What is Fee-Demo? It's a plan to charge us American taxpayers for use of what we already own.
The Recreation Fee Demonstration program is a plan to charge you and me to walk, park, visit, or otherwise use public lands managed for us by the federal government: National Parks and Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife lands. The fee is claimed to be nominal now, to get the plan through. But the grand plan is to commercialize and privatize public recreation so there is little difference between paying to go to a public park or to a private theme park.
Who wants Fee-Demo? Not surprisingly, the 'demonstration' plan before Congress was drafted by those who stand to profit most from such an arrangement: members of the American Recreation Coalition, a highly funded lobbying group that has been working for years to convert our public lands into their private profit generators. And they are close to succeeding.
But what pours out of the belly of their Trojan Horse is not what they promise us. They claim money is kept locally to help improve recreation areas. But up to 50% of fees collected are reported to be used to build new collection centers, hire fee takers, employ enforcement officers, and prosecute offenders. When Fee-Demo becomes permanent law of the land, your friendly nature-walking ranger guide will have less time for you -- unless you forgot or refused to pay.
A restful day in the woods away from the hassle of urban techno-life won't be like it used to be. Already, out in the forests in the Rockies of Colorado, stand tall, expensive, mechanical steel sentries, ATM-type machines whose sole purpose is to take your money and spit out daily, weekly, or annual Recreation Fee permits. Open 24-hours a day. No excuse for not being able to find a ranger to pay.
And what happens to the money that's left over from collection costs? Will it be put into repairing the backlog of unmet needs? Not likely. With self-generating slush funds left to the spending choices of local land managers with no Congressional oversight, the money will mostly go to build those facilities that will attract more and more fee payers. And the Disneyfication of our public recreation lands shall begin in earnest. Not to mention the wonderful opportunities for graft and bribery.
Just in case the underpaid, beleaguered public staff needs help planning the additions (because they're too busy enforcing fee collection), ARC members will be all to eager to help out. (Remember them? they're the lobbyists who want Fee-Demo permanatized.) Anywhere they can find to put a new ski slope, marina, expanded gift shop (selling nothing made in the USA), snowmobile trail, high priced resort hotel with restaurant and spa, jet ski port, dirt bike track, monorail train. . .well, you get the picture. Muscle machine heaven. And much more. For a cost-plus federally contracted price.
Nowhere in the legislation establishing any of our public lands does it say they were created to profit the recreation industry. The big money boys -- and their stooges in the current Congress -- are behind Fee-Demo, seeing windfall profit to be made from public lands. They could care less what damage they shall do to our National Parks and Forests, so long as their members turn a buck. But where did this idea come from, and how did it become so entrenched?
Gale Norton, current Interior Department Secretary, was trained and groomed for the job in James Watt's Intermountain Legal Institute. Watt, the infamous Interior Secretary under Reagan, was forced to resign for attempting to sell off our National Parks to private entrepreneurs. Norton brings the same voracious wolf to the door twenty years later, this time in sheep's clothing and wearing a polite smile. Fee Demo is her weapon of choice. In the end, the results will be similar. Our nation's public lands held as a public trust for citizens in perpetuity shall be gutted and gouged for every nickel that private and commercial interests can extract from them.
We're told this money is needed because "we're loving our parks to death". Not so. Visitation has stabilized or is in decline, especially this year. And the claim that Congressional funding is declining is a myth perpetuated to promote Fee-Demo. Since 1991, the Park Service operating budget has expanded faster than the rate of inflation. And just this year, on top of a budget increase, a new organization (Americans for National Parks, 1-800-NAT-PARK), was formed specifically to lobby for $280 million in additional funds for the 2003 NPS budget, to relieve the backlog and use future budgets to cover only current expenses.
None of the reasons given for Fee-Demo address the true dangers to our public recreational lands. These are the real threats which must be met:
1) encroachment of new non-traditional recreation technologies into the parks (muscle machines);
2) "Disneyfication" of public recreation lands on an extraordinary scale to attract more fee payers;
3) diversion of limited staff to collecting and enforcing Fee-Demo, and servicing private commercial concessionaires and profiteers; and
4) the continued degradation of air and water quality, biotic fabric, and the fragmentation of habitat due to the ever increasing pressures on our delicate public land ecosystems by 1 thru 3 above.
The Trojan Horse built and left as a gift by the American Recreation Coalition appears on the outside to be a bright and shiny hope of salvation for our public lands, on into the future. But the truth is, inside the belly of this Horse is concealed an irreversible dark plague upon our public lands, which shall, if let loose, permanently transform the landscape of America.
The long-term protective best interests of our public recreational lands shall become the grist in the short-term profit mills of this generation's extractive industries. Last century was dominated by mining, timber and grazing, all private profit extractions subsidized by taxpayers. This century the profiteers have promoted the recreation industry to the top of the heap. Why spend private money when millions of acres of exploitable land is free for the asking? All they have to do is elect and appoint sympathetic officials, and lobby Congress at a tiny fraction of the cost of providing their own facilities to extract profit. Not a bad scam, if you have no love or respect for the land, nor what it stands for.
That's what I learned in school today. Those special natural and serene places where we can retreat to -- places where the noise of commercial America is not allowed -- are under imminent attack. If the false hope of Fee-Demo matters to you, make a pledge today to study and learn more about what you can do. As you know, the second thing, after arming yourself with facts to back your conviction, is to contact members of Congress and your employees at the nearest public land facility.
===== Here are three places to look for more information ======
Wild Wilderness (541) 385-5261 www.wildwilderness.org
Native Forest Council (541) 688-2600 www.forestcouncil.org
Americans for National Parks www.americansfornationalparks.org==============================================
ParkWatch Action Network
P. O. Box 333, Ridgeway VA 24148
(336) 623-6200
Gene Messick, ParkWatch Supervisor
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org