Public Land, Private Profit: Mount St. Helens National Monument May Be Open For Business

Forest Magazine, Summer 2006
By Roddy Scheer

When U.S. Forest Service officials announced last October that the Gifford Pinchot National Forest would be considering bids from private concessionaires proposing to take over and expand on visitor services at Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in southwest Washington state, many purists were aghast. After all, Congress had set aside the still-active volcano and surrounding lands a quartercentury earlier so that scientists and the public could learn about natural restoration following the massive 1980 eruption that claimed fifty-seven lives and leveled 230 square miles of verdant forest. This new call for proposals by the Forest Service, which manages the monument, not only suggested that for-profit entities might take over educational programs and exhibits, but even went so far as to suggest increased recreational access—via yurts, helicopters and snowmobiles, no less—to the recovering landscape around the volcano.

A shrinking budget combined with a facilities maintenance backlog topping $13 million has made it tougher for the Forest Service to carry out its mission at Mount St. Helens, forcing the privatization card despite the potential public outcry. Monument manager Tom Mulder acknowledges that the judicious use of resources can only get the monument’s skeleton staff so far. “There are a lot of unmet needs at Mount St. Helens,” he says. “Maintenance and operations of the current visitor centers are beyond our budget and beyond what we can collect in recreation fees.”

Tom Knappenberger, a spokesman for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, insists that the call for proposals is just another creative way for the Forest Service to achieve the “greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” Due to budget cuts that started during the Clinton administration and continue today, monument staffers have had to selectively eliminate some educational offerings at Mount St. Helens.

Knappenberger credits his coworkers for making smart use of limited resources. The staff has cut back hours at monument visitor centers during the slower winter months and put media and curriculum resources online to minimize direct requests. Meanwhile, the Forest Service also struck a deal allowing Washington State Parks to take over financial responsibility for and management of the Silver Lake Visitor Center, which is the first of five such facilities beckoning tourists on their way to the volcano.

But Scott Silver of the Oregon-based nonprofit Wild Wilderness sees the very number of visitor amenities dotting the fifty-four-mile, $200-million highway into the national monument as a large part of the problem. “There are more visitor centers up at Mount St. Helens than there was need for or could be funded through any kind of congressional allocation,” says Silver, who impugns former U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, a Washington state Republican, for bringing home enough pork to build more infrastructure than could be maintained.

Silver takes little comfort in the fact that he correctly predicted back in the late 1990s that the only way for the Forest Service to make ends meet at Mount St. Helens would be to contract with the private sector to create more amenities to attract more tourists. The current need for outside proposals at the monument, he says, is the result of a fiscal crisis at a Forest Service no longer flush with logging revenues. But what irks Silver most is that the only beneficiaries of outsourcing concessions at Mount St. Helens will be the concessionaires themselves.

Lake ecologist Doug Larson monitored conditions at lakes around Mount St. Helens following the 1980 eruption and witnessed the deleterious effects created by illegal fish stocking. Larson, who did his work on behalf of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says adding for-profit recrea-tional amenities would pose a serious risk to the original mission set forth by Congress for the monument.

“You’ve got more and more people coming in there, and there’s this kind of a steady creeping effort to provide more and more amenities to make it a money-making operation,” he says.

Larson considers Mount St. Helens a geological wonder to be studied and appreciated, not a recreation area. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scientists to track the recovery of different ecosystems up there,” he says. But lack of funding means Larson personally has to shoulder equipment and travel costs to contribute to ongoing scientific monitoring in the area.

“They’re blowing up 9 or 10 billion dollars a month in Iraq and I have to pay for some of the work that I do,” he says. “The Bush administration should provide adequate funds so that the Forest Service doesn’t have to contract with private entrepreneurs to go up there with yurts and helicopters and all these opportunities for recreation.”

Meanwhile, Forest Service officials maintain that farming out some visitor services does not mean they are abandoning their congressional charge to “permit the full use of the Monument for scientific study and research” while preventing “undue modification of the natural conditions” within the 172-square-mile national monument. Monument manager Mulder thinks partnering with outside service providers is a necessity. He and others worked hard to launch the nonprofit Mount St. Helens Institute in 2000 to help carry out their mandated education mission without squeezing the monument’s ever-shrinking budget. But others view outsourcing educational and visitor services to for-profit entities—while a logical step given the economic environment—as asking for trouble.

“I believe that commercialization, by putting a lot of these activities in the hands of private entrepreneurs, would definitely pose a risk to the original mission of the monument—to provide educational opportunities for visitors—and of course to maintain this as a natural laboratory,” Larson says. He fears that once private concessionaires get their foot in the door, they will chip away at protective restrictions as they add to their offerings.

“The idea that they need to commercialize it to make ends meet,” Larson says, “reminds me of the Vietnam War expression about destroying the village in order to save it.”