The successes of the Adventure Pass program are easily recited - repaired facilities, cleared trails, more staff out in the Forests, nearly 200,000 passes sold and about $2.7 million raised over the first two seasons. Nobody objects to this. But this is only the bright side of the program.
The dark side of the Adventure Pass is a time bomb of protest that is very largely of the Forest Service’s own making, as I will explain.
In brief, Forest fees are now clearly understood to be the agenda of major corporate recreation interests with their greedy eyes on opportunities to make money from the public’s use of its own lands.
The smoke screen has been declining recreation budgets, which are now widely perceived as an orchestrated strategy, as an excuse to start up fee programs.
The Fee Demo Program has not been a Demo at all - the push is clearly to sideline public protest and to make it work at all costs. It has been straightforward for the average American to put together the corporate commercialization agenda and the manner in which fee programs are being implemented full steam ahead, regardless of widespread protest.
The main problem facing you, then, is the public perception that, as fee program staff, you are acting not as public servants, but as corporate lackeys.
Derrick Crandall has been carefully putting together many of the pieces of this commercialization agenda, for the past few decades. But perhaps he should have heeded the July ‘88 Outdoor Recreation Policy paper from the Domestic Policy Council, which recommended that “the cost of basic access to federal lands should not be included in fees,” as that has been, by far, the most unpopular aspect of Forest fee programs.
That this commercialization agenda exists is without question. The Recreation Roundtable claims direct responsibility for Fee Demo. That the ARC represents a membership almost entirely composed of recreation corporations, is a matter of public record. We do not question the ARC’s right to lobby Congress for money-making opportunities on our public lands - but we do not believe that this should happen in a vacuum. The cozy Private/Public Ventures, the Cost Share/Challenge agreements - none of these reflect the interests of the majority of Forest visitors who are quite content with a non-commercial Forest.
But, Fee Demo is only the tip of the iceberg. The ARC’s current big push is for the Visitor Infrastructure Improvement Act, which they themselves produced. It is designed to enable private enterprise funds, the big money, to construct and maintain major visitor facilities such as marinas and lodges on public lands.
Fee Demo has come as far as it has for two reasons - (1) that nobody representing low-impact Forest visitors was paying enough attention to recreation budgets and issues and (2) that it came out of nowhere, as a stealth rider to the 1996 Appropriations Bill. That Fee Demo came about by rider was the warning shot. That it was further extended by another rider last fall is testament to the care one must take, if one is to engineer the privatization of management control of public lands.
What the Forest Service has been ignoring, at its long term peril, is the steadily-growing, articulate and very reasonable opposition to Fee Demo. Last fall the Sierra Club took a nationwide position against Fee Demo, against the further commercialization, motorization and privatization of our public lands and in favor of increased recreation budgets. Many, many other organizations will be taking similar positions this year. The Feb. 99 Senate hearings on Fee Demo will likely be the last, at which one or more national opposition voices are absent.
The big question is, how far does the commercialization agenda move forward, now that the spot1ight is on it? The spotlight of media and public interest attention is set to change all of the ARC’s best-laid plans. Marketing wizard Robert Shulman’s efforts notwithstanding, the going will no longer be easy for Fee Demo.
The good part is that a broad debate on the future of Forest recreation is now underway. For too long, this has been taken for granted by the American public. Access to our Forests - what Derrick Crandall regularly describes as a free lunch - has been widely understood as a public service, paid for out of federal tax dollars. Imagine a Forest Service where, once again, recreation dollars from Congress are adequate to the task of maintaining our National Forests’ recreation facilities. Where the public conservation and recreation communities, nationwide, act as watchdogs to ensure that the budgets are sufficient to the needs. Where staff like yourselves no longer need to issue parking tickets when you’re out in the field. Which Forest Service did you sign up with? Which do you want to see?
In Southern California, the emphasis has been on ignoring the protest and counting the money flow, contrary to the Adventure Pass Orientation Guide’s statement that Project success will be determined “by public support for paying a fee to recreate in National Forests,” not “by the amount of revenue generated.”
No amount of communications plans will make everybody accept the Adventure Pass. It has been a terrible mistake to believe you can somehow sell the public on paying a fee. If you’d been paying attention to the important issues raised by the papers on Alan Watson’s website, you could be addressing those issues, but you’re not. Surveys of comment cards are meaningless to understand the views of all those protesting fees, who’ll never hold a comment card.
While focusing myopically on the sale of thousands of Passes, you’ve ignored the determined and lasting voices of disagreement. This is important because these are the voices that will shut down Fee Demo. This is exactly how the Forest Service has created Fee Demo opposition - by sidelining it. If the idea was to push Fee Demo down our throats, of course you can’t listen to us, because our views get in the way. But the results of seeing report after report that make Fee Demo seem like the only future for Forest recreation, have been the dozens of critical newspaper stories, the thousands of letters to Congress, the public protests and the growing network of Fee Demo opponents around the nation.
In Southern California, for those of you from further afield, one protest group alone has fairly easily persuaded over thirty Adventure Pass vendors to quit selling tickets to public Forests. Congresswoman Capps (Dem./Santa Barbara) has asked her constituents to stop writing to her, complaining about the Pass. At least four newspapers have taken editorial positions against the Pass. And there is the Bono/Capps bill, introduced by two Southern California Congresswomen who have heard so many constituents complain about the Adventure Pass Program. Still the Forest Service is behaving like an ostrich with its head in the sand. How can you marginalize protest, when elected Representatives have been stirred into action, with now two bills to end Forest fees? And with more to follow?
Yet not a word of this in Forest Service reports. No wonder the protest is getting stronger! Derrick Crandall’s July 29, 1998 letter stating ARC’s “plan to work with the federal agencies to help identify and eliminate the reasons for strong localized opposition to the program” only makes the opposition work harder. It also makes it impossible to deny the ARC’s close involvement with Fee Demo.
The Enterprise Forest’s position is that citizen protest is centered around a handful of opponents in Los Padres Forest. This is a highly dangerous claim for the Forest Service to make. It can only serve further to undermine the Forest Service’s credibility with regard to the Adventure Pass.
How can you have a DEMO program, if only one outcome, permanent fees, is to be permitted? How can you have a DEMO program if the voices of major segments of the Forest-visiting American public are prevented from influencing the program? The results of this imbalance, which could truly be devastating to the Forest Service for a much longer time span than that of Fee Demo, have been to strengthen and unite those user groups opposed to fees. How will the Southern California Forest Supervisor’s claims of protect success look, when mass protests with TV news cameras visit the trail heads in Southern California this summer, to protest the Adventure Pass? When many thousands more protest letters flow into Congress from around the nation, how can you say the program is successful and well-received? No, the public relations campaign has already slipped beyond your grasp. You can continue the press releases which show how much money is going to Forest facilities, but as long as you sideline the protest, you can never engage it. And it’s not going away, it will only get hotter. It may involve ripping up the Adventure Pass program by the roots,, in order to begin afresh with a totally new look at the future of forest recreation, one that includes ALL interested parties, not just the corporate ones. Have you considered what happens to your longterm working relationship with the American public, when you are so blatantly in cahoots with the ARC?
The future of Fee Demo is, of course, in the hands of Congress. I promise you that there will be many thousands of Americans who will fight permanent fees. I believe their campaign will prevail. Isn’t it time for you to at least consider, publicly, that Fee Demo may fail and begin to ask what happens next?
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org