Budget imperils campgrounds

Many campgrounds in Utah's national forests probably will close, as the U.S. Forest Service copes with a nationwide budget squeeze. Others may be expanded eventually.

Across the country, the agency's recreation budget, including trail maintenance, is about $225 million. It is close to flat, say Forest Service officials, and it is used to manage all recreation on 190 million acres, including campgrounds, trails, winter sports, wilderness, visitor centers, brochures and conservation education, said Steven T. Sherwood of the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Region, Denver.

Although Utah's national forests are directed by the Intermountain Region headquarters in Ogden, a state overview from that office was not readily available.

The recreation budget is relatively stable, Sherwood said, but "we have uses growing very fast in some parts of the country." And some campgrounds are extremely expensive to keep up while hosting relatively few visitors.

The Forest Service believes it can reallocate recreation funds by closing some facilities or finding partners to run them and shifting money to places where it can be used more effectively.

Every national forest in America is preparing a Recreation Site Facility Master Plan, an internal analysis of all developed recreation sites, Sherwood said. These range from campgrounds to picnic facilities to trail heads with bathrooms.

"We put all of the sites through a pretty rigorous analysis," he said. The study includes annual operating costs, the price of bringing facilities up to standard and the cost of any maintenance that has been deferred over the years. For some, he said, maintenance has been deferred "for as many as 20 years."

The agency compares costs with occupancy rates and weighs whether a nearby forest campground or other facility could take the place of each. The Forest Service also tries to identify the special "niche" of the particular forest and determine if the facility is important to it.

Do state or Bureau of Land Management or private recreation providers also fill such a niche? That, too, is a factor to be considered.

Putting these pieces together, planners believe they can learn "by and large where we should be directing our energy and focusing our funding to be the best we can be within that niche," said Sherwood.