Two of my favorite Senators, Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, have introduced legislation (S.3452) to hand the Valles Caldera National Preserve over to the National Park Service. Committee hearings start June 24. This legislation is such a great idea, and I am imploring you to click here to write a quick note of support for the bill. Why does this matter?
In my mind, the story starts with the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, another Clinton-era program that continues to haunt us after all this time. The Fee Demo program was originally explained as an initiative to get more funding to heavily-used areas in the National Forests and BLM areas by collecting user fees (for trailhead parking, picnicking fees, entrance fees, etc.). Popular areas would collect a few bucks a head, then use it to reduce their maintenance backlogs & fund better services at these areas. At first, a few places tried it, and not all of them liked it. In some areas, it cost more to implement and enforce than it collected.
But over time, the land managers got used to this steady trickle of money, and the program got renewed. Then the forest supervisors and the BLM district office managers expanded the program, charging for more areas and for more uses. They spent it on redoing toilets and trails, picnic tables and campgrounds. They spent it to build entrance kiosks like on the Mirror Lake Scenic Byway, so people can't sneak into the Ashley National Forest without paying their pound of flesh. People complained, but the Congress renewed the program again. And the managers expanded the program again, and made more money, and Congress liked that, and renewed the Fee Demo program again.
But the backstory, which I didn't learn until a few years ago, is pretty sinister. Back in the 1990s, when conservative thinkers felt energized to come up with all kinds of "solutions" to Big Government, a group called the American Recreation Coalition came on the scene. The great thinkers at ARC saw the system of parks, refuges, forests, and landscapes as a poorly-developed and exploited, therefore wasteful, enterprise. ARC proposed an experiment: if the government could charge at the parks, they could charge at other areas. If the government started making money, they could fix up their developed facilities. Once the facilities got fixed up, they would be ripe for private companies to take over, either in the form of concession contracts or taken over wholesale.
As you can imagine, lots of people in Newt Gingrich's Washington just about peed themselves with pleasure at the idea of private corporations taking over our shared natural spaces. So they passed the Fee Demo program, laid off all kinds of experienced land managers, and outsourced as many of the visitor services functions as they could. And started bulldozing, developing, building, and paving. (FWIW the ARC is also a big proponent of motorized recreation, and helped to scuttle snowmobile restrictions in Yellowstone, jet-ski restrictions on NPS-managed lakes, etc.)
Way back in the waning days of the Clinton administration, the Federal government purchased the Baca Ranch to be public land, but thanks to the intervention of conservatives like Pete Domenici as well as the sellers, the parcel was saddled with two management imperatives. One was that the land continue to be used and managed for multiple uses, such as timber harvesting, cattle grazing, hunting, and even geothermal energy exploration. Two, the land would be managed by a 7-member board in such a way as to make it financially self-supporting by 2015. To starry-eyed "invisible hand" thinkers 10 years ago, these two imperatives sounded like the recipe for public lands management success— no bureaucracy, no tax dollars getting sucked into the environment, and a management model that would inspire future land managers to eschew Interior & Agriculture for a leaner, meaner, more profitable system.
The more the land managers built, the more they charged. Many managers charged even where there are no or minimal facilities. In some areas, like the Prescott National Forest in Arizona, there is no trailhead you can hike, no wilderness you can access without paying for it.
Conservative organizations like PERC sprung up to justify the privatization of land management, and to explain why it was not "double taxation" or unfair to the poor to charge use fees for simply going to the land that we all share and walking, looking at nature, or eating a sandwich. Is this true?
What would Ed Abbey say?
“We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.”
Abbey also said,
What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
Ed Abbey too radical? What about Wallace Stegner?
...those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado; and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.(From The Sound of Mountain Water, emphasis mine)
Our nation's public lands, encompassing nearly 1/3 of this country, not only represent, but actually offer both physical and psychic freedom. Putting up barriers, like fee structures and an enforcement system, to people trying to enter this "geography of hope," is not just drawing a line between those who have the key to the kingdom (a day use fee, entrance fee, camping fee, boat launch fee, etc.) and those who don't, but actually making the experience less free in other senses as well (spending a hike fretting about whether the quarters you used to pay the fee dropped out of the envelope in the pay tube). And while articles celebrating the success of the fee demo program laud the fact that the "riff-raff" are being kept out, the fact of the matter is that teenagers are kept out, immigrants are kept out, low-income people are kept out, and people who don't have the right change are kept out. (above, looking into the VCNP)
So, fast forward a few years (Fee Demo passed 1996 IIRC) to the year 2000, in the cold dark months before the inauguration of GW Bush, and you find Pete Domenici orchestrating a very popular buyout of some very coveted land right in the middle of Albuquerque and Santa Fe's favorite playground, the Jemez Mountains. But he wasn't going let it be run by the National Park Service, who run nearby Bandelier "for the pleasure and enjoyment of the people," nor the admittedly dysfunctional Santa Fe National Forest. It would be a business operation, run by a board, like a business.
This 2004 article captures the conservative optimism about the Valles Caldera.
Fed up with the amount of western land being consumed by the federal government and managed by inefficient bureaucracies, New Mexico senator Pete Domenici worked to ensure that this environmental purchase would not be business as usual. He had good reason for concern. As PERC has reported consistently, national park funding has increased over the years, but even so the National Park Service reports a $6 to $9 billion backlog of unfunded maintenance, acquisition, and resource management projects (Fretwell 2004).
With most of their budgets coming from Congress, federal land managers traditionally work to satisfy the interests of politicians. They have little incentive to direct funding to its most appropriate uses, to find new sources of revenue, or to keep costs down to make ends meet.
The VCNP seeks to change the incentives by serving as a market-based experiment in public land management.
The result of this market-based experiment after 10 years? Fail!
Here's what they hoped would happen:
To achieve financial self-sufficiency, the trustees will have to generate revenue from the environmental marketplace. Costs will have to be contained, trade-offs between resources considered, visitor revenues increased by charging realistic fees and restricting access, and any additional revenues reinvested. Unlike most other public lands, the VCNP will be allowed to keep the revenue it generates. The pressure to become self-sufficient should also encourage entrepreneurship and creativity, while still upholding the preserve's mission of protecting Valles Caldera's distinctive landscape.
User fees and access restrictions will play an important role.
Boy, howdy, have they ever! Although the Valles Caldera did not end up adopting the ill-received proposal to raise elk hunting permits to $7500, their fees are stiff enough as is that it keeps most people out. Hunting, guided tours, and certain hikes were the only activities allowed for a long time, but now there are all kinds of things you can pay for. For a family of four, like mine, here it what it would cost to:
Snowshoe, cross-country ski, or hike: $30
Hike with an naturalist: $46
Sleigh rides: $60
Fish: $140 (!)
But that's a good thing, according to the PERC correspondent:
With only a dozen hikers allowed on the trail during our designated time, we gladly paid $10 each to have the preserve to ourselves. Others pay for privately led photo excursions and fly-fishing clinics. In its first year of operation alone, access fees for elk hunting, trout fishing, and hiking grossed close to half a million dollars.
Oh la la! How exclusive! But the sad truth is that his nice little visit with his girlfriend cost taxpayers well over $1100, while it would have cost taxpayers only $22 for them to go to nearby Bandelier National Park (and they would have been able to pay half the price for admission). To be fair, it's better now that they're letting more people in. This past year it only cost taxpayers $250 per person who visits the VCNP, while a visit to any other park unit in New Mexico cost us an average of $13 a head.
Besides the wild injustice of charging exorbitant use fees in a state populated with large, cash-strapped families, and the irony of this experiment costing taxpayers much more per visitor, there is the absolute wrongheadedness of trying to impose metrics of profit on public lands, which like cultural institutions, offer goods in themselves. When visiting public lands, we exercise, reduce stress, and reconnect with our natural world.
After I started the draft of this article, I took my family up to the Jemez for Father's Day. We packed food from the fridge, put some gas in the car, and spent not a penny more. Over the weekend, we hiked, soaked in the hot springs, camped, romped in the meadows, explored caves, and swam in the river. I also visited with dozens of other families who had escaped the heat and the madness of the cities below, and were joyfully soaking up the sunshine, cool ponderosa pine-scented breezes, spectacular scenery, and healing waters of the Jemez. For free. I asked a few of the moms I talked to if they would be here if it cost $15/head, and all of them emphatically answered no, then told me the stories I have been hearing this past year, of unemployed husbands, medical bills and no insurance, employers gone bankrupt, etc.
The families at Soda Dam, a popular tourist attraction right on the highway, were a typical cross-section of Nuevo Mexicanos. There were the aging hippy couples, the devoted dads with their giant muscles and gang tattoos, the moms and aunties taking herds of little ones out for the day, native American kids from the nearby Jemez Pueblo, tan and lithe college kids, and a few rotund minivan families. But all of us shared the same beatific smiles, relaxed postures, and laughter. Even an afternoon in the great outdoors was enough to rejuvenate, recharge, and calm us enough that we could return to the city and continue to live our troubled American lives without falling apart. This kind of therapy, this kind of release, is beyond price.
Back to Stegner for a minute:
For clerks and students, factory workers and mechanics, the outdoors is freedom, just surely as it is for the folkloric and mythic figures. They don't have to own the outdoors, or get permission, or cut fences, in order to use it. It is public land, partly theirs, and that space is a continuing influence on their minds and senses.(From Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur)
Which brings us back to the free market fail part. I don't think user fees for public lands are going away, but more attention should be paid to the other metrics used to measure the worth of our public lands. I think the National Park Service does a good job of tracking value besides monetary (see for instance the Park Studies Unit of the University of Idaho, which publishes the annual NPS report on Serving the Visitor (PDF), and covers things like educational and recreational value ). I know we're a long way as a nation from measuring things like gross national happiness, but I know that if we did, opening the VCNP as a national park would contribute greatly to that sum.
So with all this in mind, won't you please contact the Senate Committee and let them know, hell, yeah! Make that Valles Caldera place a park already! Not everything has to be run like a business, and it's cheaper if we don't even try! To heck with the free market! Get the public back on our public lands! Use your own words of course, but let them know that you value your public lands for more than their revenue-generating ability.
Thanks!