Plan to Tax Recreation Equipment Is Dropped : Budget: Aides conclude it would violate Bush’s no-new-tax pledge. Consumer and industry groups had opposed move.

After complaints from industry and recreation groups, the Bush Administration has dropped a proposal for sales taxes on off-road vehicles, camping equipment, motor homes and pleasure boats, officials said Friday.

The taxes initially were justified as “user fees” on the grounds that they would be earmarked for recreation and conservation programs on federal lands. But some Administration officials viewed the proposal as a violation of President Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge of “no new taxes,” officials said.

“There was a strong feeling that it looked too much like a duck,” said an Administration official, referring to Budget Director Richard G. Darman’s axiom that if a tax “walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”

Industry and recreation groups said that the proposal would be unfair because it would force a small number of people to pay for programs enjoyed by millions and that not everyone who uses outdoor equipment does so on federal land.

“It sure looks like a tax to us,” said Derrick Crandall, president of the American Recreation Coalition, which represents recreation industry and user groups and which led the opposition to the tax proposal. “There is not a direct relationship between the purchase of these specific products and demands imposed on the public lands of the nation.”

As outlined in an early budget office draft, taxes ranging from 1% to 2.5% would have helped pay for programs worth $588 million in fiscal 1991, including park acquisition, wildlife restoration and tree planting. The taxes would have raised an estimated $275 million in fiscal 1991; the remaining $313 million would have come from a fund for new park lands.

“(The Office of Management and Budget) believes there is a good link between the purchase of goods such as recreational vehicles and all-terrain vehicles and the use of federal recreation and conservation lands,” the draft said. “An estimated 2 million overnight visits to national parks are made by recreational vehicle users each year with an average stay of 3.5 days.”

The budget office noted that the taxes would not be entirely without precedent, citing a 10% levy on sport fishing equipment that pays for hatcheries, ocean research and other activities that benefit fishermen. Some environmental groups had supported the recreational tax proposal.

But the proposal caused a split in the Administration. And earlier this week opponents got it removed from the 1991 budget proposal that the President will submit to Congress in January, an official said. “They wanted to send up a budget that was pure,” the official said. “The feeling was that this was an impurity.”

Crandall, the Recreation Coalition president, said his organization is enthusiastic about the conservation and recreation programs contained in the original budget office proposal and would support fees more specifically targeted at those who use federal lands.

“An awful lot of recreational vehicles go to (private campgrounds) and rarely stay in federal land areas,” he said. “And, when they do, they pay $8 to $12 a night to stay in that campground. . . . It would be far more equitable to increase the cost of that campsite use.”