Pay to play

Smokies parking tags now on sale

BY HOLLY KAYS OUTDOORS E DITOR

Starting March 1, Great Smoky Mountains National Park visitors will have to pay to park. As the date approaches and annual parking tags go on sale, park management is working to iron out the details and communicate them to the public.

“We’re going to continue to finely tune these programs to make sure that the intent that I had in creating this program is actually having that impact on the ground,” said Superintendent Cassius Cash.

Cash first proposed the parking tag program, called Park it Forward, in April 2022. It was a response to rising visitation and stagnant federal funding that made stewardship of America’s most visited and largest free-toenter national park increasingly difficult. The park logged a staggering 14.1 million visits in 2021, a 57% increase from 10 years prior.

Though 2022 visitation came in significantly lower, at 12.9 million, that’s still the second-highest annual visitation on record and marks a 33.9% increase from 2012. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted federal funding has fallen and along with it, staffing. A 1992 federal law in combination with a restriction in the 1951 deed transfer placing key park roads in federal ownership meant that the Smokies could not charge an entrance fee to scale its budget to its popularity.

Park it Forward aims to raise new revenue for the park without violating the ban on entrance fees.

The proposal was controversial, to put it mildly. The governments of all six counties surrounding the park issued formal statements opposing it, and the N.C. House of

Representatives passed a resolution to the same effect. Creating the park required evicting 1,200 families from their homes. Many of their descendants still live in the communities surrounding it and believed the park would remain free to use forever. However, public input from residents of the six counties showed an even split between support and opposition, and overall comments revealed much greater rates of support than opposition. In August, the proposal received official approval.

Starting March 1, visitors planning to park their cars for 15 minutes or more will need to purchase a parking tag. Annual tags are $40, weekly tags $15 and daily tags $5. Cash expects the program to bring in $5 million for the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30 and $8-10 million on average thereafter. When including other fee increases approved along with Park it Forward — backcountry camping rates doubled, and campground fees rose across the board — total revenue is estimated at $12-14 million each year.

Educating Visitors And Hiring Staff

The park has determined that it needs to bring in enough money to bridge a 40% gap between buying power and spending needs. Without the fee increases approved in August, the park would have had roughly $30 million this year, 80% of which would come from the federal budget. The $12-14 million Cash estimates will come from the fee increases will fill that 40% deficit, with all fees collected remaining within the park’s local budget.

“One of the primary things that we want to be able to do in the first year of raising the revenue is to start restoring our staffing,” said Management Assistant Dana Soehn. “We can’t accomplish the project work that desperately needs to be done across the park without the staffing to do the work.”

Priority hires will include custodial staff to pick up trash and clean toilets, law enforcement officers to ensure visitor safety and respond swiftly to search and rescues or accidents in the backcountry and facility maintenance workers to keep park amenities in good working order. The park has also prioritized contracted project work, including help with storm damage response so roads and trails can reopen more swiftly after a severe weather event. As revenue starts to come in this year, the park will hire about two dozen new permanent, full-time staff, with 13 such positions already approved.

“We’re on our way to right the ship to be able to have the human infrastructure to be able to address the visitation level that we have here in the park,” Cash said.

To enforce the parking tag requirement, law enforcement rangers can use consequences as severe as writing citations and impounding vehicles. But a visitor’s behavior would have to be “egregious” to incur such a response, Soehn said — especially in the first year of the program.

“Especially in year one, there’s a lot of focus, as you can imagine, on raising awareness and providing education,” Soehn said.

“We know that people have been coming here for nearly 90 years and they didn’t need a parking tag. So it’s going to take a while for everyone to understand the program.”

The park has already hired new recreation technicians who will rove the park, especially at busy locations, letting