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National Park Service
Visitor Fees in the National Park System A Legislative and Administrative History |
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I. THE PATTERN IS SET, 1908-1940
The Self-Supporting Ideal
Proposed government programs and activities have frequently been sold as "self-supporting" by their promoters. Especially was this so in the pre-New Deal era, when government was not routinely looked to for involvement and assistance in most aspects of society, and when tax revenues were far more limited and confined to far narrower purposes than they are today.
Thus it was that Ferdinand V. Hayden and other Yellowstone proponents assured members of Congress that the first national park, established in 1872, would require no appropriated funds. Concessioner rents were envisioned to provide all the income necessary for Yellowstone's administration. Nathaniel P. Langford, the park's first superintendent, generally agreed. He advocated leasing to concessioners the major points of interest and granting leases for toll roads; the lessees would provide protection for the park. Langford did see the need for an initial appropriation to mark boundaries and institute protective measures, and in 1878 the park began to receive Federal funds. [1]
The ideal of self-supporting parks continued to receive rhetorical homage and was actually achieved at various times in particular areas. Yosemite made a profit, primarily from concessions, in 1907, for example; and Yellowstone's receipts exceeded expenditures in 1915 and 1916, the first years when automobiles were admitted there. During the 1914 season, 1,594 $5 auto permits were issued at Mount Rainier, and the superintendent there saw greater income forthcoming: "It is confidently predicted that park revenues will be sufficient to meet the expenses of an economical administration of park affairs as soon as the present road is permanently improved and safety and comfort assured to automobile users." In the 1917 annual report of the National Park Service, Acting Director Horace M. Albright was equally optimistic: "I believe the time will soon come when Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Sequoia, and General Grant National Parks and probably one or two more members of the system will yield sufficient revenue to cover costs of administration and maintenance of improvements." [2]
The First Visitor Fees
Park visitor fees levied by the Government had originated at Mount Rainier, the first park to admit automobiles, in 1908. Automobiles and fees for their entry followed at General Grant in 1910, Crater Lake in 1911, Glacier in 1912, Yosemite and Sequoia in 1913, Mesa Verde in 1914, and Yellowstone in 1915. The charges for auto permits were justified as offsetting the cost of road building in the parks. In 1916 seasonal auto permits ranged from $2 at Glacier and Mesa Verde to $10 at Yellowstone, with lower rates for single trips. The following year single-trip permits were abolished and the season trip rate was reduced in most cases to the former single-trip rate, from $7.50 at Yellowstone down to 50¢ at General Grant. [3]
Far more than would later be the case, the Service was then highly motivated to levy and collect auto fees. Until July 1, 1918, the receipts were held in a special Treasury account and could be expended directly for park development and administration without congressional appropriation. Stephen T. Mather, responsible for the national parks as special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior beginning in 1915 and as director of the newly established National Park Service after 1916, saw this income as a way of gaining full control over the parks. Yellowstone, for example, was still staffed by the Army in 1916, Interior having no appropriation for a civilian administration. By that time fee revenues had increased to the point that Mather was able to arrange with the War Department for withdrawal of the troops. [4]
This arrangement hit a snag in the form of Representative John J. Fitzgerald of New York, chairman of the House Interior appropriations subcommittee. Believing that Interior and the War Department had exceeded their authority by engineering the transfer without congressional approval, Fitzgerald succeeded in having all park receipts (except those at the Hot Springs Reservation) turned in to the general Treasury effective July 1, 1918. With the Park Service stripped of means to pay civilian personnel, the Army had to be recalled to Yellowstone. The recall was brief: the need for troops elsewhere during the wartime buildup was reflected in a subsequent authorization of the shift to civilian administration. Fee receipts continued to go to the general Treasury, however; and although park appropriations thereafter made by Congress took into account the income received, the loss of the direct link between fee receipts and money available for park expenditures inevitably reduced the Service's incentive to maximize such receipts. [5]
Fee Reduction Pressures and Practice
As noted, the Service cut auto fees a year before it would lose direct control over the money collected. This apparent enigma may he explained by the phenomenal growth in the income from this source. In 1914 auto revenues totaled $14,993, with other sources-mostly concessions--yielding some $86,000. In 1916, $65,834 was realized from auto permits. Notwithstanding the 1917 fee reduction, income that year jumped to $90,969. In 1921 auto revenues soared to $210,489, outstripping the $182,000 received that year from concessions and other sources. [6]
With their overriding goals of promoting tourism and enlarging the public and political constituency for the parks, Mather and Albright were not out to charge all that the traffic would bear, regardless of whether their bureau got to keep the money. "[T]he development of the revenues of the parks should not impose a burden upon the visitor," declared the key policy letter signed by Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane (but prepared by the Service) in 1918. "Automobile fees in the parks should be reduced as the volume of motor travel increases." In addition to variously priced concession accommodations, each park was also to have "a system of free camp sites...with adequate water and sanitation facilities." This policy was generally followed, with another auto fee reduction coming in 1926 after the preceding year's revenues reached $470,940. [7]
Testifying before the Interior subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on November 19, 1926, Director Mather reviewed the evolution of the automobile fee structure and the free park campgrounds:
[W]hen we fixed the automobile fees we did so on a sort of haphazard basis. We took the approximate road mileage at that time, and made a charge of $7.50 for Yellowstone Park. The revenues for Yellowstone began to grow as the automobile travel began to increase. We made, at the same tine, a charge of $5 for the Yosemite Park, and other parks much less, because those two parks were the only ones that at that time could give facilities. Later, as we developed our camping facilities in the parks...we got our minds off the fact that we were assessing this fee on the basis of mileage, and figured that the only logical way to defend it was on the basis of the service we would render people in the parks. As rapidly as conditions would allow we established these public camps on a better and better scale, with more and more facilities, even down to the laundries for the women in one or two of them, with hot water, etc., and we felt then that we were giving a much better service, and were in a much better position to defend these charges than simply on the basis of a road charge.
In certain parks we made no charges... [W]e made no charge whatever for the Rocky Mountain National Park, based largely on the fact that the State of Colorado had done the preliminary work of building the Fall River road across the divide, and it did not seem to be in order to charge anything there at that time, particularly as there was so much private land in the park that it was almost impossible to lay out any sort of decent public camping facilities for the people.
However, we retained these rates, based, as I say, primarily on road mileage, and at the same time we were being urged by the different chairmen of the appropriations committees to do this. [8]
Mather's testimony was prompted by the desire of the incumbent subcommittee chairman, Representative Louis C. Cramton of Michigan, to reduce the burden of auto fees. The fee reduction that year had not gone far enough, he felt, particularly for the growing number of tourists visiting several parks a year:
So, as you will recall, Mr. Mather, my suggestion was that you should issue a license that would be good for a certain car in all the National parks, getting away from the idea of revenue producing.... In the old countries they charge admission to almost everything of that kind. If you want to make the parks self-supporting, and not call on the Federal Treasury for any appropriations for them, that could be done, and you could charge people for coming in; but apart from that theory, which I do not believe is the real American theory, there is no more reason for charging for an automobile to enter a park than for a person.
Cramton suggested a seasonal pass that would admit a car to all national parks "for one or two dollars," its purpose being visitor control only rather than revenue. [9]
In response, Mather indicated that the Bureau of the Budget had resisted the degree of revenue reduction that Cramton's idea would cause, and that even the lesser fee cut implemented that year (which unlike the 1917 cut led to reduced income for several years) had made the Budget Bureau press for offsetting campground charges. Nor was Mather himself enthusiastic about the all-park permit concept:
In connection with the general fee for the parks there is a little question of psychology. You know yourself if a man goes to a park like Mesa Verde he should spend the entire summer there. Under your plan I am afraid that if there is one fee for all parks you would stimulate the desire to keep moving around, and they would only spend a few hours in one park.
Cramton called Mather's argument "quite fanciful," seeing no reason why a single permit would cause people to slight the parks any more than they did already. "That is one of the greatest difficulties that you have, but I would like this to go ahead," he said. "The American idea is not that there is going to be somebody with a collection box every time you turn around in a publicly owned enterprise." [10]
On the subject of the proposed campground charges, Mather and Cramton were united in opposition. "[I]f you are making a charge in your automobile camp and no charge up in the woods, you are making a real encouragement to them to avoid automobile camps that you have gone to a great deal of expense to erect," said Cramton. Mather concurred: "You drive a man out who otherwise would prefer to stay there." [11]
Undeterred by Mather's resistance to the all-park permit proposal, Cramton attached an amendment to the fiscal 1928 Interior appropriations bill with the purpose of mandating such an arrangement:
None of the appropriations contained in this act for the National Park Service shall be available for any expenditure in connection with the issuance of automobile permits or the collection of charges therefor, except such permits and charges which entitle the holder to entrance to all of the national parks and national monuments alike, upon the single annual permit charge of not more than $2.
When the bill was brought to the House floor for discussion on December 14, 1926, Representative Joseph W. Byrns of Tennessee took exception to the amendment on a point of order, contending that it constituted substantive legislation and was therefore improper in an appropriations bill. Byrns readily admitted that his point of order was based on his disagreement with the content of the provision; he would not have raised it, he said, had the charge been set at $7.50 (the pre-1926 Yellowstone auto fee). The debate that followed remains an excellent presentation of the opposing philosophies on park fees.
Byrns recalled that support for the concept of self-sufficiency had been prevalent a decade earlier: "[I]t was always the policy and intention of the Appropriations committee at that time and in the House that, while it was not expected that these parks would fully pay their way, there would come a time when they would more nearly bring in a revenue approaching what they cost the people." He cited the 1926 shortfall of $2.4 million in park receipts under expenditures and expressed displeasure that the Park Service had elected to reduce auto fees in the face of it. Cramton's amendment would only make matters worse:
[A]ppropriations made for these parks are made for the purpose of establishing camps where there are sewers, where there is hot water for tourists, where there are laundries for the women, and kitchens and camps and all the other facilities provided in an ordinary hotel, except solid substantial structures, and the people of the country are being asked to provide these facilities...for people who have the leisure to go out there and visit these parks.... I think the Treasury of the United States should be considered in this matter, and we should not undertake to reduce revenues coming into those parks, especially as we are affording visitors such splendid facilities for convenience and entertainment. [12]
Cramton's response indicated the extent to which the House Appropriations Committee's thinking had changed under his leadership of the Interior subcommittee:
The idea of the committee has been that there should simply be a regulatory power, so that permits may be issued, and if a person should drive over the roads in the parks while drunk and endanger the lives of others, those permits can be revoked.... In national parks the theory of the committee is that the revenue-producing feature should be eliminated, so that they may be truly national in practice as well as in name. [13]
The chair ruled for Byrns' point of order, killing the Cramton amendment. Representative Tom D. McKeown of Oklahoma then offered an even more limiting amendment to preclude "the collection of any fees for entering any park." Cramton observed that this language would not affect auto permit charges, which were technically not entrance fees but license fees; the only areas with entrance fees per se were Wind Cave National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Monument. McKeown's amendment was ruled in order but was voted down by the members present. Byrns and Cramton continued their debate, with the Tennessean warning of unpleasant consequences from the recent trend:
I want to say that if the Director of the Parks undertakes to reduce the fees, and thereby reduces the revenue, he may expect vigorous protest upon the floor of the House against any such action and a disposition not to be so liberal with future appropriations.... I am speaking as a friend of the national-park system, because I want to see these parks properly developed and maintained. I want to see liberal appropriations, but I protest against the attitude that we ought to spend all the money to provide extra facilities at the expense of the people of the United States, and that those who have leisure time to go there should not be required to pay anything toward the conveniences furnished them.
Cramton sharpened the difference between them:
I want to say that if the Director of the Parks undertakes Mr. Chairman, I never realized that I disagreed on so many things with the gentleman from Tennessee. His theory and mine are entirely different as to national parks. It is my idea that when people go to national parks that they should be allowed to walk in with no charge other than those of regulation... We should provide the facilities necessary that will enable the people of this country, those of small means, to go there and have places for them to camp in the park...
"I do not question the propriety of providing camps and all the sanitary facilities," Byrns replied, "but I do insist that when the people of the United States are called upon to provide them that those who do enjoy them should pay a reasonable fee for enjoying them." [14]
The Prohibition of Campground Charges
Strangely, given the focus of his remarks, Byrns raised no objection to a second Cramton amendment specifically precluding campground charges:
None of the appropriations for the National Park Service shall be available within any park or national monument wherein a charge is made or collected by the Park Service for campground privileges.
This provision became a part of the fiscal 1928 Interior appropriations act, approved January 12, 1927. [15]
During hearings on the fiscal 1929 appropriations bill in early 1928, Cramton reviewed the campground fee provision. "Congress having expressed its view with reference to that, is it necessary to continue that language?" he asked.
"I do not think so," replied Arthur E. Demaray of the Park Service, "but the Bureau of the Budget showed objection to having it cut out..." (an odd circumstance--if true--in view of that office's pressure for campground charges two years before).
"The Park Service is in harmony, as I understand it, with that view anyway," said Cramton. "They have no thought of making a collection for camp ground privileges?"
"No," Demaray said. "It is a difficult proposition to handle." [16]
The provision was repeated in the fiscal 1929 act and was made explicitly perpetual in the 1930 act, approved March 24, 1929, with the addition of "whenever made" applying to appropriations. [17]
Horace M. Albright, who became Park Service director in 1929, was more sympathetic toward campground fees. Testifying before the Interior subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on January 6, 1932, Albright said that the Service had been reconsidering such charges:
That is a more equitable fee than the automobile fee, because if you come in a national park and you bring your own camp equipment, you pay $3 and go to these camp grounds where you have comfort stations and tables and water, and you can stay there all summer and enjoy yourself. Somebody else might go to the hotel, not getting any use of the Government facilities except the road, but it would cost them just as much money. [18]
Albright's testimony did not lead to repeal of the effective prohibition of campground fees, which remained until 1965.
Fee Opposition, 1932
At the same hearing Representative Edward T. Taylor of Colorado, Cramton's successor as subcommittee chairman, asked Albright about the all-park permit that Cramton had championed. Replied the director:
I have not done anything about that for this reason: Several of the parks do not have any automobile license fees. I do not see how in some cases you can ever impose them. Another reason is that in Yosemite we charge $2, and if we sold a permit for three or four dollars entitling a man to go to all the parks, a person who only intended to go to Yosemite or Sequoia would feel penalized.
Characterizing the automobile fee as "our principal source of revenue," Albright described it as "very unpopular." As an illustration he cited the case of the Zion-Mount Carmel Road, built by the state of Utah with Federal aid and destined to be added to Zion National Park. Utah considered the dollar fee charged by the Service to be a toll on through traffic and refused to cede the road to the park until the charge was discontinued. The Service was then appealing to the Budget Bureau, the main force behind the auto fees, to excuse the charge in this instance. [19]
Undoubtedly influenced by the Mount Carmel Road imbroglio, Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the Interior subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, introduced a bill two days after the House hearing to prohibit any charge for admission to national parks and monuments. [20] Introduction of the bill evidently served Smoot's purpose, for it was not pressed or acted upon.
Defeated in a 1930 primary election, Louis C. Cramton was appointed special attorney to the Secretary of the Interior for the remainder of the Hoover administration. Cramton put his imprint on the Park Service Director's 1932 annual report to the Secretary, which contained a policy statement reflecting his anti-fee bias: "National park administration should seek primarily the benefit and enjoyment of the people rather than financial gain and such enjoyment should be free to the people without vexatious admission charges and other fees." [21]
Broadening the Base, 1935-1940
This policy statement resulted in no practical change, either then or under the subsequent Roosevelt administration. On the contrary, Roosevelt's Bureau of the Budget in 1935 instructed the Service to develop a fee structure for all the national parks and the national monuments as well, the object being to make the National Park System more nearly self-sustaining. At a House Appropriations Committee hearing on April 2, 1937, the Service presented a proposed fee schedule encompassing several additional parks and Colorado and Petrified Forest national monuments. Auto permits at Glacier, Mesa Verde, and Mount Rainier were to go from $1 to $1.50; other fee areas would remain at $1 except for Yosemite and Yellowstone, which would stay at $2 and $3 respectively. More parks would levy charges for motorcycle permits, and many would charge parking fees. In places there would be fees for guide service. Miscellaneous charges included a registration fee for climbing Mount Rainier and ten cents for the elevator at the Statue of Liberty. Associate Director Arthur E. Demaray testified that auto permits would be required for travel on the Blue Ridge Parkway when that road was completed. [22]
Representative Jed Johnson of the committee, the second in a succession of Oklahomans (beginning with McKeown) who would take particular exception to park visitor fees, complained that the proposed and even the present charges were excessive. A reminder that they were lower than they had been more than a decade earlier failed to mollify him. A majority of the committee found the proposed schedule valid, however, and it was endorsed in the committee report. [23]
At this point Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes backed off. A Government reorganization was in the works, and Ickes and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace had designs on certain of each others' bureaus, notably the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. Ickes feared that increasing NPS fees would bring unfavorable publicity to his department and lead to unwanted comparisons with the Forest Service under his rival. "[T]he Forest Service, having no fees, would be able to play up enormously that advantage in connection with the apparent policy of the Forest Service to take over the national parks," suggested Representative James G. Scrugham of Nevada at a House Appropriations Committee hearing on January 24, 1938. Associate Director Demaray seconded Scrugham's analysis. [24]
At the same hearing, NPS Director Arno B. Cammerer took pains to make clear that auto permits were licenses for use of the park roads, not entrance permits; visitors entering on foot or by commercial transportation were not charged. "The license fee in each park is predicated upon the amount of road mileage we have in that park," said Cammerer. [25] Director Mather, it will be recalled, came to justify auto fees less in terms of road mileage than in terms of the improved campground facilities provided by the Service. With campground charges ruled out, Cammerer had to revert to road mileage as the rationale for the fees.
The Service did introduce two new fees on an experimental basis in 1938: a ten cent admission charge at Fort Marion (Castillo de San Marcos) National Monument and at Fort Pulaski National Monument. More than $7,000 was realized in six months from the Fort Marion fee. The experiment was considered successful, and with the reorganization that had stalled the general fee increase no longer pending, the new fee schedule--expanded to cover some areas not originally included--was implemented in 1939. [26]
"In making appropriations for the national parks Congress had in view the development of a system of fees which would help to support their cost," Secretary Ickes announced. "Also it is believed that those who actually visit the national parks and monuments should make small contributions to their upkeep for the services those visitors receive which are not received by other citizens who do not visit the parks that are available to them, but who contribute to the support of these parks." Not all accepted this logic. "It is indirect taxation in its most vicious form," said Thomas P. Henry, president of the American Automobile Association, in denouncing any and all Federal area fees. "Taxpayers are already paying for these attractions." Senator Robert P. Reynolds of North Carolina, especially concerned that a fee might eventually be charged at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, made a radio address on the subject and published it and other opposing reaction in the Congressional Record. [27]
In general, however, the public accepted the new charges. Testifying before the Interior subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on February 10, 1940, Associate Director Demaray reported a positive response to the ten cent admission charges at Fort Marion, Fort Pulaski, Fort McHenry, the Lincoln Museum (Ford's Theatre), and the House Where Lincoln Died:
The reaction has been very good. There has not been any particular objection to it, and most of our superintendents have found that it has been beneficial in keeping out idle local people, who just went out of curiosity. The other reaction is that the public is spending a little longer time. They happen to be more interested, having paid to enter. [28]
The decade of the 1930s thus ended with a broader application of visitor fees throughout the National Park System. The dollar amounts were extremely nominal; only in exceptional cases did a park's revenues equal or exceed its operational costs. (Yellowstone and Yosemite each turned a profit from visitor and concession fees combined in 1937, and the guide fees at Carlsbad Caverns customarily exceeded expenses there several times over.) [29] The new historical areas acquired during the decade, many of which contained structures and other features requiring costly restoration and maintenance, increased the servicewide disparity between income and outgo. Although few now paid even lip service to the vision of a self-supporting park system, there was general agreement on the concerned committees in Congress that park users should pay a greater share for the parks than the general taxpayer.
In one instance a specific exception to this concept was written into law. A 1938 enactment directed that at Mount Rushmore, "No charge shall ever be made for admission to the memorial grounds or for viewing the memorial." [30]
This was the first fee prohibition legislated for a particular park. It would not be the last.
1John Ise, Our National Park Policy; A Critical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), pp. 20, 29.
2Ibid., pp. 620-22; Report of the Superintendent of the Mount Rainier National Park, in U.S. Department of the Interior, Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1914 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1915), I, 779; Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service, Oct. 13, 1917, in Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1917 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), I, 806.
3Ise, Our National Park Policy, p. 202; Interior Reports, 1917, I, 805.
4Mather testimony in U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill, 1928, Hearing, 69th Congress, 2d Session, 1926, p. 832.
5Ibid.; Sundry Appropriations Act of June 12, 1917, 40 Stat. 153.
6Annual Reports of the Director of the National Park Service, in Interior Reports, 1914-1921.
7Letter, Lane to Mather, May 13, 1918, in Interior Reports, 1918, I, 112; Interior Reports, 1926.
8Interior Appropriation Hearing, 1928, p. 833.
1268 Congressional Record 464. (Byrns was the father of Fort Donelson National Military Park.)
15Ibid., p. 467; 44 Stat. 967.
16U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill, 1929, Hearing, 70th Congress, 1st Session, 1928, pp. 1119-20.
18U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill, 1933, Hearings, 72d Congress, 1st Session, 1932, p. 905.
21Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service to the Secretary of the Interior, 1932 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 8.
22U. S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill, 1937, Hearings, 74th Congress, 2d Session, 1935, p. 382; same for 1938, 75th Congress, 1st Session, 1937, pp. 493, 497.
23Interior Appropriation Hearings, 1938, p. 496; same for 1939, 75th Congress, 3d Session, 1938, p. 524.
24Interior Appropriation Hearings, 1939, p. 525.
26U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill for 1940, Hearings, 76th Congress, 1st Session, 1939, p. 700.
27Ickes and Henry statements cited by Reynolds Apr. 4, 1939, 84 Congressional Record Al287-89.
28U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill for 1941, Hearings, 76th Congress, 3d Session, 1940, p. 713.
29Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1937 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937), p. 73.
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