No Fees for Freedom

It was a masterpiece of ill timing. A year after the public donated more than $200 million to restore the Statue of Liberty, the National Park Service started charging the public, for the first time, for the privilege of visiting her. The fee was only $1, but its symbolism was the important thing.

So, too, was the $1 entrance charge applied to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Great timing again: The fee goes on in the very year the nation is celebrating the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, drafted in Independence Hall.

True, Congress passed a bill last year that allowed the Park Service to raise entrance fees at many of the national parks and monuments on a temporary basis, with the new money directed into the restoration and protection of park resources. The law stipulated that no admission fee could be charged at any unit of the park system that provides “significant outdoor recreation opportunities in an urban environment.”

That language clearly was designed to include park units that are visited by large numbers of less-affluent people for exercise and contemplation, such as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the San Francisco Bay area. The congressional debate had focused on entrance fees at parks like Yellowstone, where there had been no increase since 1972. Apparently no one thought that the service would use the law to impose a new fee at places like the Statue of Liberty.

There was an outcry, of course. The Park Service retreated quickly on Independence Hall. And now Congress is making sure that the mistake is not made again. The House passed on Tuesday, 416 to 5, a bill prohibiting any entrance fees at the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, the Washington Monument and other urban national park sites. The Senate should waste no time in concurring so that freedom will continue to ring free of charge at our urban shrines of history.