"There is nothing so American as our National Parks... the fundamental idea behind the parks... is that the country belongs to the People." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
"It is the will of the nation as embodied in the act of Congress [in setting aside the Yosemite government reservation in 1864] that this scenery shall never be private property, but that like certain defensive points upon our coast it shall be solely for public purposes." -- Frederick Law Olmsted.
"The primary duty of the National Park Service is to protect the national parks and national monuments under its jurisdiction and keep them as nearly in their natural state as this can be done in view of the fact that access to them must be provided in order that they may be used and enjoyed. All other activities of the bureau must be secondary (but not incidental) to this fundamental function relating to care and protection of all areas subject to its control." -- Stephen Mather.
"Montani Semper Liberi"
It's a simple motto, "Mountaineers Are Always Free," that the state of West Virginia adopted in 1872. It's a theme Congress and the National Park Service should aspire to as the agency nears its centennial in 2016.
Simply put, the Park Service's fee system across the 398 units is miserably inconsistent. Part of the reason for that was the great disservice Congress did the public when it passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act in 2004 and told the Park Service to look for ways to make money off visitors.
Don't misunderstand. Fees can play a vital role in the National Park System. For many parks, dollars generated from entrance fees, tours of centuries-old cliff dwellings, and camping enable managers to cover gaps -- ever-growing gaps -- in congressional appropriations.
But as park managers reach for fees to cover those gaps, they threaten to push visitors away as they create startling inequities. And, according to the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, fees have an adverse impact on congressional funding; as fees have sprouted and gone up, federal appropriations have declined. Another view would suggest that as congressional funding has gone down, park managers have looked to fees to make up some of the shortage. Whichever the case, there's a lack of consistency when it comes to fees in the national parks.
* When you are charged a nightly fee for walking off into the woods and sleeping on the bare ground of Great Smoky Mountains National Park while motorists in their motorhomes and $50,000 SUVs can idle in line for free as they slowly negotiate the 11-mile loop of Cades Cove, it begs that officials reconsider their approach to fees.
In the Smokies, a wonderous mountain park in the Appalachian Range of Tennessee and North Carolina, there are more than 800 miles of trail to wander. This year park officials, citing a need for a better campsite reservation system and backcountry patrols, instituted a first-ever backcountry fee of $4 per person per night, capped at $20 per trip.
And yet, none of the 650,180 vehicles -- a number that surpassed the 2012 annual visitation of Theodore Roosevelt, Saguaro, Mammoth Cave, Mesa Verde, Canyonlands, and that of 265 other units of the National Park System, and which was more than 8.5 times greater than the number who walked into and camped in the Smokies' backcountry -- that circled Cades Cove last year was charged a fee.
Now, because the park doesn't charge an entrance fee (a point Park Service officials say the state of Tennessee exacted in return for donating land for the park), the park's budget must swallow any maintenance costs associated with those 650,180 vehicles that circled Cades Cove. Last year that dollar figure was $140,092; it covered road maintenance, custodial services for the Cable Mill/Abrams Falls Trail Head Comfort Station Maintenance, Cable Mill Grounds Maintenance, Water System Operations, and Wastewater System Operations.
Why does the Park Service charge for this experience (Tiger Key, Everglades National Park, NPS photo)....
* When Yellowstone National Park budgets $125,000 per winter, or roughly $1,250 per person to keep Sylvan Pass safely open while that person pays just $20 to enter the park via a snowmobile or snowcoach, the need for either charging hundreds of dollars more for winter access through the East Entrance or shutting down the pass is obvious.
Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk says his average per person cost in winter to operate the park for visitors is $60. To get the East Entrance costs down to that level, over-snow traffic would have to increase more than 20 times, to 2,083 visitors per winter.
Now, not only is that $125,000 being budgeted for only about 100 visitors, but it pays for artillery rounds to be lobbed high onto the mountain flanks framing the pass to knock down avalanches. Can you name another park that has a bombing range?
* When Everglades National Park officials propose to charge a backcountry paddler or hiker four times what it costs a motorist and everyone in their rig to drive into the park day after day after day for a week, a top-to-bottom review of fees in the park is needed.
Park officials, who gave the public just 10 days this month to comment on the higher backcountry fees, justify boosting the backcountry permit fee from $10 to $12, and the per night user fee from $2 to $5, in part by saying their fees are below those charged on lands outside the national park. Now, they also note that it costs nearly $90,000 a year simply to process backcountry permits, and there are more costs for backcountry maintenance, law enforcement presence, and search-and-rescue. Permit fees in 2012, meanwhile, generated $48,000.
No proposals were made to increase the park's daily $10 entrance fee at the Homestead Entrance (which hasn't been increased since 1997), a fee good for a seven-day stay in Everglades National Park, or the $200 fee for commercial bus tours with more than 26 people, or for launching a boat ($5 for motorboat, $3 for canoe/kayak).
When a park counts 1.1 million visits in a year, as Everglades did in 2012, and fewer than 8,500 of those visitors went into the backcountry for an overnight, it would seem that bumping the entrance fee up $5 a car would provide more than enough revenues for both the backcountry and some front-country projects. And that $15 fee would at the same time still fall below the $25 per car charged at Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and the $20 at Yosemite and Acadia, just to name four "more expensive" parks to enter.
There are more inequities in the Park Service's fee programs if you look around.
Two-hundred-and-sixty-five units of the 398-unit system don't charge any entrance fee. If you travel frequently to those parks that do charge fees, you can lessen the cost by buying an $80 America the Beautiful Pass that gets you into as many parks as many times as you want during a 12-month period. But that $80 fee applies to college students, who might be jobless and watching the balance on their student loans steadily grow, as well as struggling young couples and most everyone else up to age 62, when the fee plummets to just $10 fee for a lifetime pass even if you tour the parks in a $300,000 motorhome. And that pass also could earn you discounts of up to 50 percent on things like campground fees.
...but not for contributing to maintain the road through Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park? NPS photo.
Now, there are economic, health, and philosophical reasons to seriously reorder the park system's fee programs.
Economically, fees potentially stand as a barrier to some who might otherwise plan a national park vacation. Those barriers cost the Park Service in terms of lost opportunities to connect Americans not only with the incredible vistas, experiences, and history found within the National Park System, but with healthier lifestyles, no small matter in a country where more than one-third of adults and approximately 17 percent of kids age 2 to 19 are obese.
Philosophically, the national parks supposedly are held in trust by Congress for the American people, who pay for them through their taxes. Yet the current fee system, especially entrance fees, is akin to having to pay a fee every time you want to enter your own home.
Those fees, both entrance and for camping, boating, scaling Half Dome, exploring cliff dwellings, climbing up the spiraling stairs of lighthouses, in many if not all cases can be traced back to Congress's passage of FLREA, (which, by the way, is up for renewal, but that's another story).
And the Park Service's headquarters compounds the problem by not dictating any uniformity in those fees. Why does it cost $4 per per person per night in the Smokies to backpack, $5 per person in Everglades, and a flat $25 for a group of friends in Yellowstone? Why does it cost you $25 to drive through one of Yellowstone's entrance gates, yet just $10 to enter Everglades?
In the end, if there must be fees, put some equity into them. Don't charge someone who walks with a pack on their back or paddles a canoe or kayak and sleeps under the stars more than someone who drives into a park. Sure, backcountry search-and-rescue missions can be expensive (though part of the cost is covered by the NPS's overall budget, not saddled entirely on an individual park), but so, too, are road repairs, maintaining front-country restrooms, handing out speeding tickets, and responding to vehicle accidents.
In fact, wipe out backcountry fees across the system and instead encourage The North Face, REI, or perhaps the entire Outdoor Industry Association to donate to cover whatever needs exist for backcountry fees across the entire park system. Or add $1 to entrance fees system-wide to fund a program for both backcountry search-and-rescue and front-country emergency response.
Even entrance fees should be questioned by the Park Service. Rejuvenation, inspiration, and creativity spring from the mountains and forests and lakes and rivers and brooks and passes and meadows and valleys and hardwood hammocks. We can price these settings in terms of the economic draw that gateway communities realize from visitors drawn to these places, but we shouldn't tax visitors again and again and again to explore and enjoy these settings.
How might you replace lost entrance fee revenues, which generate somewhere north of $200 million a year for the Park Service? Better accounting and oversight of government is one place to start in light of recent news that the government somehow lost $8 billion to fraud, waste and abuse in trying to rebuild Iraq, that a contractor involved in building a nuclear waste processing plant billed the government $2 million for overtime it didn't perform, and that federal agencies have turned a blind eye to recommendations from their own Inspector generals that could save upwards of $67 billion.
In other words, the country can afford to do away park entrance fees if it was better at managing money.
Park Service officials have voiced concerns about connecting younger generations and more diverse demographic and racial groups with the parks, and yet in iconic places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Shenandoah, Acadia, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, and 127 other parks those visitors are asked to dip into their pockets before entering and making that connection.
Some would have the Park Service sap park visitors even more for enjoying these landscapes, finding rejuvenation, and, hopefully, becoming advocates and even stewards for the national parks. The American Recreation Coalition would, among other things, have the Park Service increase park entrance fees and turn over campgrounds to concessionaires so they might "introduce dynamic pricing and start marketing these campgrounds." And ARC's revenue-generating ideas don't stop there.
The Park Service shouldn't go there. National parks are our national heritage and inheritance and held in trust for us by Congress. They are not the place to build a paywall, user-fee by user-fee.
Comments
Outstanding article and thank you Kurt for bringing more light to this situation, especially in the GSMNP. I live in GA and frequent the GSMNP about twelve times a year. In my first couple of years visiting the park, I was one of the Cades Cove loop drivers. I have since begun hiking, backpacking and now off trail hike in GSMNP. I love this park and the history behind it. This park is our land. I do not agree with the backpacking fee and the way the NPS has implemented and attempted to justify it.
I would urge anyone whom loves this park and the backcountry seriously learn more about how this fee was implemented and the injustice on how it was put in place. It is never too late to take a stand. The Everglades increase is a prime example of more of what we can expect going forward. Stand up like Kurt has and others on this site on this issue!
(I've edited the following comment for clarity after I posted it last night)
EC - You're correct about the timing of fee revenue - the NPS wasn't allowed to retain and use that money until the 1990s.
And, you're also correct about increases to the overall NPS budget in the past nine years, although it's worth noting the amounts appropriated for park operations in FY10 and FY11 represent small decreases from the previous year.
So what's the problem for the parks?
If you take the money Congress has made available for park operations (the "ONPS" category on the chart you cite), there has been little if any net gain for most parks for basic operations.
Just a few examples:
1. During the past decade Congress had added about a dozen new areas to the NPS; operating costs for those additions have to be funded out of the increases you cite, thereby reducing any potential gains to be allotted among existing parks.
2. Beginning with FY 2008, operating costs for the U. S. Park Police are charged against the ONPS budget category. In prior years, those costs were paid from a separate appropriation. In FY 2012, those costs were about $102.6 million, so a rough estimate shows those costs in FY 08-11 eat up almost two-thirds of the apparent increase since 2003 for NPS operations.
3. The cost for everyone to do business has increased during the past nine years, including fuel, costs to replace worn out vehicles and equipment, and yes, modest increases in salaries for employees during some of those years. Even though some may begrudge those increases, Congress awards them and they have to be paid out of the amount allocated for park operations.
I haven't dealt with park budgets in a number of years now, so I can only say that based on my last few years on the job, factors such as those listed above more than offset the modest "increases" in our park budget. The result: we lost rather than gained any ground in our ability to perform day to day park operations, and that meant reductions in the number of permanent and seasonal employees. I'd be surprised if that has changed very much in the past decade.
Park management has no control over the factors I mentioned above, so that brings us back to the subject at hand, which is fees.
I said in an earlier comment I believed most NPS employees would much prefer to have Congress appropriate adequate funds to run their parks without having to collect any fees at all. However, given the above factors, both the NPS and Congress are turning increasingly to user fees as a way to keep the ship afloat.
All of the above is just one Illustration of why it's so hard to figure out how to cut the cost of government.
Excellent commentary. I hated paying $20 to drive through Zion a few years ago on my way to somewhere much quieter and calmer. I was staying in the park only as long as it took me to drive through. Never again will I do that.
Despite that $20 fee, however, traffic was bumper-to-bumper from Zion's west entrance to the east. For about 30-50 miles it looked and felt like New York City's Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour. I suppose if there were no fee, it would be worse yet.
There's something amiss with the national parks' mass-tourism model, and I suppose the entrance charge is one way to try to constrain the demand to drive in and look around. It may be imperfect, but I haven't the faintest idea how to solve the larger problem. Just to refer to mass tourism, as I did, smacks of distasteful elitism. But what are people in the hundreds of RVs per day getting out of driving through Zion?
My personal solution is to avoid all popular national parks in the same way I avoid Disney World and the Las Vegas Strip.
Maybe our country is just too heavily populated now for the popular parks to be anything but overrun. And yet forcing the front country park acreage into the formally designated Wilderness model of authorized travel only by 19th century modes—canoe, foot, horse, and packstock—would probably be a sure route to alienating the public and killing the NPS's budget. The U.S. national park model has won global popularity; the Wilderness model has no precise equivalent that I know of in any other country.
So I'm out of ideas.
imtnbke, coupla thoughts on your Zion experience. One, traffic might have been bumper to bumper because of road work on the Mt. Carmel tunnel. Or, folks didn't want to take the rather longish other route outside the park from the west side of the park around to U.S. 89 on the east side. That west-to-east drive through the park is the quickest, easiest, and shortest.
Also, there is mass transit in Zion Canyon itself. You can only drive your rig into the canyon during the high season if you have a room at the lodge; otherwise you have to board the shuttle, which actually is a great service.
imtnbke, you just outlined only one of the kinds of dilemmas that confront many park managers nationwide. Want to volunteer to become a park superintendent? If you do, you'll need to accept the fact that nothing you do will make anybody happy, so be prepared for gray hair and instant ulcers.
Great article, thanks so much for "getting it" and for writing this article to explain the issues so well and so thoroughly!
Mike
Well-written editorial. I can't help but agree with much of what you say. In a perfect world we would choose as a nation to either fund parks as a collective, or not. Full appropriations say I, taking into account not only the role of national park units in protecting our resources and heritage but also providing recreational and educational activities for our people, and yes also being economic drivers for local economies.
I will say that many of the comments conflate different income sources (fees) which the NPS is authorized to collect, and your editorial doesn't help either, though I know you were going for the larger point. The FLREA authorizes fees for various reasons: Entrance fees, expanded amenities fees (usually used as campground fees), and the special recreation permit fee authority which seems to have everyone in GRSM in an uproar. Each category has its own policy for dollar analysis, justification, and expenditure. Then there are other fees such as cost recovery fees for special park uses, administrative fees, transportation fees, and commercial services fees. All these categories are authorized (sometimes demanded) by Congress.
I can't imagine a scenario where all fees would be eliminated. Whether you agree with the idea or not, fees are sometimes used as a method of "social engineering" to avoid having to institute user limits or quotas to reduce concerns about overcrowding or overuse. Is this "bad" or "good"?
Should we eliminate fees for the commercial use of our park units, particularly by those who have their business interests protected by contract with the government?
I would demand that every person standing in opposition to new fees or increases at GRSM, Everglades, wherever...instead of complaining to your representative about alleged and hyperbolic "abuses" by NPS officials you should rail against your Congress' failure to appropriate, appropriately.
My two cents.
Thanks Kurt for this article!!
I am one of the MANY who are against the "backcountry fee" in the GSMNP! I don't want something for nothing but with this "fee" in the GSMNP I will be getting nothing for something! Don't get me wrong, I will be getting the ability to pack all my stuff on my back, hike up a mountain, sleep on the ground & dig a hole to go to the bathroom! But for my family of 4 it will be cheaper to camp in some of the frontcountry campgrounds with bathrooms, rangers close by, store and have my car next to my tent! Somehow that just doesn't make sense to me!!