Last month the National Park Service rolled out a $4 per night access fee for backcountry campers in the Great Smoky Mountains. Proponents of the fee say it will help reduce overcrowding and pay for trash removal as well as fund the reservation system; those fighting it say the fee is being charged exclusively to pay for the new reservations system required by the fee’s creation. The lawsuit, brought by a group created to fight the charges, says that the NPS doesn’t have the right to levy this fee, it’s not needed, and further, it violates the NPS’s Organic Act which says, “no natural curiosities, wonders, or objects of interest shall be leased, rented, or granted to anyone on such terms as to interfere with free access to them by the public..”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 7th, 2013 at 10:00 am and is filed under Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.