Recreation Fees

Congress has for years raised concerns about the ability of the federal land management agencies to provide high-quality recreational opportunities to visitors. These agencies include the Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service. The recreational fee demonstration program, authorized in 1996, allows these agencies to test new or higher fees to help address unmet needs for visitor services, repairs and maintenance, and resource management. This report reviews the demonstration program, focusing on (1) program implementation and fee revenues generated, (2) the program's expenditures, (3) the extent to which the agencies have used innovative or coordinated approaches to fee collection, and (4) the program's effects on visitation.

GAO noted that: (1) among the four agencies, the pace and the approach used to implement the recreational fee demonstration program have differed; (2) this difference reflects the extent of the agencies' experiences in charging fees prior to the demonstration; (3) nonetheless, each agency has been successful in increasing fee revenues; (4) the four agencies estimated that their combined recreational fee revenues have nearly doubled from about $93 million in fiscal year (FY) 1996 to an about $179 million in FY 1998; (5) of the four agencies, NPS is generating the most fee revenues; (6) for FY 1998, NPS estimates that its fee revenues will be about 85 percent of the total estimated revenues collected by the four agencies at demonstration sites; (7) about 76 percent of the funds available under the program had not been spent through March 1998; (8) thus far, most expenditures have been for repairs and maintenance and the cost of fee collection; (9) the agencies expect to make significant expenditures in the latter part of FY 1998 and in FY 1999; (10) in the longer term, because some sites may have a much greater potential than others for raising revenues, the requirement that at least 80 percent of the fees be retained at the location where they were collected may lead to substantial inequities between sites; (11) some sites may reach the point where they have more revenues than they need for their projects, while other sites still do not have enough; (12) opportunities remain for the agencies to be more innovative and cooperative in designing, setting, and collecting fees; (13) among the agencies, several notable examples of innovation exist at demonstration sites of the Forest Service and the BLM; (14) these innovations have resulted in either more equitable pricing for the visitors, or greater convenience for visitors in how they pay fees; (15) while NPS has been innovative in making fees more convenient for visitors to pay, it has not experimented with different pricing structures to make fees more equitable; (16) coordination of fees among agencies has been erratic; (17) overall, preliminary data suggest the increased or new fees have had no major adverse effect on visitation to the fee demonstration sites; (18) with data from just 1 year, however, it is difficult to accurately assess the fees' impact on visitation; (19) the agencies' surveys indicate that visitors generally support the purpose of the program and the level of the fees implemented; and (20) each agency is planning additional visitor surveys and research in 1998 and 1999.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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