Mountain rescues - Who should pay?
By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoors Columnist
The report comes in — a climber is injured in the mountains. Rescue teams are dispatched and, because of the remoteness of the site and the extent of the injury, a helicopter is called to get the person to the hospital.
This kind of story is repeated each summer in the Adirondacks as more and more people become hooked on the outdoor adventure craze. Last July 4, for example, on Hunter Mountain in the Catskills, one of those rescued in a mishap went a step further-literally. This person, a counselor, was leading a group of children when they got off the trail and into steep terrain. In an attempt to get back to the trail, he slipped off a ledge. Rescuers couldn’t carry him out so a state police helicopter was called in. After being rescued, that counselor proceeded to sue the state for two million dollars for improperly marking trails!
It is not surprising there is a lot of grumbling in certain quarters after such event. Questions are raised like, "Who’s paying for the helicopter and the forest rangers doing the search?" Some sportsmen add, "Are conservation funds, coming from the sales of hunting, fishing and trapping licenses, being used either directly or indirectly for the rescue?" The bottom line is: who should wind up paying for the rescue, the state or the rescued individual?
The Franklin County Federation of Fish and Game Clubs passed a resolution recently asking the New York State Conservation Council to request legislation "that will require all persons, resident or non-resident, 16 years of age or older, to pay a user fee of $5.00 yearly for the privilege of access to the many routes in the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains." The money would be put into a dedicated fund devoted to trail maintenance and backcountry rescues.
On the surface, this appears to be a reasonable request. If someone does something foolish in the mountains, gets in trouble and has to be rescued, then that person should pay for the rescue. After all, helicopters are expensive to maintain and very expensive to operate on a per-hour basis. That’s true, but it isn’t quite that cut and dry.
In most ground rescues, volunteers and forest rangers are used, and Conservation Fund monies do not pay rangers’ salaries. Even so, rangers are state employees. As for the helicopters, yes they are expensive, but so are the Jaws of Life and ambulances, yet in Essex County, for example, most rescue squads do not charge for their services even if the victim is clearly the cause, say in the case of a drunk driver. If you are to charge the occasional hiker, climber or even hunter who runs into problems in the mountains, then, some argue, you should charge for all rescues, including auto accidents and fires.
Some ambulance companies, like the city of Plattsburgh and the Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital, do charge for their services, and in some states and in Europe rescues are billable to the person being rescued, but, as of now, the Department of Environmental Conservation does not charge for rescues, and there are no plans for that to change.
In April, Assemblywoman Betty Little introduced legislation to create an Outdoor Recreation and Trail Maintenance Fund. Section One of the bill authorizes the DEC to raise outdoor recreation and trail maintenance funds to be "deposited into a special outdoor recreation and trail maintenance account within the Conservation Fund."
So far there has not been a Senate co-sponsor. Russ Collins, President of the Franklin County Federation of Fish and Game Clubs, says the user fee would be voluntary. He hopes some of that money would go to mountain rescues. It is not clear if such a bill would pass in the legislature.
There is yet another option. Each year, hunters, anglers and boaters pay a surtax on gear as required by the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act and Dingell-Johnson (Wallop-Breaux update) Sport Fisheries Restoration Act. These monies are given back to the states in block grants that, along with revenues from the Conservation Fund and General Fund, make up the DEC budget. In 2000, New York received 12.5 million dollars or 22 percent of DEC’s operating costs from these grants. Why not, as some have suggested, have the state put a similar tax on camping, hiking and canoeing gear and use these funds for trail maintenance, rescues, habitat improvement and gaining public access to rivers and lakes? The revenues would certainly be in the millions.
A year ago, certified wildlife biologist Gary Will had yet another sweeping proposal: impose an additional sales tax of one-eighth of one percent on retail sales, like the State of Missouri did 25 years ago, and dedicate the money to wildlife and outdoor-related projects. The potential is there for more than 100 million dollars in revenues or almost twice DEC’s current operating budget.
Any proposal resembling a tax is, however, just about dead in an election year. And the prospect of DEC charging for rescues is also very unrealistic. This may be one policy that will continue indefinitely.