A hike in the park
Dig a little deeper if you are planning to visit a prominent national park next year.
The National Park Service is proposing to boost entrance fees at 131 of the 401 public properties it manages.
“The proposed increases in park entrance fees will allow us to invest in the improvements necessary to provide the best possible park experience to our visitors,” said Park Service director Jon Jarvis in an Aug. 14 memo to regional directors urging them to foster public support for the first fee increase since 2008.
With an eye toward sprucing up for the Park Service’s 100th anniversary in 2016, Jarvis is asking regional directors to conduct public outreach this fall and winter so fees can be implemented as early as next summer.
Park superintendents will set their own schedules for rolling out the new fees.
Public meetings surveying community leaders and local politicians should be completed by early March 2015, according to Jarvis.
The proposed fee increases for Colorado range from 50 percent at Rocky Mountain National Park to more than 150 percent at Great Sand Dunes National Park.
Increases that big should not be rushed, said Kitty Benzar, a Durango public lands advocate whose Western Slope No-Fee Coalition lobbies for unfettered access to undeveloped public land.
Benzar and her group are not opposed to fees at national parks. But they did oppose the last round of fee increases in 2007, arguing that increasing the cost of access returns the parks to its century-old roots, when only the wealthy and elite could afford visiting the country’s natural treasures.
Benzar scoffs at the Park Service’s plan to vet the fee increases at the local level in the wintery offseason, when visitation reaches the lowest level. (Visitation to Rocky Mountain National Park, the state’s most trafficked park, plummets from November through April, a six-month span that accounts for less than 15 percent of the park’s 3 million annual visitors.)
“Public scoping in November at Rocky Mountain National Park? Really? That’s when they expect to get a broad section of peoplewho use the park?” she said. “Doing the public scoping at a local level betrays the purpose of the national parks. That kind of scoping needs to be done at a national level.”
If there is “significant public controversy,” Jarvis noted in his memo, parks may choose not to increase fees, phase the fees in over three years or further delay the new rates.
Fee collection
Rocky Mountain National Park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said 90 percent of visitors surveyed by the park express support for the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, the legislation that allows public land managers to collect recreation fees to improve amenities.
That program — and the Fee Demo program it replaced — has provided Rocky Mountain National Park with $66 million since 1997. That money has rehabilitated walls on Trail Ridge Road and trails on Flattop Mountain, improved waste collection, upgraded campground sewers and improved roadways.
The park collects about $7 million a year in fees, but the cost of improvements to aging infrastructure and visitor services is growing, said Patterson, who expects public review of the proposed fee increases to begin in late October.
When the automatic budget cuts of the 2013 government sequester loomed, the Park Service promised a blow to the country’s tourism industry. The agency also identified $3 billion in critical infrastructure projects across the country as part of $11 billion in maintenance and infrastructure needs.
Last year’s devastating floods and the government shutdown proved to be a double whammy for Estes Park, which tallied more than $460,000 in lost sales tax revenue during the rough fall of 2013.
Rocky Mountain has been charging entrance fees since 1939. In 1989, a week long vehicle pass into Rocky Mountain National Park climbed to $5 from $2 and hikers and cyclists had to pay $2. That year, the park introduced a $15 annual pass.
In 1996, the cost to drive into the park doubled to $10 and an annual pass cost $20. In 2001, fees climbed to $15 for vehicles and $30 for annual passes, with the extra revenue paying for improved shuttle buses. Four years later the vehicle pass was $20 and passes were $35. In 2009, the annual pass price reached $40. Under the recent proposal, the annual pass would cost $60 and vehicle passes would cost $30.
“Money well spent”
Twenty bucks or even $30 is not enough to keep Randy Saffle away. The Grapevine, Texas, artist was part of a Lone Star state art club in Estes Park this week, painting landscapes.
He split the $20 entrance fee with a sedan full of friends. This was his first trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.
“I’d say it was money well spent,” said Saffle after a day with his paintbrushes among the peak-framed meadows of Moraine Park. “Itwas gorgeous. I’m kind of freaking out over Rocky Mountain National Park. I’ve never seen any place like this.”
Mesa Verde National Park last increased its fees in 2007, when vehicle passes climbed to $15 from $10 dur- ing the peak summer season. In the offseason, from Labor Day to Memorial Day, car passes drop back to $10. Under the proposed plan, annual passes to Mesa Verde would climb to $50 from $30 and car passes would increase to $25 from $15.
Mesa Verde spokeswoman Betty Lieurance said the park has several projects that need funding, including landscape restoration at the visitor center, improved accessibility, fixing up restrooms and transferring museum collections to the visitor and research center.
National parks are big economic engines.
In Colorado, the state’s 13 parks, monuments, historic sites and recreation areas lured 5.4 million visitors who spent $330.5 million in 2013.
Parks employ about 4,700 workers in Colorado and last year stirred an economic im- pact of $460 million, according to the service’s 2013 economic report.
Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat who serves as chairman for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on National Parks and whose grandfather was Rocky Mountain National Park’s first concessionaire, said parks should raise fees only after working with the public.
“Steep spikes in entrance fees can keep some members of the public from enjoying these national treasures,” Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said in an email. “(Udall) urges Coloradans who live near or enjoy our national parks to contact their local parks or monuments and the National Park Service tomake their voices heard.”