Tonto Forest "in the News"...
"12/9/03
AZ No Fee coalition recently received a phone call from a member of ours who received a ticket for not purchasing a fee demo pass in the Tonto National Forest outside of Phoenix. He stated he was ready and willing to fight the ticket in court and accept the consequences of refusing to support a program he sees as unjust. (AZ NoFee routinely gives legal advice and assistance to those who receive fee demo tickets). There was only one major problem: The ticket was issued by a private company called Universal Parking.
There was no citation number on the ticket, no court date, and no way to dispute the charges. Our concerns and reasons for acting on this are as follows:
This is a blatant attempt to undermine Congress' oversight of Fee Demo by the Tonto National Forest Service. Fee Demo law does not currently allow private companies to enforce Fee Demo. This law and the means for enforcing it were conceived by Congress, not the FS. Therefore the FS can not alter the law to allow private companies to be involved in this process without the consent of Congress.
Your constitutional right to due process has been thrown out the window. In order to legally impose a fee demo ticket, one must prove that you were present and you were recreating. Slapping a ticket on the windshield of a vehicle, without proving the owner was present and recreating and further more, without giving them the ability to defend themselves in the court of law, is unjust at the very least.
Universal Parking is a private company that is now profiting off doing the dirty work of the Tonto National Forest Service. And because of their status as a private company, we the citizens have virtually no ability to oversee their actions or defend our actions in the court of law without major funds and legal support.
PS- After the initial writing of this email, AZ NFC discovered that the PO Box you are instructed to send your money to, is registered to Universal Parking, not the Tonto National Forest Service, as you are led to believe by looking at the ticket. Thus you have no initial way to dispute the ticket.
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......Revenues
Although the goal of the American Recreation Coalition for Fee Demo is to accustom the public to paying for using public lands, it justifies the program as a revenue generator. This is misleading.
In 1997, out of a total Forest Service budget of nearly $3.3 billion, Fee Demo grossed the agency just $18 million nationwide. Of this,
53% was spent on overhead and implementation of the fee program itself."
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If this were a charity, they'd jail the board for those (47%) kind of pass-through dollars.
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Additionally,
From the
http://www.gao.gov site....
"The Forest Service reports its fee demonstration expenditures using
spending categories largely corresponding to those identified in the
legislation authorizing the demonstration program. These categories are
visitor services and operations, maintenance, interpretation and
signing, facility enhancement, resource preservation and enhancement,
security and enforcement, and cost of collection. However, the Forest
Service officials stated that their accounting system is not set up to
track expenditures into these categories. Local fee program managers,
who compile the fee revenue expenditure data, use various methods to
record their expenditures. At the sites we visited, we found that local
managers relied on a variety of financial information sources such as
project work plans and job code summary reports, as well as reviewing
bills and receipts, as a basis for allocating their expenditures into
the reporting categories. Further, one manager stated that he also
interviewed his staff on work performed and the time they devoted to
various tasks to estimate the amount of fee revenues spent in each
reporting category.
Accordingly, in the absence of forest managers
having a consistent and systematic method for tracking and recording
the expenditure amounts by spending category, the accuracy of the
spending information in the agency's annual report is questionable.
Another concern affecting the spending information in the agency's
annual report is the subjectivity of the spending categories
themselves. Despite headquarters guidance that attempts to define the
kinds of activities that should be included in each spending category,
officials at seven of the nine demonstration sites that we visited told
us that deciding which reporting category a particular expenditure
falls into
involves making a judgment that is not necessarily
consistent among sites.[Footnote 8] For example, when an aging restroom
needs extensive repairs, it may be more cost effective to build a new
facility to replace it. In this situation, the expenditures for
building a new facility can be reported as a "maintenance" expense, or
as a "facility enhancement" expense. In either instance, the
expenditure is consistent with the types of expenditures authorized
under the program. However, deciding under which expenditure category
is reported is a judgment of the site manager. Similarly,
expenditures
for fee enforcement activities and fee collections may also be reported
inconsistently. For example, we found that some sites we visited
reported fee enforcement activities as part of their "cost of
collections." However, other sites reported fee enforcement activities
as part of their expenditures for "security and enforcement."
These
inconsistencies further affect the consistency of the Forest Service's
reporting of where fee revenues are actually spent.
According to Forest Service program officials, the agency is reluctant
to invest in a new system that would more accurately categorize
expenditures because further categorization of expenditures is not
required by legislation, nor have the agencies participating in the fee
demonstration program been asked by the Congress to do so.
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more from GAO
"For the two forests in our example, both of
which are in the Enterprise Forest project,
nearly 20 percent of fee
revenues were used just to cover fee collection costs in fiscal year 2001.
If this occurs at multiple recreation sites, there is a risk that the
Forest Service would exceed the statutory limitation that not more than
15 percent of total revenues be used for fee collection costs.
The
practice of not reporting vendor discounts as part of fee collection
costs makes it difficult to determine compliance with the statutory
limitation.
The Forest Service agrees that vendor discount expenses are not fully
disclosed and as a result collections are understated.......
The Forest Service accounting system
does not specifically track
administrative overhead costs for the Recreational Fee Demonstration
Program or any other individual program within the agency. Forest
Service officials estimate that in 2001 the agency spent about $10
million of appropriated funds to support the fee demonstration program.
The agency estimates that $1 million is specifically for fee collection
activities and about $9 million is for support costs for the program
such as the salary and benefits for staff involved in general
management, program planning, legislative and public communications,
business services, as well as common service costs such as rents and
utilities, and certain personnel costs like worker's compensation and
unemployment insurance.
"The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient."
George Bernard Shaw
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