Dear HCN,
Since the user fee issue
isn’t going away, judging from your recent letters and columns, I’d
like to throw in two more cents. My only problem with the fees is
that they aren’t high enough, and there aren’t enough of them (HCN,
10/13/97).
Terry Anderson eloquently defended
user fees; however, he left out what I believe could ultimately be
the best reason to support user fees on public land. That is, to
save private land.
Private landowners who do not
want to clearcut, develop or sell their land could follow the
Forest Service’s lead in charging fees for hiking. No longer would
they need to compete with a federal government giving away this
product at way below cost. Over time the private lands hiking
industry could grow to rival the golfing industry: less capital is
required of the owner, less water and less maintenance! The huge
caveat – I know, I know – is that with hardly a
hiking-on-private-lands industry anywhere in the world, some
serious advertising would be needed. (Think how much advertising it
took to build golf to where it is today.)
Some
nasty liability laws that protect golf course owners from lawsuits
but unfairly leave hiking-land owners unprotected would also have
to be reformed.
There are very few economic
motivations for leaving private land in its natural state and some
very market-distorting disincentives for doing so, property taxes
being a particularly miserable one. If we can’t give the owners of
this land any economically feasible pathways for preserving it,
we’ll be kissing most of it goodbye. The private-lands hiking
industry may only be a dream now, but if it were born and supported
it could be of crucial help in conserving some of this land, which
tends to be ecologically richer than public
land.
Ed
Newbold
Seattle,
Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Pay to play privately, too.
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