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Quoted from appended article:
[Recreation groups hope their changes will be incorporated into Regula's bill, Jourdain said, She does not expect the controversial program to he approved before the presidential election, But interior Department Assistant Secretary Lynn Scarlett, who oversees the Park Service, and Mark Rey, the USDA undersecretary in charge of the Forest Service, said the Bush administration supports the bill and will not introduce its own recreation fee legislation.]
That's not exactly they way I heard it. I heard Scarlett and Rey say that THEY could work with the Regula Bill as a starting point for meeting their needs. But it was far from clear whether Mr. Bush is taking his cues from his employees or directly from corporate interests representing the recreation/ tourism industry.
The bottom line, as I heard it spoken yesterday, is that the recreation industry is no longer supporting any of the existing fee-demo bills... not ever the Regula bill (HR 3283) which they, themselves, created. They are instead now working directly with the President's staff to introduce new legislation --- legislation that presumably would make the Corporate Takeover of public lands explicit and unambiguous. Their plans were made clear in their testimony given last month at Senator Craig's fee-demo oversight hearing. Their plans were repeated yesterday when three Board Members of the American Recreation Coalition gave testimony.
What it appears we have is Lynn Scarlett and Gale Norton pushing a version of user-fees which will permit recreational services to be provided without requiring tax dollars to be spent funding them .... i.e., the free-market vision as best expressed by Terry Anderson of PERC.
On the other hand we have the recreation and tourism industry looking to commercialize, privatize and motorize the public lands in keeping with the vision developed by ARC's Derrick Crandall and other commissioners who sat upon Ronald Reagan's President's Commission on Americans Outdoors.
The battle lines are drawn. It will be interesting to see whether the public gets a say in the outcome. It will be interesting to see to what extent organizations with interests in public lands become engaged in this issue. And it will be interesting to see how many such organizations remain seated on the sidelines without participating, as the future is decided for them.
Scott
--- begin quoted ---
(Optically scanned from May 7, 2004 Bend Bulletin, pg. B1)
Bill appears to lack support in the House and Senate
Recreation groups oppose permanent fee plan
By Keith Chu - The Bulletin
WASHINGTON - Three recreation industries announced on Thursday that
they oppose a bill in the U. S. House that would create a permanent
recreation fee program on federal lands a surprising about-face by a
group that had been one of the largest supporters of recreation fees.
Rather than making the fee program permanent, the representatives from
off-road, snowmobiling and outdoor recreation groups told a House
committee they would rather extend fees for six years or less and
create a council made up of industry and local representatives to
oversee the fee program.
"We certainly support the fee demo. We just don't support the program
in its current form. said Christine Jourdain of the American Council of
Snowmobile Associations.
The announcement could further hurt the chances that the bill,
sponsored by Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, will become law. The Bush
administration supports the bill, but it appears to lack House and
Senate support. according to Dan Whiting, aide to Sen. Larry Craig,
R-Idaho, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee.
A Senate bill to make fees permanent at national parks, but on no other
federal lands, unanimously passed a committee in March.
"The recreation industry folks clearly want a bill that more explicitly
meets their requirements," said Scott Silver, executive director of
Wild Wilderness, a Bend-based nonprofit group. "It's really nice for me
to start to see a rift between the (government) agency people and the
recreation industry people who are driving this whole program."
The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program - known as the "fee demo
program - was introduced as a temporary measure in 1996 to let the Park
Service, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service charge access fees to visitors.
It is scheduled to end next year if no legislation is passed.
Recreation groups hope their changes will be incorporated into Regula's
bill, Jourdain said, She does not expect the controversial program to
he approved before the presidential election, But interior Department
Assistant Secretary Lynn Scarlett, who oversees the Park Service, and
Mark Rey, the USDA undersecretary in charge of the Forest Service, said
the Bush administration supports the bill and will not introduce its
own recreation fee legislation.
Silver said Regula's bill includes several other controversial
provisions that could make it unlikely to pass. The bill would let
agencies use only 60 percent of fees at the site where they were
collected, down from the current 80 percent.
Silver also criticized provisions of the bill that allow "fee layering"
- charging visitors more than one fee to use a single recreation site,
The bill allows three levels of recreation fees:
* "Basic" fees, to access developed sites, such as parks with restrooms.
* "Expanded" fees, for more intense uses, like a campground fee
* "Special" fees, for outfitters or other commercial users.
The new fee structure would reduce fee layering, Scarlett said, but she
said that visitors to some sites would continue to pay multiple fees.
The bill would also establish a pass dubbed the "America the Beautiful"
pass to allow basic access to all federal recreation lands. But the
cost has yet to be determined and could be much more than the $85 pass
for lands in Oregon and Washington.
"These people have no connection to what it's like to be a working
person," Silver said. These are public lands, we already own them, and
we don't want them to be like a day at Disneyland."
---
Joudain's testimony can be found here.
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- Land management 
