Fees build a fence around our land

It was not much of a protest as protests go. Only a few hundred people showed up at 31 sites on federal land across the West a little over a week ago to protest the growing practice of charging entry fees on public lands.

In Bend, where the protest movement ignited, about 100 hikers, climbers and outdoor recreationists carried signs branding America "the land of the fee."

It is difficult to determine whether the weakness of the orchestrated outcry was due to a feeling of impotence in the face of a Congress where everything is for sale for a campaign contribution or whether there is declining concern about access to public land in a society where outdoor recreation means playing 18 holes of golf and roughing it means a weekend at Sunriver.

The user fees are a product of the congressional budget process, not some imitation of the "free market."Federal budget law requires lawmakers who want to spend new money or cut taxes to find an equal amount in budget reductions. The Republican congress cut more than $100 million from the U.S. Forest Service recreation budget last year and used the money to finance tax cuts and pet projects.

Congress told federal land management agencies to make up the loss by charging user fees. The agencies are just doing what they were told.

Some economists argue that financing public land management with income tax money is ideologically incorrect anyway. In his 1988 book, "Reforming the Forest Service,"economist Randal O'Toole argues user fees create "incentives"to properly manage natural resources on public land.

"Underpricing of resources has insulated the Forest Service from the true demand for various forest resources.

"Prices and costs should act as signals to managers to tell them when they are producing too much or too little of a resource, but congressional appropriations allow managers to ignore costs, while underpricing allows managers to believe that the demand for forest resour-ces is ever increasing,"writes O'Toole.

This is an argument that could only fool an economist whose simplistic theories reduce all human interaction to a financial transaction between consenting adults.

O'Toole and his counterparts in the Washington-based Libertarian think-tank-thought-police are arguing, "raise prices and demand for recreation on public land will decline."Duh.

It is called deliberately pricing people out of the market. The theory treats public land recreation resources as if they were simply publicly owned versions of KOA. Publicly owned parks usually create access to some spectacular natural feature located where it is by an accident of nature. They are out-of- the-way. They are often not large enough to be commercially viable.

With the exceptions of overused parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, private concessionaires in public parks make less than the public imagines and those earnings are highly seasonal. That is why public parks have generally been supported by tax money rather than individual user fees whose collection costs are a large part the revenue they produce.

The effort to impose user fees on public recreation is a deliberate attempt to impose the same competitive conditions private recreation depends on for financial success - regimentation and restricted access to those with ready money.

The joy of living in the West is throwing a pack on your back and heading out for a spontaneously chosen trailhead.

Modern commercial recreation has trouble competing against this spontaneity. That is why lobbyists for the commercial recreation industry are interested in maintaining these public land fees.

We are not talking here about the traditional fees government charges for the use of campgrounds with restrooms and running water. There is now a $6 charge to park and walk across federal land to the beach that is already owned by all Oregonians.

Oregon State Parks now impose a $3 "day use"fee to eat lunch at a picnic table and walk on the trails or the beach. Once established, these fees can only go up in the future, pricing more and more citizens out of their parks.

Eventually all recreation, including a walk on the beach or a trail, will be limited to those with ready cash.

The government that holds public land in custody for us all is erecting a wall of dollar signs around public land just as surely as if they were erecting a barbed-wire fence.