On Monday, March 20, Washington governor Christine Gregoire signed a bill that officially killed the reviled State Parks fees. Beginning April 9, state rangers will no longer have to grovel for people to pay $5 to park their cars, and my friends and I will no longer have to park illegally to avoid tickets or feel troubled when we shred the tickets we got anyway.
I’ve always felt strongly against charging citizens money to be able to go hiking, walk the beach or play with their kids in the woods and fields. They are public lands after all, which means we already own them. We already pay state taxes to support them too. This double-taxation was a lousy sleight-of-hand to underfund environmental budgets. Nearly a third of the revenue generated from this program went to funding the administration and enforcement of the program, meaning a good chunk of the fees were going towards the collection of more fees.
When I talked to rangers about the fees in our local Larrabee State Park, the oldest one in Washington, they likewise hated it. “Turns us into a bunch of parking attendants,” one growled to me. “People shouldn’t have to cough up five bucks to enjoy the outdoors,” said another, there’s just something wrong about that.”
A study by a WWU grad student found that the fees were driving down attendance at local state parks. Almost 40% of the people contacted in the study said they “visit some places less often than they used to because of the fees,” 36% said they “avoided fees by going to another park that didn't charge fees,” and 37% admitted they had “avoided paying user fees by parking outside official parking lots.”
(Oddly, even with this substantial resistance, 49% thought it just fine to charge entry fees for parks and public lands. Huh?)
Next to go ought to be the National Forest trailhead fees, which I think are likewise wrong-headed, inefficient and ineffective. All of this reminds me of a fantasy I had out on the Olympic Peninsula about a candidate running in 2008 as a “Parks President” with plans to inject substantial funds into our ailing national, state and local parks. But that’s a post for another day….
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