Hikers, picnickers and back-country campers won a major court victory last week recognizing their right to enter undeveloped National Forest lands free of charge. At issue were U.S. Forest Service rules requiring visitors to Mount Lemmon in the Coronado National Forest near Tucson, Arizona, to pay $5 per car to park along a 28-mile highway leading to Mount Lemmon. The fee had been in place since 1996, but in 2004 Congress enacted the Recreation Enhancement Act (REA), which prohibits the Forest Service from charging fees “solely for parking, scenic pullouts, and other non-developed areas.” Although Mt. Lemmon is “non-developed,” the Forest Service tried to get around the ban by designating the popular Mount Lemmon as a “High Impact Recreation Area,” (HIRA) where visitors could use developed services or amenities.
In 2008, four recreational visitors sued the Forest Service, arguing that the REA did not allow it to charge persons who just parked their cars and hiked into the forest to picnic or camp. A U.S. District Judge initially dismissed the case, but a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit in San Francisco reversed that ruling. The court decided that the statutory language was clear and unambiguous, and that the Forest Service’s HIRA designation “would enable an end-run around the clear statutory restrictions… [and] the agency could entirely evade the prohibition on parking fees by simply declaring that its fees are ‘for’ something else too.”
The Forest Service, which is part of the
Department of Agriculture, is responsible for managing 193 million acres of public land for public use and national interests, including both recreation and timber production. It is completely separate from the
National Park Service, which is in the
Department of the Interior, and manages almost 400 sites covering 84 million acres for preservation and recreation.
-Matt Bewig
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Mount Lemmon (photo: Wikipedia)
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