User Fees: National Forests Adventure Pass An Unfair Nightmare

IMBA Trail News
Volume 11, Number 2
May-June 1998

What's your worst fear as a mountain biker? No place to ride, perhaps? How about finding a $100 parking citation on your windshield at the end of a hard ride? For riders in Southern California, nightmares like this are becoming all too real because of the "Adventure Pass" program which the Forest Service has recently instituted.

Congress has decided that your visit to one of our national forests should be on a pay-per-view basis. So now you will be charged twice each time you use your national forest: the first time when you pay your federal taxes, and then again every time that you enter the forest even if it's just for a day hike or a picnic with your family.

The reason for this is that Congress has, over several years, increasingly turned away from its responsibility to fund and maintain national forests. This year, it has allocated just $211 million nationwide to support our forest lands. In a nation of some 270 million people, that's less than one dollar per person. Congress did find oodles of money to pay out in tobacco subsidies, allocations to Midwest wheat farmers to not plant wheat, and new billion dollar bombers. How many thousands of dollars did you pay to the feds last year? Does it anger you that less than a dollar of that total went to the agency that oversees the trails that we all ride on? It should.

I hope that IMBA will come out forcefully against the "Adventure Pass" as a means of generating revenue. There is no question that the Forest Service is severely under-financed, but obtaining money in this way is shameful.

Ed Hopkins
Fillmore, CA

Editors Note: Mr. Hopkins provided us with a late 1997 newsletter from the Keep The Sespe Wild Committee of Ojai, California, which attacks the Forest Service Adventure Pass program. The program charges parking fees at trailheads in the four large national forests of Southern California. The prices are $5 per day or $30/year. The committee maintains that it is returning only 34.5 percent of receipts to maintain facilities, with the rest spent on agency administrative actions and fee collection and enforcement, plus a 10 to 20% cut to private vendors selling the passes.