Lyle Laverty, an early and fierce supporter of the "pay-to-play" concept, is in the news again. He's in the news for demonstrating the value of the "fee-demo" management paradigm he helped implement within the Forest Service when he headed that agency's recreation program. He's in the news for being part of a scandal.

Lyle Laverty may soon be confirmed as the next Department of Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. If so, he would become the third most powerful person within Interior. If confirmed, Laverty would be directly responsible for formulating outdoor recreation policy for the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Because of concerns about massive, multiple and ongoing ethics violations within the DOI, Mr. Laverty's confirmation has been being blocked by Senator Wyden. For the sake of our public lands, I sincerely hope the block remains and a new, and better, appointee is selected.

Pasted below is an example of pay-to-play working PRECISELY as its Libertarian, Free-Market and recreation industry supporters intended the program to operate.

Is this merely proof that wealth has its privileges in the pay-to-play world, or is this another ethics violation? Whichever it is, it most certainly is a valuable example of how the ideology of pay-to-play will further unfurl if Lyle Laverty is put into a position of governmental power.

Scott

PS... Laverty's congressional testimony on pay-to-play can be read here.

The appended news article is 350 words in length and is worthy of being committed to memory by anyone who has even a passing interest in outdoor recreation. If you want the executive summary, here it is:

1) The Forest Service is spending recreation dollars fighting forest fires and as a consequence, inadequate money is available to maintain recreation facilities.

2) Facilities that can not be kept open through creative means, such as privatization, commercialization, etc., will be decommissioned and removed.

I have detailed the 10-step process by which this would unfold and encourage you to read my decade-old essay titled,  "Our Public Lands: Their Working Capital." Assess for yourself the true nature of the ONGOING threat which resulted from permitting our lands to be treated as their capital.

If you are displeased with what you discover, do something to create a different future. And if you don't know what to do, please contact me for suggestions.

Scott

"We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing." - Cid Morgan, USFS District Ranger, 2005

On October 28, 2006 I wrote: "I have written many times, and with increasing frequency, about how federal land management agencies are closing and shuttering public recreation facilities."

On June 24, 2007 I followed with a piece titled "The shuttering has begun in earnest".

Today, I share with you a column from a newspaper in Upper Michigan. The headline reads, "What’s the benefit of shuttering campgrounds?"

What indeed is the benefit of shuttering campgrounds? Why is this happening on public lands all across America. Why specifically is the shuttering being focused the smaller, rustic, minimally developed, free or inexpensive to stay at, out of the way campgrounds that have long been the most popular amongst those closest to the Great Outdoors?

Why, as this column asks is "There is a push to bigger and better — such as large motor homes for camping and deep-sea charter boats for fishing — that not all residents of and visitors to our state embrace"?

Those reading the Wild Wilderness blog know the answers to these questions. You know who is to blame, because you've been paying attention.   Have you interest in helping to stop this trend, or will you be satisfied knowing what's happening, why it's happening and what the eventual outcome will be?

Scott

The Seattle Times recently published a lengthy cover story framed around  two questions,  quoted here as they appear in the article:

• Is a national park supposed to be a crown jewel of American wilderness, a place protected from the bulldozers and strip malls that define much of our lives?
  
  
• Or is it a "park," an outdoor playground for the masses, shaped for everyone's enjoyment and run to help businesses profit along the way?

Those familiar with my work will know my answers to those questions. I need not repeat them here. Unfortunately, and as this article confirms, today's National Park Superintendents rarely agree with my positions. And that being the case, I'd like to pose for you two questions of my own:

• Why do high ranking National Park officials almost invariable fail to understand and accept the fact that they are employed by you and me to serve as custodians of our nation's crown jewels in accordance with long held traditions and in compliance with existing laws and precedents?
  
  
• What more must the American People do to ensure that high ranking public servants of all stripes show more respect for them and less subservience to business interests and the pursuit of profits?

The Seattle Times article is long. I have provided a much condensed version below as well as a link to the original piece.

 Scott

(From: The Source Weekly)

Bend Oregon - If you head out to your favorite campground in one of Oregon’s National Forests this summer, you may well discover it’s no longer there.

For the past two years the U.S. Forest Service has been engaged in a process called Recreation Site Facility Master Planning (RSFMP). The bureaucratic rationale is complicated, but it all boils down to this: Each of the more than 16,000 National Forest recreation sites in the country – more than 2,600 of them in Oregon and Washington – has to demonstrate that it can pay for itself or it will be closed.

Oregon National Forests were among the first in the country to begin the RSFMP process, and the tangible results are now starting to appear. For example, the Curry Coastal Pilot reported on Saturday that the Rogue-Siskyou National Forest has closed 24 campgrounds and three picnic sites. Can the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests be far behind?

Not only are facilities being closed, but drastic budget cuts, including a 46% cut in funding for maintenance over the past two years, are forcing National Forests to reduce or eliminate services – such as providing toilets – at those that aren’t.

The National Forest shutdown is being justified by the need to pour money into President Bush’s “Healthy Forests Initiative,” which aims to make forests healthy by cutting down the trees. Philosophically, it dovetails perfectly with the administration’s broad aim of starving all government services – or at least those that benefit average Americans rather than big corporations and their major stockholders.

Critics, such as Scott Silver of Bend-based Wild Wilderness, see an even deeper and darker motive: They believe the funding cuts and the RSFMP process are steps toward the “Disneyfication” of recreation facilities on federal lands – turning them into money-making enterprises, or maybe even handing them over to private corporations to operate as concessions.

Even if you don’t buy that sinister theory, it’s not hard to see why the present policy is short-sighted and destructive. Closing facilities, making them prohibitively expensive or making them difficult or impossible to enjoy because of a lack of basic amenities shuts off access to the only recreation many working people can afford. It also has a negative impact on communities near National Forests whose economies depend largely or partly on the dollars that visitors to those forests spend.

It’s ironic that an administration that likes to attack “environmental elitists” for wanting to “lock up” public lands has turned out to be the biggest locker-upper of such lands in American history.

When the U.S. Forest Service was founded more than a hundred years ago during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, summed up its job as "to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run." The administration’s approach seems designed to provide the greatest number of dollars to a handful of people in the short run.

It’s a lousy way to run our National Forests – but it’s an excellent way to earn THE BOOT. 

If National Parks were museums, there would be no debate whether entrance fees discouraged visitation.

Everyone the world over knows that entrance fees discourage museum visitation. Those nations which place a high value upon their children, education, heritage and culture have already discovered the value of providing FREE access to public museums and galleries.  Nations that have abandoned museum entrance fees have already seen visitation soar 100% or more.

But America's National Parks are not museums and in this country, many of our legislators and virtually all public lands managers strenuously deny even the possibility that declining park visitation could be correlated to soaring entrance fees. 

Are parks and museums so very different the whereas fees take an enormous toll upon visitation to museums, they have no similar impact upon park visitation?

Or is it possible that the people of the United States are so very different than the people of England and France that what is true elsewhere in the world is just not true in our country?

Or is it possible that those who are responsible for the rapidly increasing entrance fees in our National Parks (and we do know who those people are -- do we not?), simply do not place as high a value upon children, education, heritage and culture as do the people and legislators of other nations???

Pasted below are excerpts from two recent articles on museum entrance fees and here are two links to other of my recent blogs on the issue of museum entrance fees and how these fees and visitation are directly correlated (click and click).

As for the farcical pizza connection, does the fundamental economic market concept of 'price elasticity' illustrated in this pizza graph apply to everything except parks?

Scott
 

Today's Washington Post features an article about Vice President Cheney under the headline "Leaving No Tracks." I've quoted a small passage of it below — one dealing with the issue of snowmobiling in Yellowstone and with administration efforts to commercialize, privatize and motorize America's National Parks.

Pasted immediately below todays WP article I've provided a short passage from a 2001 "Trail Tracks Newsletter" — the voice of a pro-motorized recreation advocacy organization. That article had been given the headline "Outdoor recreation groups meet with Bush Team" and was written by the American Recreation Coalition's President Derrick Crandall.

Pasted immediately below that is a broadcast message I shared with the Wild Wilderness network on January 6, 2001. I had titled that message "Motorized Message to President Elect" and those who make the effort to read it today will discover precisely why Vice President Dick Cheney did not need to tell his people what needed doing with regard to snowmobiling in Yellowstone, with National Park policy revisions or, for that matter, with regard to anything associated with the radical transformation of outdoor recreation on America's public lands which has occurred in recent years.

Cheney delegated that authority to his industry friends... or so I would suggest.

Scott 

If you currently hike, bike, hunt, fish, camp, float, bird, ride, climb, swim or engage in any other form of outdoor recreation on National Forest managed public-lands, the appended article from today's Oregonian is a MUST READ. It is more than a 'MUST READ'... it deserves ACTION.

If you receive valuable compensation in exchange for labor, are you volunteering or are you employed? If an agency, a concessionaire, or a non-profit organization operating upon federally managed public lands gives a free recreation pass in exchange for a specific quantity of labor performed, is that showing appreciation or providing employment?

  The Oregon Court of Appeals will soon be taking up those issues in a nationally significant case. The case involves the giving of seasonal ski-passes to those who volunteer for the Bend-based Mt. Bachelor Ski Education Foundation --- but, so I suggest, something FAR more important is at stake!!

The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004 authorized the creation of a the America the Beautiful Volunteer pass which, according to government sources "will be issued free of charge to volunteers who accrue 500 volunteer hours."  The America the Beautiful Pass is the contentious new $80 public lands recreation pass which replaced the older National Parks Pass and now provides basic access to most federally managed public lands.

According to the front page article from today's Bend Bulletin (appended), with respect to the giving of ski passes, Oregon's "Employment Department and Department of Justice are arguing that those free annual passes are actually the equivalent of wages, because they have value and were offered in exchange for service."

The Hearings officer said:

"Volunteering is commendable and in many ways governmental policies and laws do encourage this ... but the volunteer work cannot be done in exchange for remuneration or with the expectation of remuneration being paid."

I've long said that the America the Beautiful Volunteer Pass was ILLEGAL because it compensates workers at the equivalent of sixteen cents per hour and runs afoul of minimum wage laws. Now it appears that the awarding of an America the Beautiful Volunteer Pass may have more legal problems than those to which I've previously pointed. And as the federal government continues to transition from using paid employees to using volunteers, the issue of what exactly is a volunteer will become of increasing importance.

Scott 

The process of accepting public comment pertinent to outdoor recreation on public lands has, in effect, been turned over to the motorized segment of the recreation industry --- with predictable results.

Pasted below is the American Recreation Coalition's preliminary report following Monday's national recreation listening session. Their final report detailing their findings for the 6 session series,  will be presented on May 22 during a special event featuring remarks by author Richard Louv

To my friends in the conservation community I wish to stress one point. The ARC has co-opted the Richard Louv (brand) "Last Child in the Woods" message and they are using it to advance their own, long-standing, commercialization, privatization, motorization agenda.

To the extent that we in this community support that branded PR-message, we are assisting the ARC in its quest to dominate the Great Outdoors and shape the very meaning of the words "outdoor recreation".
Scott

The 1996, passage of Fee-Demo gave the land management agencies virtually cart blanche to charge visitors for recreation, access and use. Inventiveness in setting and collecting was strongly encouraged. Nine years ago as part of this inventiveness, the U.S. Forest Service converted a portion of one of Colorado's State highways into what, for all intents and purposes, became a federal toll road. What the USFS did was probably illegal,  though they got away with it for many years.

In 2004, the Federal Land Recreation Enhancement Act abolished Fee-Demo and gave the land management agencies much more limited authority to charge user fees. Many of the fees charged under Fee-Demo were clearly prohibited by FLREA.

And so when the U.S. Forest Service continued to charge drivers on Colorado's Mount Evans Highway, what they were doing became unambiguously illegal and utterly shameless.

The appended article from yesterday's Denver Post explains what had been going on and, more importantly, details a much appreciated victory for the citizens of Colorado. The State of Colorado has stepped in and busted up the U.S. Forest Service's illegal toll road operation. Hopefully other States where the U.S. Forest Service continues to operate similarly illegal toll booths will take similar actions against the law-breaking Forest Service.

Scott

NewWest blogger Bill Schneider has recently caught the US Forest Service  doing some reprehensible and possibly illegal things. There's little new in that, other than the fact that what Bill caught them is unrelated to classic resource extraction. It is specifically related to the agency's attempted transformation of free-flowing recreation into commodified wreckreation —  i.e., the transformation of leisure into an extractive industry.

In Bill's piece, he blasts the agency's brass for what they are doing and for the contempt they are showing the citizens who pay their salaries.  I'd just add that the top brass within the agencies are, with few exceptions, people who have been promoted to the current positions specifically because of their willingness to serve the anti-democratic interests which have come to control this nation and its government.

Bill's piece is titled "Stretching the Law is Not Good Policy"  and stretching the law has become policy within the Executive Branch of government. The USFS is merely an element within the Executive Branch.  Bill's piece is subtitled "FS Digging Its Own Grave."  I take no comfort in knowing the US Forest Service is Digging Its Own Grave, though I accept this to be a statement of unvarnished fact.

The USFS and the FDA, and the EPA and all of the other elements within the Executive Branch of government are digging their own graves. If these agencies succeed they will, in combination, have dug the grave of America.

Scott

A picture may be worth a thousand words.
The graph which appear below is priceless.      -Scott

Source: Natural Resource Economics by Barry C. Field, Professor of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst
 
On the Use of Graphs in Economics 2:

Graphs may come in any number of different shapes, however. Suppose, for example, we are interested in the relationship between the amount of the entrance fee to visit a public park and the number of people who visit that park. We might expect a negative relationship, as depicted below:

Note that there are no actual numbers on the axes in this case. We are interested only in the general nature of the function, i.e., at higher entrance fees visitation will be lower. So the actual numbers on the scale need not be specified.

A point that we will come back to is the following: There are normally lots of factors that affect park visitation rates, not solely the entrance fee. But Figure 4 shows only the relationship between the two variables: entrance fee and visitation. We have to understand that this function expresses the connection between these two factors with other things assumed constant. In other words, at higher or lower entrance fees this function show how visitation will respond, on the assumption that all other factors that might affect visitation are remaining unchanged. Of course in the real world this is hardly ever true; everything is usually in constant change. The reason for singling out just these two variables and assuming everything else is constant is because we wish to explore the nature of the connection between these two important factors. Thus, in this particular graph (or model) we are temporally abstracting from other factors that might have an impact on visitation.

This short article about Swedish museum fees is so revealing that I post it here without introduction other than to say it has direct analogies to the issues associated with National Park Service entrance fees. I have place the symbol "••" next to each point of special importance.  -Scott

Sweden: Entry fees deter visitors
By Clemens Bomsdorf - 25 April 2007

STOCKHOLM. Visitor numbers to Swedish museums have declined dramatically since the re-introduction of entrance fees •• in January this year. A survey by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter compared visitor figures for 15 museums in January 2007 with the same month in 2006. This revealed a decrease of nearly 90,000 visitors to 183,000, from 272,300 the previous year—a substantial drop of 33%.

The greatest decrease was at the Swedish Museum of Architecture which suffered an 83% decline ••. The museum is adjacent to the Moderna Museet, which has also seen a 35% fall in visitors.

The new centre-right coalition government ••, which came to power in September 2006, removed the legal requirement for museums to retain free entry •• but simultaneously cut their subsidy by up to a quarter ••, effectively leaving institutions with no option •• but to reintroduce charges ••. At museums which have enforced admission fees, free entry is now restricted to those aged 19 or under ••.

“Free entry to museums made it harder for other institutions, which still charged a fee, to attract visitors ••. That is not fair,” Carl Johan Swanson, political advisor at the ministry of culture, told The Art Newspaper. He added that museums “can now decide for themselves, what they prioritise—free entry, education or restoration” ••.
 

Bill Schneider over at the NewWest Blog has uncovered yet another example of the US Forest Service playing fast and loose in their 'mis"-interpretation of the Recreation Access Tax (aka, "the RAT").

Although expressly prohibited from doing so, the Forest Service has erected what amounts to toll-booths upon several State and County Highways throughout the West and are extracting a fee from everyone who passes.

Bill has presented details for how this is playing out on Mt. Evans in Colorado. I've myself been ticketed for refusing to pay an illegally charged Forest Service toll in Oregon.

Check out Bill's Blog to learn the sordid details of this latest scandal. See also this UPDATE.

Scott 

I have frequently explained how the same recreation industry lobbyists who brought us forest recreation fees, are aggressively pushing to take the fee concept to the next higher level. "Congestion Pricing" , "Value Pricing" and "Differential Pricing" are the terms most commonly used to describe the refinement in pricing being sought. Each of these concepts represents a classist, anti-democratic, method of allocating access based upon willingness to pay.

Let me give an example. Congestion Pricing is usually associated with the concept of converting public freeways into private tolls roads then adjusting the price charged for use of the roads hour by hour. Whenever the road becomes congested, such as during the rush hour commute, the price charged for using the road would be increased. The concept is that when higher fees are charged,  people of limited financial means will avoid the road and commute times will thus be reduced for those willing or able to pay the higher fee.

Differential Pricing is the American Recreation Coalition's preferred fee mechanism for our National Parks. Like Congestion Pricing, this mechanism calls for varying the cost of visiting a National Park or forest based upon changing demand. Popular parks would be priced higher in order to drive lower income persons toward lower cost options. Likewise, when because of some special event or seasonal occurrence (such as wildflowers being in bloom) the desirability of visiting a park increases, higher fees would be charged. Increased fees would not only better capture the higher value, these increased fees would eliminate crowding and thus further increase the value of the experience for those capable of paying top dollar. Those of wealth would, in effect, get to pay a premium in order not to have to share the experience.

Pasted below is an article from today's press describing how entrance fees at Chinese tourist sites are being increased in preparation of the coming holiday season. The article explains how "The price hike is a major source of income for tourism companies" and goes on to describe how differential pricing is being applied using these words:

 Tourism sites usually raise entrance fees during peak periods, said Guo Weihua, an official with the travel service. Basic entrance fees for the Forbidden City will jump 50 percent, from 40 yuan to 60 yuan (8 U.S. dollars) while a basic ticket to get into the Summer Palace will go from 20 yuan to 30 yuan for the coming holiday.

 Many other lesser-famed sites scattering across the country have pledged not to increase entrance fees hoping lower prices will attract more visitors.

If that's how things are done in Communist China, imagine what we can look forward to as the American Recreation Coalition and Free-Market ideologues take control of our parks and recreation lands.

Scott 

If the National Park Service wants more visitation as they claim, then they could do as has just been done at Australia's Brett Whiteley Studio —  (see appended article).

If the National Park Service wants lower visitation, then they can continue to raise their fees, as they are doing and as had frequently been proposed as a mechanism for reducing visitation when managers were worried that visitors were "loving the parks to death."

PS... Unlike the privately owned Whiteley museum, America's National Parks are publicly owned and should not be required to survive upon the kindness of volunteers, the largess of corporate sponsors and exclusionary user fees. Public parks need public support — support denied them for far too long.

From Today's Aspen Daily News, full article appears below:

{Aspen/Sopris Ranger District continue to finagle their way along with an ever-shrinking pot of funds as the U.S. Forest Service tightens its operations nationally to meet budget shortfalls...

    Wilderness Workshop director Sloan Shoemaker said Forest Service budget issues are part and parcel of a larger problem. "What we're seeing is that philosophy of shrinking government till you can drown it in a bath tub. It's coming home to roost..."}

From the Oregonian, July 31, 2005:

"{[Cid] Morgan, the Angeles [NF] district ranger [is]...seeing her overall budget reduced for basics such as campground maintenance, law enforcement and recreation. 'We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing,' she said."}

From  Wild Wilderness' most popular webpage since 1997

**Access to public lands is deliberately being manipulated for the benefit of campground associations, private concessionaires, manufacturers and users of motorized sports vehicles, and giant tourist and recreation corporations.

 **Congressional budgetary cuts are intentionally creating a maintenance crisis for federally managed recreation lands and facilities.

 **The rescue of a badly decayed system of National Parks and recreational lands, through private corporate investment, is the planned outcome of this strategy.  <continues>

Today's Aspen Daily News article describes how the privatization process described above is being playing out upon the White River National Forest and, by extension, upon every public forest and National Park in this nation. The issue is not one of penny pinching. The issue is the intentional destruction of America by design for profit.

Scott
 

If confirmed as Department of Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish Wildlife and Parks, Lyle Laverty would set recreation policy for the National Park Service and other Interior agencies. If confirmed, the triumvirate of Dirk Kempthorne, Lynn Scarlett and Lyle Laverty would comprise the dream team for the American Recreation Coalition and those special interests aggressively promoting the commercialization, privatization and motorization of the Great Outdoors.

"Lyle Laverty, tapped by Bush for an Interior Department post, has a record of bolstering Colorado's parks amid tough times and also of taking some questionable personal perks."

   “If Laverty is going to push recreation like
     we think he will, it could be a disaster.” 

Scott