The Recreation Fee program is a national program. Under laws passed back in the 1960's, the FS was allowed to charge for campgrounds and a few other fees. With the 1994 congress, they decided that in order to balance the budget, there needed to be "end user pays" fees. Thus started the Recreation Fee Demonstration program. That started the Adventure Pass program on the 4 southern CA forests. There were also various other fee programs on forests throughout the US. This was supposed to supplement the recreation budgets on the forests to do improvements, deferred maintenance (backlog), etc. At the same time, a "perfect storm" occurred in the budgeting process. The forest service gets a "constrained budget" The way I like to explain it is "you get 50 widgets" or "you get a 10 inch pie." Now, congress dictates how many widgets are for wildlife, recreation, soils, watershed, fuels, etc. (or how big each slice is for each discipline). The only exception to this is fire. The presuppression/suppression budget is calculated by adding up how much it cost to suppress the last 10 years of fires and divide by 10. That is how many widgets they get or how big a slice of the pie they get. In 1993, this was roughly 13% of the total piece of the pie. Massive, large scale wildfires started in 1994 and have continued in most summers since. In 2010 fire's cut is roughly 50% of the pie. So, given we only have a 10" pie, and now half of it goes to fire, it only goes to figure that there is less for wildlife, recreation, soils, fuels management, etc. So the "extra" that was supposed to go to funding recreation from the fee program is now helping to prop up the rapidly declining system. It is being used to fund employees, pay the fee at the dump to dump all the trash generated by all those visitors, buy toilet paper for the restrooms, etc. I do know that for the Big Pines area Adventure Pass monies were used to fix up the Big Pines Clubhouse (that was condemned prior to the rennovation), fix up Apple Tree and Peavine picnic areas, helped pay for the rennovation of the "Comfort Station" across from Big Pines Clubhouse. It also pays salaries for some of the personnel that work in the area.
The "Forest Service" was established in 1905 with the "Transfer Act" that transferred the "Bureau of Forestry" from DOI to become the "Forest Service" under the Department of Agriculture. However, the budget for the Forest Service is still in the Interior Appropriations bill and not the USDA appropriations bill. The first chief of the Forest Service was Gifford Pinchot who received his forestry training in Germany. He believed trees were a "crop" to be harvested just like wheat and corn. If you look at the enabling legislation of the forest service, even under the 1897 Organic Act managing "forest reserves" was for timber production and watershed protection. There is nothing that says that the agency must turn a profit when selling timber. As for logging, under the old Forest Plans, there was an "Allowable Sale Quantity" or ASQ that was a ceiling of the maximum amount that could be cut on a sustainable basis. Using old FORPLAN modeling that was single dimentional, the system was flawed. Also, a lot of the old "timber beasts" used to immediately make the ASQ the "Target" that was to be sold every year. It was a nighmare. I don't know if the new forest plans will have ASQ in them, the 4 So CA forests were exempted from ASQ because there is such a small market for the timber if it were to be harvested. There was some timber harvest over on the LA River District prior to the Station Fire.
The Tongass and the Chugach NFs in Alaska are a whole different ball game. They have all kinds of contracts and agreements that I don't know much about except for the fact that I would never want to work or live up there....
