While the public could soon be charged more to enter their favorite national parks, ranchers who graze cattle on public lands are being charged less/BLM

While Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has not publicly changed his position on relying on surge pricing in an effort to chisel away at the maintenance backlog facing the National Park Service, the cost ranchers pay to graze their livestock on public lands in the West is falling by 25 percent.

Park Service staff hope to have analyzed by the end of February all the public comments submitted on Secretary Zinke's proposal to use higher entrance fees during the summer months, or winter high seasons, for 17 parks ranging from Acadia to Zion.

The proposal would more than double entrance fees at the 17 parks for nearly half the year and raise an estimated $70 million to help address the estimated $11-$12 billion maintenance backlog. The proposed $70 fee for a week, if finalized, would apply to Yellowstone, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Denali, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Olympic, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Acadia, Mount Rainier, Joshua Tree, Shenandoah, and Zion national parks.

While that analysis is being completed, an archaic formula used to calculate the fees ranchers pay to graze livestock on public lands, one that uses 1966 as its base year, has those fees for 2018 falling from $1.87 per month to $1.41.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the costs to administer the grazing fee program surpass the amount collected, "resulting in taxpayer subsidies of about $100 million per year."

“It’s shameful that the Trump administration wants to drastically increase national park fees while gouging taxpayers to subsidize livestock grazing,” said Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These enormous subsidies for a small group of livestock operators have cost taxpayers more than $1 billion over the past decade. This program is long overdue for an overhaul.”

If you based the cost of the fees, known as "animal unit months," or AUMs, by the cost of living, the 2017 fee should have been $9.38 per AUM. And perhaps it should have been higher, for when you look at the AUM ranchers are charged to graze their livestock on private lands, the figures can be upwards of $17 per AUM. 

Whether or not you agree that $1.87 per AUM on public lands is reasonable, when you consider that there were 12,365,877 AUMs active on BLM lands as of January 2016, you can see that a higher fee could generate a significantly higher return for Interior.

At the Center for Biological Diversity, staff say that "more than 200 million acres of federal public lands in the western United States are used for grazing cattle and sheep. Most grazing programs ― on grasslands, deserts, sagebrush steppe and national forests ― are administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. Less than 3 percent of the nation’s 800,000 livestock operators and cattle producers use federal grazing programs."

"Federal grazing policy caters to a tiny fraction of the livestock industry,” said Ms. Spivak. “The vast indirect costs of grazing on federal lands include the killing of important native predators such as wolves and bears and livestock’s damage to soil and rivers. It’s a bad deal for wildlife, public lands and American taxpayers. The full cost of the federal grazing program is well overdue for a complete analysis.”