The following editorial appeared in the Pasadena Star-News on August 6, 1998.
The 'Adventure Pass' fee charged to users of the Angeles National Forest is ill-conceived and should meet an appropriate demise.
The bumper sticker reads: "You can't see the forest for the fees." And our Angeles National Forest has become bogged down in excessive charges. The haze of fees is mostly due to something euphemistically dubbed the "Adventure Pass," a $5-per-day (or $30-a-year) fee charged by the U.S. Forest Service to hike or simplet walk in the Angeles, as well as the Los Padres, the Cleveland and San Bernardino forests. Since June 1997, visitors to the Angeles have paid $405,000 and this includes penalties from some 6,500 citations issued by forest service rangers.
While reports from the forest service say the program is funding some good things, such as bear-proof trash cans and trail improvemebts, we still don't agree with these charges. Money for those improvements should come from regular tax dollars already funding the forest service and its sister bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Which was exactly what an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara and others had proposed. But the majority of the U.S. Congress apparently was not listening and the amendment was defeated. We renew the call and urge our local congressmen to "sunset" the fees in 1999 as originally planned. Right now, Congress is willing to extend an unfair tax until the year 2001 without so much as a public hearing. We agree with the "Free Our Forest" group (which plans a protest in La Cañada Flintridge soon) that printed the bumper stickers. The so-called "experimental program," like most new taxes, has taken on a life of its own. Fees and more fees preclude an impromptu drive along Angeles Crest or Highway 39 to hike in out natural backyard, the Angeles, the most heavily visited forest in the nation. Maybe this is what Forest Service officials want to accomplish: keeping people out makes less work for them.
But we don't subscribe to that management philosophy. The federal lands were set aside for the people, not just for the people who can afford to use them.
Let's end this double taxation by removing our Angeles from the Adventure Pass program.