While visits to public lands soar, funds to keep the shrink: NPR

It is the prosperous period in Mammoth Lakes, California, which is ending a record snow winter. Eager to take advantage of it, Donovan Sliman and his two young girls take a snowy trail on the outskirts of the city, where the condos give way to the state forest.

"I like to get away from everyone," says Donovan. "I like hearing the sound of wind and snow through the trees." "We will also go sledging," adds Grace, one of her daughters.

Mammoth is completely surrounded by protected federal nature areas or lands belonging to the US Forest Service. Its ski destination operates on public lands via a federal lease.

The Slimans attempt to visit the Mammoth Lakes area from their home in Orange County at least half a dozen times a year.

They are not alone.

Each year, more than 2 million people descend to eastern California, California to camp, hike, fish, hunt and ski. This region, often dubbed "the wild side" of the state, has only about 50,000 inhabitants spread across two sprawling counties the size of Massachusetts.

Visits up, funding down

In the western United States, cities surrounded by public lands are increasingly affected: they are witnessing a sharp increase in the number of visitors playing in the forests and mountains that surround them, resulting in an economic boom . At the same time, federal funding for the management of these lands has dried up.

"There is a dramatic increase in recreational uses of public lands and a dramatic drop in their budgets," said Megan Lawson, a researcher with the Headwaters Economics Think Tank based in Montana.

A recent analysis of the group showed that the number of visitors to the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands has increased by about 15% over the past decade, while budgets for recreation programs in these areas have increased agencies had decreased in a similar way.

According to Headwaters, since 2010, the Bureau of Land Management's recreation budget has decreased by 18%, or $ 14 million. The Forest Service's recreation budget decreased by 16% to $ 49 million over the same period.

Lately, more of this money has been transferred to pay for wildfires in the West. Since 2000, for example, the Forest Service's budget for forest fire suppression and forest fire suppression has increased by more than 100%. And, more recently, the Trump administration has attempted to devote more resources to accelerating logging and mining on public lands.

The crisis has been slow, but recently, local leaders such as John Wentworth have warned of a future where public lands are beloved to death.

"The trails are destroyed, the bathrooms do not work, the trails are not maintained, people park everywhere," he says.

For Wentworth, the timing could not be worse. Cities like his have gone ahead to promote their leisure savings and the amenities they offer based on their access to federal public lands. They are now forced to be creative in tackling the problem of declining revenues to take care of these lands.

A smaller federal presence

A former mayor and current member of the City Council, Wentworth likes to show off the wildlands surrounding Mammoth Lakes. There are the backcountry ski glades south of the city, reachable by a short drive from his home. The summer hike to the famous John Muir Trail and the Ansel Adams Desert is unprecedented. All these public lands are why people flock here and in some cases settle there permanently, he says.

On a recent snowy afternoon, he stopped at a popular US Forest Service trailhead just south of town. Things had become rather illegal there during peak periods, he said, because the federal agencies simply did not have the resources to keep an eye on the trail. This was particularly evident during the government's protracted closures in recent years. The city intervened to convince voters to approve a tax increase to cover maintenance and staffing costs at federal public land entry points.

At the Mill City Trail, Wentworth shows the new large information panels setting the rules. There is even a dog trash. All of this is an amount the US government could have paid in another time.

"It's discouraging and a little scary to see the federal presence disappear," Wentworth said. "But on the other hand, there are real opportunities for better management if it is more localized."

"The envy of the world"

It was the theme of a summit that Wentworth had helped organize in a ski chalet at Mammoth recently. The summit has brought local leaders and owners of outdoor recreation businesses from the West to develop strategies to deal with federal budget cuts.

They also shared success stories: Vail, Colorado, pays salaries to additional federal guards for organizing a popular summer hiking trail; Montana volunteers count wildlife to help overworked wildlife biologists; In California, private funds are building new mountain bike trails on federal lands.

Participants like Allen Pietrasanta quickly reported that their efforts were aimed at extra charge the federal government does not advocate a takeover of the land, as some Western Republicans wanted.

"We are the envy of the peoples of the world for our public lands," said Mr. Pietresanta. "We seek to keep the public on these lands and are looking for new creative ways to help manage them and keep them healthy and vibrant."

Pietrasanta, who lives in Bishop, Calif., Is chairing a group called the Sierra Business Council, which helps struggling rural towns make the transition to outdoor recreation economies.

This is an increasingly lucrative business in the rural West. Another analysis by Headwaters has shown that rural counties in the west with significant savings in recreation are the only ones not to report population decline since the Great Recession. Today, the economies of services and outdoor recreation are generally much larger than more traditional economies, such as mining and logging, although wages are generally lower. to those in the natural resource sectors.

People here said that they were tired of everything waiting and waiting for Washington's solutions. So they are doing what they can locally for the moment to handle the boom in visits, among others.

"People are coming to public lands in the United States and they are coming in millions," said Wentworth. "They love it, it's free, it's their legacy, and we have to be ready for them."