well, what is the alternative? cut the department of defense?

DO YOU WANT COMNISTS AND MUSLINS TO RAPE YOUR WOMEN?

Raise per-visit fees to 2.8 times now, hope to get revenue of 1.3 times now: so the plan is to cut visits in half?

Not sure that's a good idea for public support of public land, guys.

On the bright side, the ultra wealthy will be getting a kick-ass tax cut!

@2 Of course, it's not a good idea. They are hoping to loose revenue and then they can privatize our public lands. "Mt. Bank of America" has a good ring to it, don't you think?

The parks are being visited to death.
And are underfunded.
What's your solution?

Do it, just means a bunch of red states will loose a bunch of tourist dollars. That will be awesome for the people of Montana.

@4: it requires a NFS trailhead parking pass, though. $5/day.

@5: don't eliminate the estate tax, don't cut income tax rates, don't lower corporate tax rates, create a tax on stock market taxation, cut the DoD by 1/3, & fully fund the Interior dept to clear the maintenance backlog.

Privatization is next.

The Trump administration is doing this on purpose. Zinke wants to sell National Parks to the highest bidders. Gut government funding and oversight and the parks need to raise their entrance fees to survive. People can't pay the fees and stop going to the parks. When there is no money to maintain the parks, Zinke can move forward with his plans to sell the parks to corporations who will exploit and destroy them. Welcome to Trump's AmeriKKKa, the biggest grift in history.

@10 xina: I nominate you for the win. You nailed it.

Honestly looking at the clowns ransacking wilderness areas like Baker/Snoqualmie, I am all in favor of keeping the riffraff out of the NPs.

regressive user fee mentality seems right up the alley of Washington residents

Here's what I wrote them:

This proposal is idiotic.

The parks should be free, paid for by our taxes, not entrance fees. It used to be that way. It should be again. Charging fees and allowing a small number of permits to some locations restricts access to the parks. Yuppies like me are price insensitive and will access the parks regardless. That's what you're depending on. It's not a good plan.

The majority of the population that you need to support the parks the most will not pay the current entrance fees, much less increased fees. The result is that the majority of the population sees no value in the parks. This inevitably leads to further funding cuts, feeding the vicious cycle the Park Service is in now.

The inevitable conclusion is a state where the vast majority of the population sees no value in the parks and moves to eliminate them entirely, paving the way for paving, drilling and logging.

The way out is simple. Free access to the parks. Eliminate permit programs. Encourage people to use the parks. Taxes to support the parks will become more palatable. Profits from shops in the parks will increase. Popular parks should have people in them enjoying the scenery. That will ensure their preservation. The current approach of trying to minimize the number of people in parks will ultimately lead to a reduction in the number and scale of our Parks. Your current approach is self defeating.

The problem is most of the parks are infrastructure poor and the rate at which people visit has only steadily increased. If you've spent any time at Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, or Yosemite in the last 10 years during the peak season, you may remember some interesting sights but you probably also remember sitting in gridlocked vehicle queues once you rolled through the main gate just to park or to access their most popular sites or trails.

The parks at their inception didn't anticipate that visitation would increase quite like this while their budgets to maintain much less modernize would only see meager increases (if they even got one) year over year. Some of this is the Trump administration and some of this is not as the budget planning for the parks on a yearly basis happens a year or more in advance, when our last president/congress was still around. Most of the newer/nicer facilities at the parks are run and maintained by private industry contractors or through grants or endowments.

It's easy to blame the current administration for what's happening and I don't anticipate that they won't try and ruin it further but the situation cost to run the parks vs. what the parks get from the government to operate hasn't been great for a long, long time and every time there's a budget crisis-- the parks are among the first places they strip out any money leaving the parks to operate and pay their people on the most minimum number necessary. The money has to come from somewhere and the government is generally intent on not finding room in their own budget for the parks.

What @14 said, EXCEPT it should not be funded by our taxes, but by royalties on private companies' resource extraction & "harvesting".
https://projects.propublica.org/represen…