This Land Is Whose Land?

If a forest program fell in Congress, would anyone hear it?

That seems to be the question as politicians continue to turn a deaf ear to public outrage at the fee-for-access program initiated in lands controlled by the U.S. Forest Service, including the Cleveland, Angeles, San Bernardino and Los Padres national forests here in Southern California.

For more than 100 years, Americans have enjoyed free and unfettered access to our national forests under the assumption that public ownership meant public access. Now Congress has decided that we should be charged to enter lands already maintained by our tax dollars. To many forest users, this sounds suspiciously like double taxation.

Other outdoor enthusiasts are more willing to pay extra to support campground facilities but deeply resent being forced to buy an “Adventure Pass” just to use public lands. After all, how meaningful is the idea that “this land is your land, this land is my land” if we must pay a fee and have proper government documentation just to take a walk in the forest?

The rhetoric surrounding this test program runs thick with talk about running government like a business. But there are two skewers that go to the heart of this false framework.

First, it is factually wrong to look at the public as consumers who should be sold access to the forests. The American people are the actual forest owners, who pay federal dollars in the expectation that Congress will see that our national forests are adequately maintained.

Second, in a true business sense the fee collection program is a losing proposition, consumed by the inherent inefficiency of transforming forest rangers into the functional equivalent of meter maids. The maintenance backlog for the Forest Service is approximately $1 billion but expected contributions from the 40 participating national fee pilot sites for fiscal year 1998 constitute only 0.38% of that backlog. At this rate, it would take more than 250 years to make up for the failure of Congress to adequately fund forest recreation budgets.

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Environmentalists have long suspected that this business rhetoric is really about politicians surrendering lands in the public trust to corporate interests in exchange for campaign contributions. It’s frankly hard to take seriously the idea of running the Forest Service more efficiently while it continues to lose an estimated $400 million per year through road building and below-cost timber sales to logging corporations. It is only natural to ask what we’re not being told when we see the Walt Disney Co. named as a design consultant to this Forest Service project, or when we witness the $150,000 lobbyist for the American Recreation Coalition being backslapped in a long grip-and-grin procession before speaking at a recent Congressional hearing without the hindrance of normal time constraints.

Many House members left that subcommittee on public lands hearing last month before the one member of the public who was allowed to testify in defense of the principle of free access to public lands could speak. At the end of the proceedings, Alasdair Coyne of the Ojai-based Keep the Sespe Wild Committee sat before a nearly empty row of committee chairs. He told those in attendance: “After several decades of civic activism, I have never seen so many people so outraged at a government program. The fee-for-access program is upsetting a great number of people, far out of proportion to the minimal fees collected.”

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The subcommittee chairman thanked the assembled witnesses at the close of the session and indicated that their comments would be taken into consideration as Congress evaluates whether to make the access fee program permanent. But as the microphone was turned off, it was still unclear whether the testimony had been heard.