On Oct. 24 the National Parks Service (NPS) announced a proposal to increase fees at 17 highly visited National Parks during their peak season. This list includes Rocky Mountain National Park, which would see its entrance fee double from $35 to $70 on June 1, 2018.

This is a very bad idea for several reasons.

Firstly Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke stated that the reason for the fee increase was to pay for needed infrastructure improvements. It is true that the National Parks have a huge back log of maintenance projects. The NPS stated that the fee increase would raise around $70 million a year. The maintenance backlog is $12 billion, which means this increase will take care of all that (assuming no new maintenance issues arise) in around 170 years.

Of course the Trump Administration has proposed cutting the NPS budget from $3.1 billion in 2017 to $2.55 billion in 2018, so the fee increase wouldn’t even come close to making up for the proposed slashing of the NPS budget.

Read more at eptrail.com