Robbed by RAT's

To keep the carp out the refuge installed weirs on the pathetic, irrigation-depleted remains of its water source, the White River. But it has no money to maintain the weirs (which are rotting where they stand) and no money to control the carp. This is a land of imperiled desert fishes--relics from extinct glacial lakes that have miraculously adapted to desert life. The refuge contains many springs that probably sustain federally listed species such as threatened White River springfish and possibly endangered roundtail chubs (clinging to existence in a nearby artificial pond and thought to be extinct in the wild). But the refuge can't even afford a biologist to inventory the springs. "I need that data to make good decisions," declares refuge manager, Merry Maxwell.

In January the Fish and Wildlife Service's eight-state, 54-refuge Midwest Region announced a plan to reduce the workforce by about 20 percent. "Our sense is that about a third of the refuges in that region are going to be in 'preservation status,' which means they'll be unstaffed," says Jeff Ruch, director of Public Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Summing up the whole sorry mess for all federal resource agencies is district ranger Cid Morgan of the Angeles National Forest in California: "We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing."

As abusive as RAT fees are in their own right, the Forest Service is abusing them further by playing fast and loose with the law. The Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004 was supposed to fix all the problems with Fee Demo. No longer would the public be charged just to, say, go fishing, but only if a site had "significant investment," which the act defined as six amenities: security services (staffers who check to see if you've paid), parking, toilets, picnic tables, permanent trash receptacles and permanent interpretation (signs with such messages as "Don't feed the animals").

What happened on the Deschutes National Forest is typical. "One day," says Scott Silver, "and I mean one day, the Forest Service goes out and buys a bunch of 30-gallon, galvanized trashcans and some chains and padlocks and drops them off at places they'd been charging without being in compliance."

A site has to have all six amenities. But the Forest Service has dreamed up a way of getting around the law by designating sections of forest as "High Impact Recreation Areas" (HIRA's). One corner of a HIRA has a sign; another corner, perhaps two miles away, might have a trash can. Three miles from both might be a parking lot. The Recreation Enhancement Act makes no reference, oblique or otherwise, to anything like an HIRA. The concept is simply Forest Service sleight of hand. And HIRA's are being set up all across the national forest system.

The Forest Service has been flouting even its own bizarre interpretation of the law. Last year it admitted to the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests that 739 HIRA's didn't have the six amenities. Moreover, it had not bothered to report 627 of these HIRA's to Congress, a violation of the Recreation Enhancement Act, which forbids designation of new fee sites without public participation. And there are at least 3,000 former Fee Demo sites outside HIRA's that are still charging fees, many of them illegally.

When Scott Silver got a ticket for refusing to pay a RAT fee in a Deschutes HIRA he informed the US attorney that he would be representing himself in court. The feds immediately dropped the charge. But they prosecuted Christine Wallace, a Tucson legal secretary, who wouldn't pay two tickets for what amounted to hiking without a license on a Coronado National Forest HIRA in Arizona. While the Recreation Enhancement Act allows RAT fees, it specifically prohibits the Forest Service and BLM from charging entrance fees. Accordingly, the court found that by charging a fee for entering the HIRA and for parking, the Forest Service had illegally implemented the law.

But the agency appealed and on January 16, 2007 won a reversal. If the ruling stands, it establishes case law that makes it a crime to fish or even get out of your vehicle on your own land without finding a ranger station (if one is open) and coughing up money that even the motorized-recreation axis that hatched RAT fees never intended for you to pay.

When federal agencies come to depend on funding from special interests the special interests wind up running the show. In the fish-rich Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho, as on so much public land entrusted to the Forest Service, the campgrounds have been taken over by concessionaires. After a public-relations disaster in this land of fed haters, managers here have recently backed away from RAT fees. But the damage has been done.