However, when these proposals are boiled down, one fact remains: recreational fees are tax increases. And these increases reach into the wallet of middle class families who are already being pinched and squeezed at every opportunity by misguided economic policies.

Sadly, even with recreational fees in place, our system of National Parks and Public Lands teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Backlogged maintenance and visitor needs are ignored as the gap between what the system has, and what it needs, grows wider.

This Administration and this Congress have cheated our Parks and Public Lands year after year and the band aid provided by user fees cannot stop the bleeding. The bill before us is an attempt to remedy this failure by applying an even larger band aid to a fractured budget policy, and I do not need a medical degree to know that approach will fail.

Before this hemorrhaging permanently stains our natural resources heritage, we should reexamine our priorities and begin to provide the funding needed to support a world class system of National Parks and Public Lands without resorting to an unjust and unjustified tax increase on our citizens.

During my years of service on the Transportation Committee, I have refused to support charging tolls on our Interstate Highways. That is what people pay gas taxes at the pump for, to build and maintain highways. Tolling is double taxation. In my view, the recreational fee program is no different.

Since 1996, we have been conducting what was supposed to be a brief experiment to determine whether a recreational fee program is feasible. And what have we seen in this experiment gone awry – visitors are frustrated, confused and angered over being charged to use resources they already own.

Reading this legislation is just like reading the tax code: five agencies, four different types of fees, twenty different classes of exemptions, three different types of passes, and more than 50 resource councils to help sort it all out.

When the average American family sits down to plan their summer vacation to the National Parks, in addition to their maps and guidebooks, they will need a CPA and a loan officer to determine what they will owe in fees.

As it stands, it costs the average American more to spend a day in many of our National Parks than it costs a mining company to pick up several acres of federal land under the Mining Law of 1872. That is just flat wrong.

Mr. Chairman, both the underlying bill and your substitute authorize the expenditure of fee revenues to enhance things like visitor enjoyment, habitat restoration, hunting, fishing and visitor health and safety on public lands. To me that sounds like the job of this Committee, this Congress and this Administration, not the seniors, parents and kids who visit our public lands.

Thank you Mr. Chairman.