The following editorial appeared in the Denver Post on June 7, 2003.
Congress should terminate the U.S. Forest Service's recreation fee demonstration program. A recent 40-page report from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, should be used to drive the final nail into the program's coffin.
When it created the pilot program in 1996, Congress intended to help the Forest Service solve its perpetual budget crisis, authorizing the agency to charge visitors a fee at a handful of intensively used recreation sites nationwide.
The Forest Service pretended the new charges were user fees, but they have become de facto entrance charges at more and more national forests nationwide. In Colorado, longtime national forest visitors suddenly found themselves having to pay just to enter popular areas such as Yankee Boy Basin near Ouray and Mount Evans on the Front Range. As the number of sites charging fees rose, public opposition mushroomed.
Good intentions can't make up for the program's many flaws. For one thing, it charges taxpayers to just hike or drive through their own federal forests. Worse, the Forest Service deceived Congress about the program's lack of success.
The GAO report should end the game-playing. The report was prepared at the request of U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis a Republican from Colorado's Western Slope who wanted straight answers to persistent questions about the program.
The GAO didn't prove that the program costs the Forest Service more to run than it generates. Its report shows, though, that whatever the Forest Service is getting from the recreation fees isn't worth the public anger and political feuds it incites.
The Forest Service doesn't keep a proper tab on how much the program costs or where fee money has been spent.
The Forest Service says recreation fees brought in $35 million nationwide in 2001. But the GAO discovered the Forest Service had siphoned $10 million of appropriated money to shore up the recreation fee program in that year alone. So after telling Congress it needed the recreation fee income to supplement its appropriated budget, the Forest Service instead used its appropriated funds to prop up the fee program -exactly backward of what Congress in-tended.
The Forest Service also couldn't show that fee revenues have reduced its back-log of deferred maintenance on roads, campgrounds and so forth - the very items Congess wanted the agency to fix.
The program has been such a disaster that even former supporters - including this newspaper - can no longer defend it and maintain their own public credibility. Indeed, the Forest Service even misled its friends in Congress with nearly seven years' worth of half-truths and shoddy numbers. Members of Congress have a right to feel betrayed.
Congress must deal with a host of urgent national forest issues, including prevention of catastrophic wildfires, but the quarrel over recreation fees has distracted from those important de-bates.
The program just isn't worth the cost, financially or politically.