Movie Makers’ Cut-Rate Park Fees Attacked

The Reagan Administration, which wants to increase national park visitor fees, is renting public land to movie and TV commercial producers at bargain rates, a House subcommittee chairman said Friday.

Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) said that not only has the Bureau of Land Management skirted a 1976 law requiring such rentals to carry at least fair-market prices, it sometimes goes below its already low posted prices.

Synar, who heads the Government Operations environment subcommittee, said that on their way to a $168-million gross, the makers of “Return of the Jedi” paid $8,620 for the use of bureau property in California’s Buttercup Valley for 243 days in 1981.

He said the bureau “could have earned thousands of dollars more” under fees charged by California for productions on state land. The fees are $100 a day during set construction and removal and a minimum of $600 a day during actual filming, Synar said.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, Synar said areas of the valley were denuded and that, contrary to the bureau permit requirement, trash “was burned on the site and buried in the sand.”

“Not only were no penalties imposed, the film maker was undercharged $17,580 for the use of the land, even at BLM’s bargain-basement rates,” said Synar, who based his letter on a study by the General Accounting Office.

Lee Laitala, chief of the branch of land resources at the land bureau, said he thought “some of the information (in the letter and report) is dated. There has been substantial corrective action taken in the last year, he said.

The GAO study focused on movies and TV ads made from 1981 to 1985 on land managed by four bureau offices in California.