America’s Outdoor Recreation Act

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It is billed as a bipartisan bill. Barrasso is a Republican and Manchin is a Democrat, though I think if most were honest, Manchin would be considered more like an independent. This bill is suggested to be revenue-neutral, but it provides for opportunities, so we're going to get into all those different opportunities. But let me lay out the major things that this bill does before we dive a little bit deeper into them. The first is that it fixes or changes.

I guess I shouldn't say fixes, but to me, it fixes the problem of filming on public lands. We've been talking about this for years now here, there has been a problem with filming on public lands and a disparity between commercial filming and non-commercial filming. And all sorts of places where people cannot legally go out and film on public lands, especially in national parks, but also on U.s Forest Service Land Bureau of Land Management, Land without receiving a permit for filming. If they want to make any money off of it, i...e.

Do it commercially, and nobody knows what commercially means. It sounds as simple as making money, but it is uploading a video to YouTube where YouTube makes money off of it commercially. But you don't, who knows? So this bill fixes a lot of that. The bill intends to improve access on public lands by doing things like extending the season and by making the permit process for commercial tours a lot easier. And it intends to bring internet to a lot of public land areas. And a lot of people think that public lands should be places where you can unplug and be away from the internet.

The problem is that access to public lands now relies a lot more on the internet than it ever did. For instance, applying for a lot of the permits that are in here requires you to go onto the internet to do so. A lot of public campgrounds across America. Now, you can only book online or perhaps by the phone, but you need to have some sort of access to be able to do that. It's also a safety issue. Rangers can issue warnings about closures.

You can get up-to-date information about access to a certain trail, that sort of information is hard to get when you don't have access to the internet. So just the top line of that is that. It aims to modernize recreation sites by directing agencies to work with the Department of Commerce to construct broadband internet infrastructure at certain recreation areas. And that's sort of something you'll see a lot in this bill, it's at certain places. Pilot program, try it here, try it out there.

That's a lot of what is in this bill, but let's move along to campgrounds because I think this is a really important point. So the bill directs the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service, which are the two main federal land agencies, so the Department of the Interior has under it. The National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U...S. Forest Service is sort of separately its own entity, direct the Department of the Interior and the U.S.

Forest Service to establish a pilot program for public-private partnership agreements to modernize campgrounds on federal land. Okay, so here's an issue. A lot of people support private entities running public campgrounds. And on its face, you can see the value of that company comes in. They put a lot of investment into a campground to sort of modernize it and bring it up to shape, and then they run it. And a lot of people will say that the government has no business being involved in hospitality. In fact, we probably wouldn't expect them to run one of the National Park Service lodges or something like that. The problem is, these partnerships have largely been very problematic over the course of the last many, many decades.

What happens is these companies really only want the most popular campgrounds, they only want the ones that are going to be profitable. And they take them over and they charge exorbitant fees. So if you go to Yellowstone National Park right now and you want to stay in one of the concessionaire-run campgrounds. You might be paying upwards of $90 a night for a campground in a national park, that's concerning to a lot of people because that's reduced public access by making it something that is only for people who have the ability to afford that. But I think more importantly, the thing that you should understand is that these concessionaire contracts over the decades have proven to be very difficult for the American people.

What happens is these companies come in, they spend a lot of money on these facilities. And when their contract is up, you would think that would be the end of it, but no, the end of their contract. We the people owe them back the money that they spent on improving those facilities so their contract ends. It's time for a new bidding process to take place, and either the federal government has to pay up that money or the new bidder that wins the bid has to pay that money. And often what happens is neither one of those things, nobody bids on it.

And that concessionaire gets to now re-bid on the contract that they already had, or they already are, for a lot less money. There have been many situations in the past where private concessionaires have held the government up for millions and millions of dollars over this. Including at Yosemite National Park, where the concessionaire actually held the trademark to many of the popular names of locations in the park. And didn't allow the National Park service or the new contractor to sell any merchandise with it on it, or even use those names in the park at all. The RV industry has been pushing hard for legislation like this over many, many years because they want public lands, campgrounds to improve. They want them to be full hookups, they want them to be able to fit larger RVs.

I am deep into the RV industry, I've covered it for many years, I have sponsors that are in the RV industry. We own an RV, we travel full-time in an RV.

And I think that's a problem here. That is not something that I think most customers actually want. What we want is affordable, nice, clean campgrounds on public lands, we don't need tons of amenities, we don't want to pay a lot of extra money.

And I think when you look at the list of different supporters of this bill that have been provided. Most of them are commercial entities, and very few of them are entities that support the public interest. And that is one of the difficulties I have with this bill, because there are many other things that I really like in this bill. So let's move on to some of those. Support rural communities adjacent to recreation areas by providing technical and financial assistance to local businesses, including hotels, campgrounds and restaurants, to support visitation. There's a lot in here about providing support to gateway communities and allowing gateway communities, which are the sort of communities that are close to public lands, to sort of participate more and be a bigger partner. Providing accommodations and benefiting off of public lands.

And I'm all for that. But one of the ways they plan to do that is by extending the season wherever possible on recreation lands. I think a lot of us Northerners or Midwesterners have run into the problem. Where all the public campgrounds close on October 15th, or even earlier, when everyone's willing to camp much, much later into the season. This bill is directing all these public land agencies to extend the season wherever possible. The bill ensures greater access and opportunities for activities like recreational climbing, mountain biking and target shooting on public lands.

It actually says that there should be a target shooting range at every district of public lands. And it directs the agencies to establish more bike-specific trails on the level of like a national trail. The package modernizes film and photography, permitting so land management agencies can keep pace with changing technology and social media. Allowing people who responsibly recreate on our public lands to record and share their experiences without the worry of unnecessary red tape and fees. Essentially, it's going to allow anybody that is filming with a group of seven people or under to be able to do it without getting a permit. As long as they're meeting certain criteria, basically, they're doing stuff that the public would be doing, otherwise they're going out hiking on a trail.

They're visiting Mount Rushmore and standing in front of it and chatting. They're not filming a scene for a movie with lights and equipment, they're not blocking off access to an area, anything like that. I think that's a great compromise. I almost might think that the bill went a little too far in freeing this up, but I'm not going to push that by any means.

This was a real problem, and, frankly, it's a real major freedom of speech problem. If you go back to the episode I did on this before, when the National Park Service filming rules were struck down. And then they were brought back by a three-panel judge who essentially decided that commercial filmmaking didn't have freedom of speech protections because it was the act of making the film, not the presentation of the film. So I think that is an element that still really needs to be looked at by the Supreme Court, whether these rules change or not.

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And that will allow people to know in advance before they go somewhere how busy it is. I thought that was really interesting. And that could be a great benefit to certain areas that actually receive fewer visitors. Because somebody that goes online and sees that might see that an area is very, very busy, but they might see that another area is not. And that might help relieve some of the overcrowding problems that we have on public lands today. Now, I'll be honest, about half of this bill is entirely about tour companies and tour operators getting special access permits and easing the challenges that some of those tour operators have. I don't know that it's going to provide for more tours and more commercial use. But it intends to make the process easier. Both for getting a permit and for paying for a permit, and to reduce the number of permits needed to bring a tour group onto public lands now. This bill currently sits in the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources, which Joe Manchin presides over. And certainly is going to have some amendments and changes before it finally passes.

So that's an overview of the American Outdoor Recreation Act that now sits in the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources. I wanted to get this episode out there. So that you could decide whether you support it or not, or if you support certain aspects or not. That you could tell your congressperson what you think. Thanks a lot for being here everybody, and we'll see you next time.