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PRECSION MILLWRIGHTS

It's been 10 years since the Forest Service erected a toll booth on the road up Mount Lemmon and started charging visitors $5 a pop to drive up the mountain or $20 for an annual pass.

That fee was supposed to rescue the Forest Service from a stingy Congress that, on a regular basis, fails to budget enough money to enable our federal land stewards to manage the lands they are charged with maintaining.

The fees did make a difference. Roads, picnic and camping areas and bathrooms are vastly improved on Mount Lemmon and other sections of the Coronado National Forest.

But now, it appears, what the Forest Service gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Despite the user fees, the Coronado is proposing to cut back some of its services to reduce operating costs over a five-year period. It's also talking about instituting fees where it never had any, like Carr Canyon in the Huachuca Mountains near Sierra Vista.

Some of the proposed cost-cutting suggestions are sensible and probably won't be noticed by most visitors. But reducing services, especially after increasing fees or imposing fees where previously there were none, is politically unpalatable, especially from a government agency that has been subsidizing the logging, mining and livestock industries for many years.

To be sure, the forest rules that govern extractive industries are created by Congress and the Department of Agriculture, not the rank-and-file folks who manage individual recreation areas within the system. There's a fat buffer between Washington policymakers and the people affected by those policies.

The local managers, as a result, become the faces that are associated with the obnoxious policy and frequently become the objects of consumer complaints. Those complaints would be more effective if they were aimed at members of our congressional delegation, but you don't find those people picking up the garbage on your weekend in Molino Basin.

Locally, the Coronado National Forest office, through its branches in Safford, Douglas and Nogales, manages several popular camping and hiking areas throughout Southern Arizona, including those at Sabino Canyon and in the Santa Ritas, the Pinalenos (Mount Graham), the Chiricahuas, the Dragoons, the Huachucas and the Atascosas, a few of the mountain ranges in the region.

There are some campground and picnic areas in the higher portions of these ranges that are rarely used in the winter. It's the rare person who wants to picnic at Marshall Gulch when the January temperature is below freezing, for example. Likewise, Rustler Park at the top of the Chiricahuas is ice cold and often snowed in during the winter. Closing those places in the winter is not likely to annoy too many users.

But closing Palisades Visitor Center on Mount Lemmon from September to May is not smart. Mount Lemmon is too close to Tucson and a population of 1 million, and about one-third of those people are newcomers who know nothing about the mountain and could benefit from having Palisades remain open a month or two longer and reopening a month or two earlier in the spring.

The Forest Service also proposes removing trash bins from Loma Linda and Marshall Gulch, the picnic areas closest to Summerhaven. Ending trash removal in two of the most heavily used areas on Mount Lemmon is not exactly a brilliant strategy for saving money.

It is, however, a good tactic for distributing more garbage across the top of the mountain and inviting more rodents and, possibly, disease.

A fee is also being considered for the West Turkey Creek Campground in the Chiricahuas and one for cars entering the picnic area at Carr Canyon in the Huachucas. Both places are currently free.

This sounds like less for more, a bad strategy for retail business and one that's even worse when it's imposed by a federal agency that we've already paid for with our taxes.

It is time for Congress to allow the Forest Service to be as generous with ordinary recreational users as it is with the loggers, the miners and the ranchers.