The U.S. Forest Service is taking steps to make permanent the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program , commonly known as the fee demo. The program, created through a legislative rider to a budget appropriations bill in 1996, authorizes the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to charge admission fees to public lands. Critics of fee demo say the user fee represents a double taxation. Taxpayers pay once through their federal income tax to fund the needs of public lands, and they don't want to pay again at national forest entry gates. Not so, according to Greg Super of the U.S. Forest Service.
Taxes amount to a small percentage of the recreation budget.
Still, hundreds of groups have signed a letter asking the government to have the fee demo extension rider removed from the 2002 Interior Appropriations bill and not be made permanent. The fee, they say, is an affront to the 1965 Land Water and Conservation Act that strictly prohibits charging fees to enter public lands except for National Park entrance fees, campgrounds and mechanical boat launching facilities. The fee demo allows the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service to partner with the recreation industry. Partners can be everyone from concessionaires to downhill skiing businesses to personal watercraft companies to recreational vehicle companies to recreational equipment suppliers. The American Recreation Coalition says spending on public recreation programs needs to increase, and that the responsibility for the increase should fall to direct beneficiaries of these programs.