Recreation Fee Demo Insider History: Guest Post by Teri Cleeland

Many thanks to Teri Cleeland for this post!

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Sharon asked me to share more thoughts on the Recreation Fee program, so I pulled this possibly too-long remembrance together. This is a little bit about my experience with Recreation Fee Demonstration in those smoke-filled DC rooms from 2001-3.

I’ll lead with the famous Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I couldn’t say it at the time, but Kitty Benzar and Robert Funkhouser and the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, among others in opposition to recreation fees, made a meaningful impact on how FLREA developed. The Forest Service at the national level was listening, and so was Congress. I also want to thank Jim and Vladimir for their observations from the ground. I’m so glad they worked things out together.

In 2001 I went to DC from a ranger district in AZ to see how the sausage was made, and it nearly wrecked me!

Imagine arriving in DC in the 5th year of a grand experiment authorized by Congress to try out different kinds of recreation fees, with no objective goals other than to reduce deferred maintenance and improve the recreation experience.

I don’t have time to recount my whole experience, so I’m just going to cut and paste some parts of an oral history interview I did on my larger career for the National Museum of Forest History in 2023. Rec Fees were a small part of that interview.

In late 2000, I was working as a rec/lands/etc. staff officer on 3 consolidated ranger districts on the Kaibab National Forest. Here’s my introduction to recreation fees: “…it was kind of like the Wild West: experiment and see what works. And for us, we were south of Grand Canyon National Park, and it was a twenty-five-dollar entrance fee back then to get into the National Park. And we had this visitor center that we had created in Williams, and we started charging passes for the park, and we got to retain eighty percent of the park pass that we were selling as a convenience to people at our visitor center as they were heading up to the Grand Canyon. And then we got to keep all the money from our campgrounds too. And so, it was like, “Hey, this is a great deal and it’s not controversial. So, how hard could it be?” Right. [this was my reasoning for taking the job in DC]”

…” So, I took the Recreation Fee Demonstration [job], and I found out very quickly how incredibly controversial it was. And part of the reason for that controversy is that the Forest Service never set up a measure of how would we know it was successful? What would be some measures of our success? We just said, “Go out there and try a whole bunch of different things.” And every National Forest had their own ideas on how to charge for recreation. …All of the Southern California National Forests banded together and decided we’re going to have a de facto entrance fee. You cannot be on the National Forest without paying for a pass to be on the forest. And other places like Sedona, it would be certain trailheads that were just overrun, and they wanted to charge people at a trailhead….”

“…And it was very inconsistent. The public was running into signs saying, “You can’t park here without paying,” but there was no way to pay. And I just inherited kind of a nightmare. It was very much hated by almost all of the public. And the National Forests were like, “You can’t take my fees away. This is working for me. My measure of success is that I’m taking all of these receipts in, even if the public hates me, I’m getting finally money to keep the toilets clean or to put toilets in.” And I mean, I could do an entire interview about the mess that I inherited. And the first thing that I saw was that the agency itself was going to have to come to some kind of consistency on where and how we charge fees and make them fairer for the public. I always had a marketing perspective from the end user because I was one, out in the woods, and the hardest part was convincing our own agency leaders [I’m referring to Forest Supervisors and Regional Foresters here] to maybe give up on some of these ideas that they thought were successful in order to save the program.”

“…The very first thing that I did was have a trip out west to meet with all of the regional managers of the program to talk about the state of where we were. And I just had to find out how hard is this going to be? And I discovered very quickly that it was going to be really difficult for us to change into a more nationally consistent program. I had this “Locally Flexible, Nationally Consistent” mantra because the people who were making all the money on this recreation site weren’t seeing what was happening nationally and how it was not consistent. Like they weren’t accepting, at the time, there was a Golden Eagle Pass that the Park Service had, and we didn’t have a national pass, and that was something. So, there was consistency within the agency, but then there was consistency among the four agencies that were part of this program nationally.”

“…It was really the Forest Service that all the press was negative about our fee program. And there was a feeling that we were dragging down the Interior agencies and they badly wanted permanent authority. So, again, it was every year in the appropriations bill that they reauthorized us to do this. So, every single year we were involved in the appropriation process to try to get this authorizing language carried over, and then they’d want to keep adding little bits to it. And right when I got there, the purpose of my job was to work with Interior to develop permanent fee legislation. And so, we had to get our agency act together before we could work with the Interior agencies to bring a bill up to the Hill. And I don’t know how I got through those first couple years. It was very challenging, but I think I pulled it off in the end because we ended up getting permanent legislation.” [I’ll interject here that DOI’s Lynn Scarlett was very supportive of keeping the FS in the program.]

“… And part of that was starting with this—we came up with a blueprint, what we called “the blueprint” for rec fees in my first year there. And a lot of that was a result of working with Congress. There was a couple of Republican congressmen, one from Colorado [Scott McInnis and his staffer Josh Penry], … he was instrumental. He and his staffers, they said, “Look, this is what we’ve seen in this experiment. These are the principles that we think might make it acceptable.” So, they helped me. They were kind of the bad guys [to my FS folks]. They said, “Look, we’re not going to authorize this unless you meet these criteria: consistency, value for the visitor. You can’t charge people just to park on a National Forest. You can’t charge entrance fees to enter a National Forest.” So, there were some principles that they had outlined that I had to bring to the agency and say, “Look, this is reality, guys. Legislation is the art of the possible, and it is not going to be possible to get legislation with what you guys are doing out here.” That helped me a lot….”

I want to say here that Representative McInnis (and staffer Josh Penry) showed real leadership in grabbing this thorny issue and developing what seemed to be reasonable principles that the FS had to adhere to in order to get fee authority. It ended up with some rather unwieldy legislative language, including the very exacting list of amenities required at fee sites. This reflected a lack of trust in the FS, and in my opinion, it was well founded. We also missed out on the ability to charge fees for larger areas that had a cluster of recreation sites, like the Coronado’s Mount Lemmon Highway into the Catalinas, which had a single controlled access point like an entrance station. My interview continued after I went into a diversion about the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, with this story about the new national pass…

“… It was maybe later that fall or that winter (2002)—the Interior and Agriculture agencies and our attorneys were literally writing the legislation for new recreation fees. We were going to do away with the old Golden Eagle Pass, because that was only good for the Park Service. So, there had to be a new interagency public lands pass that you could use on National Forests, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Park Service. And we were like, “Okay, it’s going to be called the ‘Federal Lands Recreation Pass,’ but that’s too wordy. Can’t be ‘The Golden Eagle,’ that’s no longer authorized.” It was going to replace the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. So, this was a pretty big deal, authorizing all of the recreation fees that could be charged on public lands. So, somebody said, I don’t know who it was—I could lie and say it was me—but somebody said, “Well, how about the ‘America the Beautiful Pass?’” And that’s why your pass today is the America the Beautiful Pass—that got written into legislation. So, it was as a result of 9/11 and that moment of national unity” [because everyone was singing that song at the time]….

“… We didn’t get into the nitpicky details [of how to divvy up the funds] at the national level. With the National Forest or Park, you could get into those little nitpicky things. We were like, “No, it’s wherever it’s sold”. And then we started being able to sell them by mail, like virtually. But no, we didn’t get into that. [Apologies to the folks on the ground, but you did figure out income distribution, and this was part of the “local flexibility” that seemed to work.]

“… I was always trying to think of, “How can I simplify this?” And I came up with “The ABCs of Recreation Fees.” “A” was accountability: that we were to be accountable to the public on how and where we spent their money. So, there would always be information on where their extra fee went to. “B” was benefits: that you would see the benefit of your extra money that you paid. You would see that it got me security at the trailhead, or it got me a new restroom or a better trail. And “C” was convenience: that it would be convenient to buy these. And it was that convenience part that we really had to work on because I wanted that pass to be accepted in as many places as possible. And what happened was we had these concessionaires that we had contracts with that predated this, and people were taking their passes and expecting them to be good at these day use areas that were under contract with third parties. And part of the contract was, “No, we don’t accept these passes.” [and that’s still the case].”

To wrap up all these memories, as I’m explaining all of this, the interviewer, Dr. James Wall, who might be in his forties said:

“Wall: “This is blowing my mind. I’m sorry. So, until 1996, you never paid a fee to go onto the National Forest. You would pay to camp probably.

Teri Cleeland: I love this. I love that you’re saying that [laughs] because that means that we were successful in our transition toward having some visitor fees.

James Wall: I’ve never known any other reality and they do a lot of good things now with the passes and stuff. I always have a pass every year. The America the Beautiful Pass.”

End of interview excerpts.

When I became eligible for the senior discount America the Beautiful Pass, I made sure to buy it from that little Kaibab NF ranger district office that I left to go to DC. They deserved the 80 percent!

In 2003, I followed the siren call of promotion to the Legislative Affairs staff, where I stayed until 2009. I got to celebrate the passage of the first 10-year authorization of FLREA. It was quite an accomplishment. But I much more enjoyed working on other legislation: lands, wilderness, partnerships, heritage, tribal relations. We got a lot of good work done in those days when we had a functional Congress.

It’s interesting to see the program from afar, and as a consumer, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turned out. The funds have brought meaningful improvements to a lot of places. Of course, there are still problems everywhere and some things like the RACs that didn’t work out. That whole thing was a political compromise that seemed unwieldy from the start. I experienced that as a deputy forest supervisor when I had my own RAC for some pretty minor rec fee sites in Florida. We certainly weren’t raking in the dough on our OHV trails and other day use areas. We always had to subsidize fee sites with appropriated dollars.

Thanks for the link to the annual report. It looks to me like the revenues for the Forest Service are still a small portion of the recreation budget. Twenty years ago it was around 10% of the budget or somewhere around 30 million, now it’s 85 million. For lots of reasons, it costs a lot of money to provide quality recreation amenities. And the FS has a really hard time closing recreation sites. There was a concerted effort in Region 8 to assess low performing sites with high deferred maintenance. But when it came time to close some, there was always a constituency group calling their congressperson. We also got into real trouble building multiple visitor centers on Mount St. Helens. All the congressionals want to be at the ribbon cutting but not fund operations.

Rec Fees came about as a result of the loss of the big timber program, which subsidized a lot of other programs. Road maintenance, for example, was no longer paid for by timber receipts. Then fire rose after the big fires that started with climate change around 2000, and because of the 10-year average the fire budget kept creeping up to a larger and larger share of the overall budget squeezing out recreation and other programs. The recreation program was running just to stand still. Some couldn’t even handle volunteers or grants because we just couldn’t keep up with the field work. Toilets don’t clean themselves!

The National Forests have been overrun again in the Covid and post Covid era, and then DOGE came along and just decimated the recreation staffing. Now with reorganization and ever-consuming fire seasons, there isn’t much attention being given to the recreation resource. I’m hopeful that some good will come with downsizing the overhead above the Forest level, but it will take some time for that to settle out. I’m on the NASFR recreation committee and we’re in hiatus now. There was some internal effort in the waning days of the Biden administration to refocus on recreation, but they didn’t get past listening sessions before the DOGE shock came.

Rec Fees play a crucial role in helping to close the funding gap, but as we predicted back when, they will never supplant appropriated funds. I wish that Congress and the Administration valued public lands recreation as much as I do. But they just don’t and never will. I believe that the worst fears of the opponents have not been realized, nor the greatest hopes of the proponents.

I only hope that American’s love for their public lands will prevail and that these lands will continue to be a place of joy and wonder for generations to come.