March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Forest fee scofflaws often avoid paying fines

Hikers who head into the White Mountain National Forest without paying a parking fee often end up walking away without paying a $50 fine.

The user fees were instituted as an experiment in 1997 to make up for severe budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies. Last year, 85,000 visitors paid the $3, $5, or $25 fees, pumping $786,000 into recreation projects in the forest.

Most people caught without a pass pay the resulting $50 fine, but those who don’t often see the charges dropped, sometimes without even showing up for court hearings.

Prosecuting violators has proven to be a costly bureaucratic nightmare, and more than a dozen tickets have been dismissed in Concord’s U.S. District Court since fall.

“I have been dismissing these left and right when [defendants] don’t show up,” Magistrate Judge James Muirhead said during one hearing in January.

The most common reason cited by New Hampshire judges is a simple flaw in the statute. The law requires visitors to pay the recreation fee, but does not actually state that they must display the passes in their car windshields.

“The difficulty here is this: There is nothing in that regulation that requires anybody to post anything on their automobile,” Muirhead said. “And if the Forest Service wants to prove that somebody hasn’t paid the fee, they’re going to have to prove there was no [payment] made. … And if they fail to do that, they have not proved their case.”

At the January hearing, a Portland, Maine, man was fined after admitting he had not paid the fee. But Muirhead told Tate Trautz that the case would have been dropped had he remained silent.

“Had you chosen not to testify, I would have dismissed it,” he said.

He isn’t the only one dismissing the cases. In Idaho, the federal government decided in January to not prosecute an Oregon woman who refused to pay the fee to hike in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

And in Maine, a case was dismissed because the Forest Service could not prove the man whose car was ticketed was actually hiking.


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