Paying to play may be the new reality
The proposed parking fee for visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has users — especially locals in the gateway communities whose family histories are intertwined with the Smokies — understandably upset. The identity of the Smokies and those who live near it are more closely aligned than at other national parks. Locals have roamed freely (save for some camping fees) for several generations on land that was taken with the promise that there would never be a charge for visiting.
The devil is in the details, and those angered by the proposal should not blame park officials who are desperate for some means of repairing and maintaining crumbling infrastructure in a park whose visitation has risen by 57 percent in the last decade, while its budget has decreased when inflation is factored in. The women and men of the National Park Service are doing yeoman’s work to ensure visitors can enjoy their time in what is one of this country’s great wilderness areas despite these budget realities.
No, it’s our representatives in Congress and the White House who should bear the brunt of our collective ire. They are the ones who have led us to this precipice by their refusal to adequately fund the country’s most popular national park. Here’s a paragraph from Outdoors Editor Holly Kays’ cover story (page 28) in this week’s edition:
In 2011, the park received $18.95 million in federal funding, with that number inching up to $20.66 million for the current fiscal year. President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 would substantially increase the dollar amount to $24.09 million, but even that wouldn’t give the park the same buying power it had 10 years ago. In March 2022 dollars, the $18.95 million it received in 2011 would be worth $24.74 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator .
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The Smokies had 14.1 million visits last year. The second-most popular park is Zion in Utah, which clocked in at 5 million visitors. All the top 10 most visited national parks charge entrance fees, and that money is allowed to stay in that particular park for upkeep and staffing. With no increases in federal funding and no entrance fees, the GSMNP has accumulated a backlog of maintenance needs that totals nearly $240 million. Try to fathom that — a park whose budget is $20.66 million in 2022 has more than 10 times that amount just in overdue maintenance needs.
As many know, the parking fee proposal is in lieu of an entrance fee, which the Smokies can’t enact. Deeds from Tennessee when roads were handed over to the park in the 1950s prevent a “toll or license fee” from ever being enacted to use the roads, and another federal law from 1992 bolstered those restrictions to include the entire park. The current proposal, dubbed “Park it Forward,” would allow those driving through the park to continue to do so at no charge. Once you stop and get out, there would be a fee to park.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the crown jewel of this place we call home. Protecting it for future generations is a legacy we should embrace for both environmental and economic reasons. A $5 parking fee or $40 annual parking pass is not a game-changer for the great majority of park users. The truth is that something has to give: either this park goes to pot in terms of infrastructure or — if we want to preserve it — the federal government steps in or some kind of local fees have to be generated.
It’s a bit too easy to say we should bombard our congressional representatives with complaints about their lack of support for the park because there’s little hope they’ll respond. This problem has persisted for a couple of decades. But that’s what we should do. It does no good to blame the Park Service folks who came up with the proposal as their motives are clear — saving the park. That’s a mission we can all agree on, and if this fee is the best and only option, then we should support it.
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
