Higher Fees in the Los Padres National Forest

Garrett

Garrett

Adventurist
I have a great idea! Let's privatize and charge MORE for access to public land! (sarcasm). Read the article below.

https://www.noozhawk.com/article/los_padres_changes_management_fees_at_recreation_sites

Here's the list of affected areas from the Los Padres Forest Association:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Amai9gdQP5Hev0ECA9P_YAT6o-mx5_0i1pS54bE60o0/edit#gid=0

Luckily, my favorite spot remains unchanged, but a lot of places just got more expensive to use. $10 to park at Upper Oso so that I can go dirtbiking for a few hours? LAME.
 
Glad I made an April reservation at one of the affected campgrounds last week!
 
The BLM attempted a pay to play at Means Dry Lake, home of the Hammer's trails. Us rockcrawlers pummeled the dick head at the Barstow BLM that dreamed that scheme up. I even called and talked to him, asked him if he had even been to Means Dry Lake, and just what exactly were our "fees" going to pay for? I asked him how they were going to enforce the fee program as Rangers were rarely seen out there. His response was they were going to hire more Rangers. Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I can do simple math. The BLM was asking us to pay a fee so they could afford to hire more Rangers to make sure that we were payng the fee! Fortunately the idea went swirling down one of those fine gov'ment toilets.
 
Hooray for crony capitalism! I'm sure this company padded the right pockets. I have first hand experience with how the Forest Service operates. There are armies of people in cubical farms staring at computer screens, most of them have never actually set foot on the land. There is a very small percentage of FS employees in the "Recreation" side of the Service. These are the ones you may see driving a FS truck (a rare event now). They are responsible for cleaning restrooms, picking up trash, emptying trash cans, weed whacking, campground maintenance etc. Almost all FS employees are there to deal with regulation compliance and the avoidance of lawsuits. The bottom line is that there is no money left over for the recreation aspect of the Forest Service's "mission". Hence they are now farming that out to their cronies who will extract as much money as they can from the public and then line the pockets of the politicians. It's a beautiful world.

Those people that I know in the recreation dept. out in the field are wonderful but they are buried and can't keep up.

BTW, the FS does fund and hire a lot of amazing folks in the the fire brigades. Great people who do a lot of good work in the forests, both in and out of fire season.

Cam
 
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