Here’s what Dale wrote:
The comments from Kitty above are incorrect with regards to FLREA authorizing the FS to charge a fee at developed trailheads. That actually was the point of the law by Congress to allow the FS to generate some revenues from trail and trailhead users to help fund management of that recreation activity. In Colorado, the FS Is the only agency that generally is not charging trailhead fees, except for a limited number of trails. State parks, counties, and even CO Parks and Wildlife are charging to help fund maintenance or improvements of trails and trailhead facilities, and they charge significantly more than usual FS fees to date. The public has not rejected such user fees at FS trailheads where they are implemented. Only Western Slope No Fee Coalition has attempted to reject them, but the fee application has been upheld by courts when the FS properly provides required amenities.
Under the law, Something like 80% of the revenue is supposed to stay at the local FS units and be used for trail maintenance or other related improvements. These monies can and do fund trail crews where they are collected and where they are properly applied in good faith under the law. If the FS collected on a more widespread basis, many seasonal and permanent trail crew folks could be hired. Coincidentally, I drove by the Herman Gulch trailhead today west of Denver along I-70 on the Arapaho-Roosevelt NF and there were probably 400 cars parked (maybe more, hard to tell driving by on the interstate), but the ARNF largely does not charge any trailhead user fees. They do charge ‘entry fees’ at a few special areas. And concessionaires charge entry fees at the very popular Brainard Lake area on the ARNF but that is a different matter. That is THEIR fee that they have been authorized to collect in their concessionaire contract with the ARNF.
It is important to point out that the FS can choose what trailheads to charge at; they don’t have to charge at every trailhead. And in R6 forests, many trailheads have no fee, for example. Also, the Interagency America the Beautiful pass is accepted for the fee. As I noted above R6 forests have been charging for 30 years, as well as limited other locations that I am aware of. Under the law, they simply need to provide required amenities, such as vault toilet, info kiosk/sign board, trash collection, picnic table I believe in order to impose the fee.
The FS did abuse the law in a few places by attempting to charge fees for people simply parking along roads not near a trailhead within what they termed a “high use area”, but where they had not provided the required amenities. They lost in court over this at least once as they should have.
On high use forests such as the ARNF, collection of trail fees at most of the high-use trailheads ( this may be almost everywhere on Clear Creek and Boulder Districts for example) could likely generate very substantial monies to fund a lot of trail crews and maybe replace a vault toilet or improve or expand a trailhead parking area. But, the FS largely has not been utilizing this authorized funding mechanism for some reason. As noted in the WyoFile Op Ed above, I would also say I am dumb founded as to why they have not in a broader way across the FS. The trails and trailheads could be in much better condition.
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I decided to look at FS Recreation RACs. I’m not going to criticize anyone because of the FS website hassles of last year. I’ll just point out the Regions 2, 8 and 9 links on the RecRac site went to information about RecRacs. I’ve heard that there are troubles with these, getting people to apply? Getting FACA members appointed (that’s always an issue)? I don’t know but hopefully folks out there know more. I wonder if there will continue to be Regional RACs without Regions?
Last fall, the CRS did a piece on FLREA and relevant issues.
Fee Sites. The most recent FLREA report (p.8; hereinafter 2024 Report) shows that in 2023, the agencies charged FLREA fees at then-existing sites as follows: Of FS’s nearly 30,000 recreation sites, 3,936 collected fees. Of BLM’s 3,400 developed recreation sites, 402 charged fees. Of 568 FWS refuges, 131 sites charged fees. Of 429 NPS units, 157 charged a fee. Of BOR’s more than 245 sites with developed recreation, 4 charged a fee.
So, maybe, it would appear that other federal agencies are not charging fees on as many areas as possible under FLREA either. Here’s something Lynn Scarlett, then Assistant Interior Secretary, wrote in 2005. I am a newbie to all this so forgive me if I got something wrong, but is this currently the right list for being able to charge?
Standard amenity recreation fee
Except as limited by subsection (d), the Secretary may charge a standard amenity recreation fee for Federal recreational lands and waters under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, or the Forest Service, but only at the following:
(1)A National Conservation Area.
(2)A National Volcanic Monument.
(3)A destination visitor or interpretive center that provides a broad range of interpretive services, programs, and media.
(4)An area—
(A)that provides significant opportunities for outdoor recreation;
(B)that has substantial Federal investments;
(C)where fees can be efficiently collected; and
(D)that contains all of the following amenities:
(i)Designated developed parking.
(ii)A permanent toilet facility.
(iii)A permanent trash receptacle.
(iv)Interpretive sign, exhibit, or kiosk.
(v)Picnic tables.
(vi)Security services.
Requiring all of those amenities seems a little much, IMHO. Security services? Many of the county places I hike have excellent well-maintained handicapped sized port a potties inside a shelter. The concessionaire-run FS sites often have a trash can within their vault toilet. Is a sign with a map the same as “interpretive”? It just seems like kind of an potpourri of different things, especially since it must have “ALL of the following” if I understand correctly. It could be that technologies have changed, as well as many more people out there, and so maybe Congress should take another look should be taken at all this, and how well it has worked in the last 20 years. But perhaps our academic friends have done some studies? Or perhaps the recreation industry? Or even have collection kiosks at sites for voluntary contributions? Right now if I felt like contributing, I wouldn’t know where to send it.
Let’s go back in time.. to this testimony from Lynn Scarlett, then Assistant Interior Secretary. Whatp
The Fee Council, whose members include key officials of both Departments, was created in 2002 to facilitate coordination and consistency among agencies on recreation fee policies. Our Implementation Plan includes the creation of a Steering Committee to oversee day-to-day implementation, as well as several technical working groups for each of the key areas. The Fee Council created the following technical working groups:
National Pass Working Group
Fee Collection/Fee Expenditure Working Group
Recreation Resource Advisory Committees (RAC)/Public Participation Working Group
Communications Working Group
The Implementation Plan, a dynamic working document, sets forth preliminary implementation timelines by identifying short-term, medium-term, and long-term tasks and designates staff with the lead responsibility to accomplish those tasks. The working groups are drafting guidance, developing detailed action plans, and discussing key issues to ensure compliance with the new law. One of the short-term tasks of the Fee Collection/Fee Expenditure Working Group is to ensure that all sites that charge recreation fees conform to the infrastructure and other requirements of the new law. Although this review continues, the following are examples of sites that have made changes to their fees under FLREA:\Gavin Point National Fish Hatchery (FWS) no longer charges an entrance fee.
Arapaho National Recreation Area (Forest Service) no longer charges an entrance fee for the entire area, but may charge a standard amenity recreation fee at localized developed sites.
At Imperial Sand Dunes (BLM), recreation fees for two overlooks and a trailhead were eliminated.
Quaker Lake Visitor Center and Lewis and Clark Visitor Center (Forest Service) no longer charge for children under 16 years of age.******************************
Sharon said “And if folks are going to be charged, why not have the FS get the bucks rather than concessionaires or other private and public entities? One good reason would be that the FS can’t do the work as cheaply as other entities, probably due to rules regarding hiring, contracting and so on.”
One of our Ranger Districts wanted to drop the campground concessionaire and return to Forest Service management so I asked the Resource Assistant to do a financial analysis. The Forest Service management would have to meet the same standards that we required in the concessionaire contract.
The overtime laws are different for ski area and campground concessionaire employees by law. Yeah, they don’t have the same labor protections to apply to other employers or the Federal government.
The Ranger District could do it by paying temporary Forest Service employees for 20 hours of work and then asking them to volunteer for the next 20 hours!!
I did have a Department of Labor employee contact me about work hour laws as they pertained to concessionaires and ski area employees. I told him we would abide by whatever the Department of Labor came up with.
I never heard from him again.
I was willing to take on the Washington Office on switching our campgrounds to Forest Service management.
I did have a couple of short conversations with them on the topic, but at the time the Washington Office had invoked the “Brezhnev Doctrine” when it came to concessionaire campgrounds. That is, once a campground went under concessionaire management it could NEVER return to Forest Service management.
I did have to explain the Brezhnev Doctrine to them.
I guess I could have been more “polite” in my discussion with the WO. But hey, with a name like Vladimir it was the first thing that came to mind when the policy was explained to me!!!
I don’t know if the Forest Service still operates under the Doctrine these days. It would be worth finding out to get that policy changed first and then follow it with a change in labor law.
Thanks, Vladimir! I would guess it’s not an official policy (Brezhneve) but more of a “the hassle and possible litigation isn’t worth it” kind of calculation. It does seem highly odd that concessionaire and ski area (?) employees would have different overtime laws/regulations. If that’s true, I wonder how that happened?
“from AI—Gemini
AI Overview
Federal law does not set a uniquely different overtime rate for ski areas and campgrounds. Instead, under Section 13(a)(3) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), these businesses are legally classified as “seasonal amusement or recreational establishments”. This classification allows them to bypass the standard overtime rules entirely if they meet specific operational timelines.
To qualify for the federal exemption, the ski area or campground must meet at least one of the following criteria:
The 7-Month Test: The establishment operates for 7 months or less in any calendar year.
The 33 ⅓% Test: During the preceding calendar year, its average receipts for any 6 months of the year were not more than 33 ⅓% of its average receipts for the other 6 months.If a business qualifies for this exemption, they are not required to pay overtime (time-and-a-half) to their non-exempt employees.”
I thought it was a separate law, but it appears that it is under Fair Labor Standards act.
That Department of Labor employee must have been a new hire. There were a couple of other issues that he raised besides overtime, but I don’t remember them.
I really cannot believe that this is still on the books. Concessionaire employees were and probably still to this day taken advantage of under this law.
I always felt sorry for them.
Hmm. Thanks Vladimir! I wonder if the ski areas that now open for summer don’t have to follow that anymore?
In Oregon, several of the smaller ski areas have become concessionaires for Forest Service campground.
That allowed them to keep their employees through the summer. It seemed like a good thing for both employees and the ski areas.
If the law applies to them, but not the non-ski concessionaires then that puts the ski area concessionaires at a competitive disadvantage.
I have a friend that became a multi-millionaire by starting a company that let small financial institutions turn over compliance with Federal financial laws to him.
Pass enough laws and compliance drops simply because people cannot keep up with all of them and comply with the terms.
I suspect nobody is in compliance because they haven’t read the law.
If I can find some time to put together a cogent reply to the bigger picture of this, I will, since I was the WO program director from 2001-3, when we wrote the FLREA legislation. Lynn Scarlett was the DOI point person and very involved.
But the concession comment triggered this thought. I was a district recreation manager when I got the DC job. We were just about to pull the trigger on a concession contract for our large campground just outside of Grand Canyon. It was still Rec Fee Demo then, and authority had to be renewed every appropriations bill, so it was always a cliffhanger come October and some forests like mine kept the status quo on using appropriated dollars. Anyway, I asked the forest to consider moving to a rec fee model instead of issuing the RFP. They did, retaining the fees that used to go to DC, keeping 80 percent.
It was a huge success, as I recall. We couldn’t have done it without volunteers though, who were happy to spend summers near Grand Canyon. It looks like it is still FS operated under recreation.gov. They completely restored this campground in recent years.
Anyway, taking a campground out of concession was like the 3rd rail of FS rec fee program. You just couldn’t do it because of the political connections of the concessioners. And despite the fees paid, a lot of forests didn’t see the returns that would make sense. I think it was a good move on the part of the forest to keep it in house under FLREA. But many forests had already gone concession out of desperation prior to FLREA. No turning back then.
Thanks Teri for your perspective! We’d appreciate anything you could come up with. Also if you would like to write a guest post on “what the FS has the power to change that could be helpful to in recreation”, I’d be very interested in your thoughts. Yes, more funding. Yes, more volunteers. Yes, more partners. But are other, potentially internal or things Congress could help with?
Oh, the “Brezhnev Doctrine” is very much still in effect and stronger than ever. (Love that name!) A bit of history for those younger than I. (Which is nearly everyone.) Under the Land and Water Conservation Act, the FS could charge for campgrounds but could only retain 15% of the revenue. The remainder went to Treasury for Congress to appropriate. The 15% was often not enough to operate the campground, and Congress didn’t always appropriate enough to make up the difference. Under that scheme, using a private concessionaire under Granger-Thye made some sense.
Fee Demo should have upended all of that by allowing the FS to keep all fee revenue. And indeed, some forests saw Fee Demo as a chance to phase out concessionaire management and bring things back into federal hands, which made total sense. The Chief at the time (Dombeck) shut that down hard, stating in a memo to all RFs:
“Specifically, our direction is not to displace concessionaires associated with the execution of the fee demonstration test. Several of our trade association partners have contacted my office and members of Congress expressing their concerns that some areas are contemplating modifications of current concession permits, or even not renewing permits, to incorporate a site in the demonstration program.”
He softened the blow by reminding them that Fee Demo was just a five-year test. That was 29 years ago.
The concessionaire system has done nothing but explode ever since, which has never made any economic sense. Why would a forest not want to run their own campgrounds and retain the revenue in their budgets? Maybe even generate a profit on camping to use for trail maintenance? Camping fees are well tolerated; trail fees not so much. It would be a win-win. They could even go with the BLM model and recruit volunteer camp hosts to provide on-site presence, something private concessionaires are not allowed to do per the Dept of Labor.
Looked at from a business standpoint it makes no sense. It’s an ideological choice, not an economic one. If the USFS were a business they would have gone under a long time ago.
As to the Rec RACs. They are effectively defunct and have been for years. Trouble getting people to apply, trouble getting applicants approved, charters expiring before appointments can be completed. Plus the concept was flawed from the get-go because only FS fanboys and girls ever got appointed. Anyone not a FS sycophant was not even considered, which limited the pool.
FLREA allows other FACA committees to fill the role, and the FS finally gave up and went that route. They now use BLM RACs or SRS RACs when they need a fee proposal rubber-stamped, which is always (always!) the outcome.
Sharon: you mentioned a CRS publication that references a 2024 FLREA Report. Do you have a link to that? Because although FLREA requires a Report to Congress every three years, the last one released publicly was in 2015.
Thanks for all the information, Kitty!
Here is the link to the CRS report.
Here is the link to where the published reports can be downloaded, weirdly found at doi.sciencebase.gov (???) https://doi.sciencebase.gov/flrea/
I was once a Designated Federal Official for a FACA committee and the problem of charters expiring and finding people to do it that would satisfy various entities and getting them approved through the USDA bureaucracy.. so many different groups had to approve them I used to joke that I needed radioactive tags to figure out which office the paperwork had stopped at.. FACA is a good idea, but it’s a bit of a common theme, layers of well-intentioned procedures leading to agency employees working around them or giving up completely.
Thanks for the link to the reports. Weird place for them indeed.
There doesn’t seem to be a place for joint Int/USDA projects. Seems like that could be improved. And no obvious link from USDA, I found it by going to the CRS report and finding it there.
From the perspective of a Forest, FLREA was a tale of the “who has and who has not’s”. I happened to be a Line Officer on a RD that had a fantastic slush fund of retained fees; I mean lots of $! However, the other seven RD’s, not so much.
Being the all caring bunch of cutthroats we were, we did decide to form a committee (who would have thunk it) to level the rewards of outstanding resources. Apparently, I had excused myself for a restroom break because when I returned to the FLT, I was the Line Officer Representative for that poker table.
Anyway, we did level the goods between all the RD’s, and contrived a calculus that would confuse Einstein, based on PAOT’s, if I remember correctly. It’s tough being head rooster in the chicken house, battling the desire to keep all the money vs helping those in need but the “Greater Good” took hold. I was once a contract grower for Tyson Foods so sorry for all my chicken analogies….🤣.
Inquiring minds.. why was one District such a “have” compared to the others.. more fee campsites, more popular campsites???
Sharon, yes, lots of campsites and a couple huge special use permits; two with snowmobile rentals and Outward Bound HQ was located there too. Those snowmobiles were/are expensive money makers, with probably at least 1-2 hundred machines total.
It was a legit thing to do, I reckon…
I was hoping you’d ask about the chickens…..🤣
Somehow I didn’t understand that rec special uses bucks were in the same pot. Wonder how that works if your district has a ski area or some other super-humongous permit.
OK I’ll bite. Did the chickens play poker?
Well Kitty, you have me at a loss on context. 🤣🤣. I never really saw them playing poker, but did watch day old birds turn into four pound “nuggets on sticks” in about six weeks…. I grew about 16 million pounds of broilers over 15 years..
On the Wenatchee each District got to keep their “revenue”. The only one we used a formula to distribute were the Golden Passes.
However, the BIG ISSUE was revenue sharing between the western Washington National Forests and the North Cascades National Park.
I started my Recreation job on the day Rec Fee Demo was implemented. As a economist in my previous job I was appalled at the demonstration projects chosen. The chosen projects almost insured failure of the Rec Fee Demo program and to this day I hold that the Forest Service program is a FAILURE. Want to see a successful Rec Fee Demo program go look at the National Park Service.
Anyway, that summer the Wenatchee National Forest collected 25,000 dollars in the Northwest Pass program. I believe, it was the Washington Trails Association that sponsored a public meeting in Seattle regarding the Northwest Trail Pass program. And at that public meeting, I said that I was not sure the Wenatchee would stay in the program, since $25,000 was such a small amount.
The Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie based in Seattle on the other hand got well over a MILLION DOLLARS as Puget Sound residents bought the trail pass AND then promptly drove over the passes to hike on the Wenatchee!!!
The Mt. Baker noticed my comments and the two Forests met at Stevens Pass to negotiate the “Treaty of Stevens Pass” for revenue sharing. I have to give ALL THE CREDIT to the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie for negotiating the treaty.
As a “reformed economist” I had lots of data at hand and it took less than two hours to negotiate revenue sharing.
It really helped that both Forests took it from the perspective of public service, instead of funding their own organizations. The two Forests even gave Northwest Pass Revenue to the GP, Olympic, Okanogan, and the North Cascades National Park.
It was really easy since the Mt. Baker-Snoq focused on public service and distribution of those funds to serve the public instead of lining their own pockets.
The Regional Office was stunned that we came to an agreement so quickly.
There are many issues associated with the Recreation Fees and unfortunately there has been little serious discussion within the Forest Service. Revenue sharing worked in Washington state, simply because of the personnel on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie.
The Forest Service should internally, and quietly review the program and see what changes need to be made. Then go public.
Recreation fee retention is only ONE aspect of funding recreation programs on National Forests.
Those other aspects need to be brought into the discussion.
The revenue sharing aspect is a complete can of worms. Consider the following scenario:
Visitor purchases America the Beautiful Pass online. Cost $80 (+ $7.50 shipping for a physical card). 100% goes to NPS WO because they are the national administrators of the program.
Visitor purchases America the Beautiful Pass from a National Park. Cost: $80. Distribution 80% to that Park, 20% to NPS WO.
Visitor uses said pass at a different National Park. That Park sees zero revenue.
Visitor uses said ATB pass at a trailhead on a National Forest. Trailhead sees zero revenue.
Visitor uses said ATB pass at a picnic area on BLM. Picnic area sees zero revenue.
I think there is some mechanism for funds sent to NPS WO to be re-distributed out to Parks, Forests, and BLM, but by the time it trickles down that far it’s negligible. Also the original idea was that the fee you pay stays where you paid it to benefit that specific location. That has always been a lie.
Some places have tried to go with regional passes to compete with the ATB but their cost is usually in the $30-$50 range for far fewer benefits. In a head-to-head comparison of value, you’d have to be an idiot to not get the ATB.