Will National Park Service entrance fees affect Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokies?

ASHEVILLE – For now, national parks in Western North Carolina have escaped – or some may say lost out on – the new entrance fees recently announced by the Department of the Interior.

The department oversees the National Park Service, which includes the most visited national park site, the Blue Ridge Parkway, which had 16.1 million visitors in 2017, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which saw a record 11.3 million guests last year.

The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock is also part of the Park Service. It had 80,000 visitors last year.

Although there are fees to tour the home of the famous writer, or to camp in the Smokies or on the parkway, these parks have never charged an entrance fee.

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On Thursday, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced that an increase in entrance fees to help offset the $11.6 billion in deferred maintenance across the system of 417 parks, historic and cultural sites, and monuments.

When the proposal for increased fees was announced last year, it would have initially doubled or tripled fees at some parks, drawing outrage from many groups including park visitors, businesses, local governments and the Outdoor Industry Association, saying it would severely limit access to parks for many people.

After receiving more than 100,000 comments, the DOI and NPS settled on a more modest fee increase.

"These increases are now more reasonable but we want to make sure the administration commits to making sure that parks remain affordable, and how any future increases could impact American families particularly lower income families and those of modest means," said Jeff Hunter, program manager for the Southeast Region of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, based in Asheville.

Most seven-day vehicle passes to enter national parks will be increased by $5 starting June 1.

Yosemite National Park in California, for example, will increase the price of a seven-day vehicle pass from $30 to $35, as will Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Yellowstone in Wyoming and Montana, and Grand Canyon in Arizona, among others. More than two-thirds of national parks will remain free to enter.

RELATED: A complete list of national park entrance fees.

Local parks have history of free entry, but shrinking budgets

The Great Smokies, which has a half-million acres of rugged mountain backcountry across the North Carolina-Tennessee border, was established in the height of the Great Depression, as was the Blue Ridge Parkway, to protect land heavily degraded by logging, create jobs and encourage tourism to the isolated Southern Appalachians.

The plans to attract people to pretty scenery and spend money has by all accounts worked well.

An NPS study last year showed that in 2016 visitors to the parkway and the Smokies had more than a $1 billion impact on the surrounding communities.

But as visitation increases, putting more pressure on everything from trails to visitor centers to clogged motor roads, park budgets have not kept pace, and the maintenance bills keep piling up.

In the Smokies, the maintenance backlog has reached $215 million, spokeswoman Dana Soehn said. The backlog includes repairing and rebuilding roads in the nearly 90-year-old park, rehabilitating buildings and upgrading wastewater facilities, and replacing vital communications equipment including emergency radios.

This year the park raised its front-country campground fees for the first time in more than a decade. The park retains 100 percent of the camping and pavilion fees to operate these facilities, provide visitor services and fund projects such as replacing picnic tables and grills, Soehn said.

No other fees are planned.

The land comprising Great Smoky Mountains National Park was once privately owned. Tennessee and North Carolina, as well as local communities, paid to construct Newfound Gap Road/U.S. 441. When the state of Tennessee transferred ownership of Newfound Gap Road to the federal government, it stipulated that "no toll or license fee shall ever be imposed…" to travel the road.



Action by the Tennessee legislature would be required to lift this deed restriction if the Smokies ever planned to charge an entrance fee.

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Maintenance backlogs on the parkway, which runs 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Smokies’ entrance in Cherokee, total $462 million, said spokeswoman Leesa Brandon.

“We are not considering implementing fees at the parkway,” Brandon said. “However, 20 percent of the entrance fee revenue from other parks supports enhancing visitor services and deferred maintenance at parks that do not collect fees.”

There are no plans to charge an entrance fee in any current planning documents or projects at Carl Sandburg either, said Sarah Perschall, chief of visitor services.

All three WNC national parks rely heavily on nonprofit partners for funding.

Entrance fees collected by the National Park Service totaled $199 million in fiscal year 2016. The new fee structure is expected to increase annual entrance fee revenue by about $60 million. But Hunter calls that "a drop in the bucket" when trying to chip away at the maintenance backlog.

"The fees will be helpful with maintenance other needs important to visitors, but given the scope of the problem, the (Trump) administration needs to work with Congress and provide dedicated funding to clear up the maintenance backlog. Fees alone aren’t going to do it," Hunter said.

In a statement, Zinke said he is also working with Congress on proposed bipartisan legislation to use revenue derived from energy produced on federal lands and waters to establish the Public Lands Infrastructure Fund specifically for “National Park Restoration.”