How much would you pay to walk around Grand Prismatic Spring or watch Old Faithful erupt?/Rebecca Latson file

A new video (below) on how best to fund national parks, built around the maintenance backlog at Yellowstone National Park, wonders how much you would be willing to pay to visit the park, watch Old Faithful steam and bellow and spurt, and perhaps catch sight of a grizzly bear?

It's not a new question. From time to time over the years Op-Eds appear, either arguing for higher -- much higher in some cases -- entrance fees, others saying the National Park System should be free to enter.

Back in 2017 a poll was released with a claim that higher entrance fees would hurt park gateway towns because, at the time, 64 percent of those surveyed said they would be less likely to visit a national park if entrance fees increased. 

Under that proposal from then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, there would have been a more than doubling of entrance fees at 17 national parks for nearly half the year. Interior Department staff estimated it would raise $70 million to help address the maintenance backlog. The proposed $70 fee for a week, if approved, would have applied 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.

But the proposal was criticized and opposed by members of Congress, attorneys general from around the country, and a vast majority of Americans who commented on it.

In the end, there was a $5 increase added to the fees to enter a number of parks, including Yellowstone, where the fee inched up to $35 for a private vehicle entering the park and staying for seven days.

Every year there seems to be a number of parks proposing, and imposing, higher fees, whether it's to enter the park or for backcountry permits or camping fees or some other amenity fee. Even with passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, which was designed to give the National Park Service $6.5 billion over five years to apply towards its maintenance backlog, which last was estimated at $12 billion (the Park Service no longer announces the backlog total), parks are raising fees because there's simply not enough money to go around.

Indeed, GAOA is not considered by everyone to be the vehicle to cure the park system's continually growing maintenance backlog.

Against that backdrop, the Property and Environment Research Center -- PERC-- , a free market environmental think tank based in Bozeman, Montana, has released a video that pushes the idea of raising entrance fees to help parks stay on top of their maintenance.

"What would you pay to see the grandeur of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone, the otherworldliness of geysers and thermal features, or the paint-palette colors of Grand Prismatic Spring, or to see a grizzly bear, or a wolf in the wild," Brian Yablonski, PERC's CEO, asks viewers. "Well, the answer apparently is not much."

In the 7-minute video, which features Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly discussing his park's maintenance woes and the lack of funding to adequately address them, Sholly points out that a $35 fee for a family of four to spend 3.2 days (the average stay) in the park works out to $2.89 per person per day.

"A very miniscule amount of the total trip cost," notes the superintendent. 

To visit the Space Needle in Seattle, it costs a family of four $122, said Yablonski. A trip to Disney World in Florida costs $110 per person per day, he added.

Possible remedies, Yablonki suggested, would be charging foreign visitors more than U.S. residents, going to a per-day fee per person, a per-person fee vs. a per-car entrance fee, or a per-day vehicle entrance fee vs. a weekly fee.

"Users should feel good about user fees, because user fees actually stay in the park, and they go to fund the very thing that the user is there to see," he said. "What would you be willing to pay?"