On Tuesday, August 24, the Ojai City Council,
in a 4 to 1 vote, came out against the USFS Adventure Pass and supported the
Forest Access Immediate Relief Act.
The resolution resulted in letter being drawn up by the City Council to be sent
to Senator Barbara Boxer, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Representative Elton
Gallegly.
Two speakers from the USFS were present at the hearing held before the vote. They expressed displeasure over the 25 person demonstration in front of the Ojai ranger station on August 14. They also felt it was unfair that Free Our Forests had put pressure on local merchants not to sell the Adventure Pass as the Ojai station now must remain open on the weekends to sell the passes. Finally, the USFS representatives asked opponents of the Adventure Pass to work closer with them to find ways of funding the Forest Service budget without the Adventure Pass.
The letter resulting from the resolution reads as follows:
"After holding a public hearing on August 24th 1999, the Ojai City Council voted to take an official position of opposition to continuation of the U.S. Forest Service's Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, commonly known as the 'Adventure Pass'.
The reasons for this position include the fact that the fee constitutes an extremely regressive tax, which bears no relation to the actual costs of many types of passive recreation such as hiking, having a roadside picnic or observing wildlife. Additionally, many members of the public are gravely concerned that this fee program represents the first step towards establishing a 'revenue stream' from National Forests for the purpose of creating a basis for the privatization or commercial use of public lands. Finally, a practical problem with the Adventure Pass is that many local merchants and retail outlets, which were counted on to be a convenient means of distributing the Pass to Forest users, refuse to sell them.
The Council believes that it is the responsibility of the United States Congress to provide adequate funding for the maintenance and protection of Forest Service lands. The failure to do so in the early and mid 1990's created a fiscal environment which sent the National Forest Service into a crisis, and damaged our public land resources. This is the real issue. The Adventure Pass Program reflects an attempt to redress this mistake, but it has created more problems than it has solved. While we recognize that in some ways the Adventure Pass program can be viewed as an innovative attempt to generate funding, from the local perspective, the Program must be judged a failure. It has proven to be an extremely unpopular and flawed method for raising the necessary revenues. Furthermore, while the controversy over the Adventure Pass roars, the core issue of providing adequate funding for Forest maintenance remains unresolved.
Therefore, we would urge you to support legislation that would restore Forest Service funding levels from other tax revenues and eliminate the Adventure Pass program.
Towards this end the Council endorsed HR 2295, introduced by Lois Capps of Santa Barbara, which would end Forest Service participation in the Fee Demonstration Program and offset revenue losses by redirecting monies appropriated to subsidize the construction of timber logging roads towards National Forest maintenance needs. In our view, this approach makes sense because one class of Forest users (recreationists) should not be asked to pay a new user fee while the Congress provides a subsidy to another type of Forest user (timber companies). We ask for your support of this legislation, as well as any other approaches that would restore adequate maintenance funding without the necessity of the Adventure Pass program."
Congress has authorized a recreation fee
demonstration program for the Army Corps of Engineers. This progam is similar to
the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program (Fee Demo) now in effect for the Forest
Service, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish & Wildlife Service. The
program was authorized in section 225 of the
Water
Resources Development Act of 1999 (Senate Bill 507) which became Public Law
Number 106-53. It is set to begin in 1999, and will end in 2002.
Like Fee Demo, the authorization for the Army Corps' recreation fee demonstration program was buried within a bill containing numerous provisions, and was not debated by Congress. For some time now, one of the desired objectives of the American Recreation Coalition (ARC) has been to expand the Fee Demo to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. Although there is only circumstantial evidence to prove it, it is likely that the ARC lobbied this program through Congress.
A day of nationwide protest against the
Recreational Fee Demonstration Program (Fee Demo) took place on Saturday, August 14. The day
consisted of about 30 demonstrations in 9 states including California, Oregon,
Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Ohio. Press coverage was
varied throughout the country with the most thorough reporting in Washington,
Utah, and Oregon.
Organizers of the national day of action largely consider the day to have been a success. Many of the protests were held in high traffic, public places. Whether the media reported a particular event or not, the message of opposition to Fee Demo was spread, and the opposition continues to grow.
On Tuesday, August 3, the Santa Barbara County
Board of Supervisors unanimously resolved to support the
Forest Access Immediate Relief Act,
co-sponsored by Representative Lois Capps (D-CA). Several members of Free Our
Forests addressed the board with their opposition to the Adventure Pass. Only
Jeanine Derby, Supervisor of the Los Padres National Forest, spoke in favor of the
Adventure Pass. A representative of COLAB, a pro-development entity, made remarks
comparing the National Parks to the National Forests. The two Board members who
commented on the issue expressed their firm opposition to this sort of admission
fee. Supervisor Schwartz also mentioned that her opposition included fees to
county beaches.
The resolution voted on concerned the following:
"Support HR 2295 (Capps) terminating the participation of the Forest Service in the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program (Adventure Pass) and prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to finance suppoer of sales of timber from National Forest lands."
The Public Access Coalition was founded on August 1st in response to
the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program. The purpose of the coalition "is
to preserve the principal of free access to federal recreation lands and to support
adequate public funding for land, waterways, and habitat protection," and to
"prevent fees-for-service or pay-to-play from becoming mechanisms for funding
the needs of our forests and parks."
The membership of the Public Access Coalition includes individuals, recreation companies, and access groups including Patagonia, the American Whitewater Association, and the Access Fund. Many of the members of the Public Access Coalition are conservation-oriented and stand in stark contrast to the high-impact, solely-profit-driven members of the American Recreation Coalition.