Article by Erik Smith. Published on Thursday, July 14, 2011 EST.

New $30 Pass Keeps State Parks Open, But Tricky Rules Have Some People Steamed 

Discover Pass on display. (Photo courtesy Washington State Parks.)

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, July 13.—When Curt Fackler walked into the Shadle Center Wal-Mart in Spokane to buy his new Discover Pass for the state parks, there were a couple other guys in the line ahead of him, waiting to do the same thing.

            The clerk had been through it a few times before. And he wearily told ’em to gather ’round.

            Yes, you have to buy a pass if you’re going to use a state park, he said. That’s $30 for the year, plus the $5 transaction and dealer fee that vendors like Wal-Mart are allowed to charge. You hang the pass from your rear-view mirror. You have to write your license tag number on it. And there’s only one space.

            Wait a second, Fackler asked. You mean you have to buy another pass if you have another car?

            Yup.

            “I said forget it,” Fackler said. “I’m not going to do this. The other two guys were exactly the same way.”

            Fackler owns a van, a pick-up and a Nissan Sentra, and then sometimes he drives his son’s Subaru – so that means he’d have to pay $140 for the whole Fackler fleet.

            “If I’ve already paid close to $200 for hunting and fishing licenses, why do I have to pay again for a parks permit?” Fackler asks. “I’ve got ’em for Fish and Wildlife and for DNR. And now one for parks? Why do you need three different passes?”

            Chalk it up to the state’s budget troubles, the Legislature’s spending priorities, and a new rule layered on top of and already complicated system of passes and licenses employed by the state’s natural resource agencies. Advocates say it was the only way to keep the parks open – and it’s not as if there was anything unusual about it. Most other states charge for access, too. But the way this one worked it became a crazy quilt of rules and exemptions that makes more sense in Olympia than in the world where Fackler lives.

            Wouldn’t it be easier if the state just paid to keep the darn parks open? Fackler asks. You know, like it used to?

            Were Up Against It

            He won’t get any argument on that point from Jim King, lobbyist for Citizens for Parks and Recreation, who shepherded the Discover Pass bill through the Legislature. The problem was that this year, as the state ran about $3 billion short, lawmakers whacked natural resource agencies by $65 million, and they decided to phase out state support for state parks. So their supporters had to find the money somewhere.

            “We were politically up against do you cut children’s healthcare, do you cut education deeper, or do you keep the parks open?” he said. “Parks loses that battle every time. Much as people love the parks, I ask people why didn’t I see you in Olympia arguing that it should come out of the general fund? Nobody was burning the phone lines to legislators saying do this from the general fund.”

            And so the Discover Pass was born. Seemed the simplest way to do it. Drive onto any one of the 119 state parks or 7 million acres of state recreation lands managed by other agencies and you need a pass. It’s $30 for the year, or $10 for the day. The rule went into effect July 1. Park without a pass for more than 30 minutes and you get a $99 ticket.

            But there’s nothing simple about it.

            Conflicts With Other Programs

            The thing is, there are plenty of other charges and fees that already are imposed by the state on those who use state lands. Boat-launch fees, hunting and fishing licenses, off-road-vehicle (ORV) tabs, campground fees. All of those remain in place.

            Advocates worked out a deal with user groups: If you’re paying already, you don’t have to pay a second time. But the result is such a patchwork of rules that’s a little hard to decipher. At the very least, people have to read the state website before they go. The lengthy list of rules and exemptions can be found at http://www.discoverpass.wa.gov.

            There’s the ORV tab, for instance. You need one to drive a dirt bike or an all-terrain vehicle on state lands. You don’t need a Discover Pass, because you’re already paying for access. But until now, if you had a street-legal dual-sport bike, your motorcycle license fee gave you access to ORV lands. Now you need a Discover Pass for that. And suppose you bring it in your truck. You need a Discover Pass for that, too.

            If you camp at a state-parks campground, you don’t need a pass because you’re paying to camp there anyway. But if you stop for a picnic, you need one. And if you’re using a primitive campground on DNR land, where no fee is charged, you need one, too.

            You don’t need a Discover Pass to launch a boat from a state parks boat launch if you have the $70 annual boat-launch permit. But you need a Discover Pass to use a boat-launch managed by the Department of Natural Resources or the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

            You don’t need a pass to get to the ski lodge at Mt. Spokane state park. Presumably you’ll be buying a lift ticket there. But if you drive to the lookout at the top of the mountain you need one.

            And so on. Suddenly, the entire state has to do what folks do at the state Capitol. People have to read the rules and be mighty careful when they do it.

            Too Complex For Civilians

            You can’t expect regular folks to understand rules like those, says state Rep. Cary Condotta, R-Wenatchee. When he goes on the radio in his district, he says the calls flood in. “Now there’s just complete confusion,” he said. “I’ve got the Fish and Wildlife people saying one thing, the Department of Natural Resources and the state parks people saying another, so it is a complete disaster. The phone just keeps ringing off the hook, and it’s one of two things – screw those guys, I’m not paying to go on public land; I thought that was the definition of public land. Or how does this work and what do you need it for, and what the hell is all this about?”

            Fackler’s complaint – that you need one pass for every car – is one of the biggies, Condotta says. The pass isn’t transferable from one car to the next. Even if there were spaces to write in two license tabs, as on Fish and Wildlife vehicle access passes, there was the concern that people would share. Revenue might be cut in half.

            Virgina Painter, spokeswoman for the state parks system, says the idea was to keep the cost low enough to sell the maximum number of passes. Make the passes transferable and the cost would have to go up.

            $64 Million to Go

            The state has been doing its best to let the public know where the passes are required and where they’re not, posting the rules on its website and staffing a toll-free hotline at (866) 320-9933.

            You have to expect some confusion when a program like this one is launched, Painter said. “You hear people say this used to be free,” she said. “Well, it never was free. It cost money but it was always tax-supported. It is going to take some adjustment for folks. Most people who have questions just want to know some aspect of how it works, where do they need it, and how do I display it? That kind of stuff. All in all, given how fast we had to put this on the ground, I think it’s going pretty well.”

             So far, the state’s licensing system shows that 32,812 annual passes have been sold, and 1,566 daily passes. There are probably more – some are sold at parks themselves, and they don’t show up in the system. But that’s the good news – $1 million in revenue so far.

            The bad news? There’s still $64 million to go.

            Just the Beginning

            Condotta says you can bet this one’s going to come back next year. The complaints are too many. It might make more sense for the Legislature to come up with a new fee structure and a one-pass-fits-all system that is easier for regular joes to understand.

But he says there’s an even better solution. The state could just step up to the plate and fund the state parks. The situation demonstrates how social service programs are squeezing everything else out of the state budget, he said, and that needs to change. “We are going to the right to the heart of the working people that use these parks and use these lands,” he said. “We’re whacking them and they don’t like it much.”

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