The following editorial appeared in the Ventura County Star on August 16, 1998.
CAPPS-BONO BILL: It's not a tax, but is it buying any improvement?
Partisanship is so rampant in Congress that any bipartisan legislation merits scrutiny - especially when it involves something as controversial as the fee to use popular federal recreation ateas, such as Los Padres National Forest.
On June 16, 1997, the National Forest Service began collecting a dee — $5 a day or $30 a year — for recreational use of national forests. The fee, which buys an Adventure Pass, was controversial when it was first imposed, and it continues to generate controversy.
Rep. Lois Capps, during her brief career representing parts of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties in Congress, has made a crusade of trying to eliminate this fee. Her attempt to kill an extension of the fee to the year 2001 was recently rejected by her colleagues, 341-81.
Undaunted, Rep. Capps had now introduced what she calls the Forest Tax Relief Act, to rescind the fee. And Rep. Capps, a Democrat, has enlisted Rep. Mary Bono of Palm Springs, a Republican, to coauthor the bill.
Like much legislation, the title of this bill is more alluring than accurate.
Fees for using the forest aren't taxes, any more than entrance fees to national parks. To the exent the forest fee can be condidered a tax at all, it's a user tax - among the fairest type of taxes.
Like any new charge for something that was free, by any name, this fee is very unpopular with people who like to hike and camp and otherwise enjoy the natural wonders in our national forests. And one of their complaints deserves the serious assessment that Rep. Capps suggests.
Opponents of the fee claim that the money being collected isn't producing the improvements — such as cleaner and better restrooms and more regular trail maintenance — that were cited to justify the fee. They claim the fee is merely self-perpetuating, with the revenue used mainly to hire more people to collect more fees.
Rep. Capps calls it "meter-maid enforcement," and she wants the General Accounting Office to audit exactly where the money is going. Now that the fee has been collected for more than a year, some clear pattern must have emerged, and the request for an accounting seems reasonable and commendable.
The distinction between national parks and national forests may seem essentially semantic to people who don't use the forests. Forest users tend to favor a wilderness experience that's not available in a regulated park.
But forests require some maintenance — and some regulation, to prevent their destruction by vandalism and carelessness. It's not unreasonable to expect the people who enjoy using the forest to help pay the costs of making that experience available.
Still, a fee that only finances the collection of that same fee is too incestuous to justify its existence.
It's time to get beyond the claims and counter-claims, and find out where the money is actually going. Then we'll be in a far better position to discuss whether to retain or rescind the fee.