The following is an account of an audit conducted by Riverhawks and the Northwest Rafters Association on the Rogue River Recreation Fee Demonstration Program project run by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. This account was compiled by Lloyd Knapp of Riverhawks.
The Recreation Fee Demonstration Pilot Program for the Wild & Scenic Rogue River, started here in Southwestern Oregon during 1997. Known simply as Fee Demo, it sounded good initially, the idea being that 80% of the fees raised from both commercial and independent river-users; totaling in excess of $200,000 annually, would remain here, ostensibly to better manage and protect the river resource.
The 1997 Rogue River Business Plan listed a backlog of needed maintenance items totalling $300,000 along the Wild & Scenic river. The Medford District Bureau of Land Management (BLM) website claims: "These fees will be used for repair and maintenance, interpretation, signage, habitat or facility enhancement, resource conservation, and law enforcement relating to visitor services. . ." However, extraordinary abuses exist in this program. What follows is the real money trail:
The BLM tried using up to $127,000 of the Fee Demo to partially pay for a new and controversial visitor center that no one wanted, but it was an illegitimate use of the money. When my friends and I obtained documents from the BLM, and discovered a prohibition written into the fine print of the federal law authorizing Fee Demo, the BLM immediately withdrew the funds. However, possession of this document had not stopped them from trying to use Fee Demo funds in the first place.
BLM also substituted Fee Demo funds into the salaries of federal employees in its River Program office, at least $40,000 in 1998, with another $10,000 going to administrative overhead. This is a classic shift, but not a gift, situation wherein the river resource did not benefit.
0Another $15,000 went to a chamber-of-commerce-type video promoting general tourism throughout Southern Oregon. With only a few seconds worth of rafting and jetboat footage, it was an incredible waste of money. This video actually goes on to promote a number of private and for-profit enterprises, which is definitely no place to spend federal funds of any kind.
BLM has also spent several $200-500 increments of the Fee Demo on airline tickets, fancy accomodations, and other travel expenses, many of which are questionable.
Meanwhile, on the Forest Service end of the Wild Rogue River, a number of river issues, conflicts, and violations remain unresolved. Forest Service officials have claimed there's "no money" for enforcement.
The amount of money the BLM wasted in simply administering a system to collect money for this program is astounding, close to $46,000 per year. Yet, somehow, with an apparent wink of the BLM eye, over 225 commercial passengers floated the Wild Rogue for free last summer!
What we have, then, is a Fee Demo program spinning out-of-control, complete with a number of unresolved inequities, needed maintenance items being postponed, little or no money for needed enforcement, and big bucks flowing everywhere except to the river --- much of this outside of the stated objectives for Fee Demo. The objectives say nothing about salary substitutions, or promoting tourism. Going along with the financial losses, are the missed opportunities to care for a beautiful river.
It's clearly a disaster, but the root causes of this failure go deeper still. Fee Demo constitutes a blindingly unregulated system of de-facto taxation performed by untrained, relatively low-level government officials. Agencies like the Forest Service and BLM are abruptly given the singular responsibility to at once --- tax, collect, and spend. They unilaterally determine how much tax to levy, where to spend it, and then get to police themselves with people from their own agency. It's an amazing system that begs corruption! Even the IRS only performs one of these multiple functions. The lack of meaningful accountability and oversight, and no system of checks and balances, are crippling shortcomings of this program. There isn't even the pretense of having a volunteer public advisory committee here, as weak as that concept is.
Programs administered by federal land management agencies are normally subject to National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes designed to involve the public. But NEPA does not apply to Fee Demo. The only recent public-involvement process for the Rogue River Fee Demo program was a meeting convened on August 5, 1999, in Grants Pass, to explain where the money was going. Almost no valuable information was provided, BLM officials in particular were unprepared to answer legitimate questions, and public comments were ignored. By the time it was half-over, the public knew it had been stonewalled, and there was no audible support for Fee Demo in the room. The decisionmaking was all in the hands of a few careless officials.
All of the above financial hemorrhaging has occurred during Fee Demo's trial phase. Nevertheless, this grotesque and poorly executed piece of legislation now stands on the verge of becoming permanent. In an era when government is supposedly being taken off the backs of the American people, Fee Demo stands in stark contrast as one of the most powerful potentials for random injustice being imposed on the public today.
For the record, my friends and I are rafters and kayakers, in the river activist group Riverhawks, and the Northwest Rafters Association. The above comprehensive audit has been conducted, down to the point of requesting credit card receipts, under the auspices of the Federal Freedom of Information Act. We are still wondering why it fell upon a few members of the public to point out these deficiencies.
Submitted by:
Lloyd Knapp
knapple@echoweb.net
Riverhawks