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Show ment, if specified in a statewide recreation plan to provide recreation opportunities in the community, should be transferred or leased to state or local governments. Whether it is because the land is not designated in a statewide plan or for some other reason that the state and local government cannot accomplish transfer or lease, we recommend as a corollary policy, state and local government should be afforded *a priority in the award of concession contracts for commercial-type intensive recreation developments of all types on multiple-use public lands. Some state governments have already entered the resort management field in a direct effort to encourage tourism, provide variably priced accommodations, and promote local economic growth. Within the controlling policy favoring development and administration by state or local government, we believe there is opportunity to encourage private capital to undertake construction of facilities and their operation. Classification System Recommendation 85: Congress should provide guidelines for developing and managing the public land resources for outdoor recreation. The system of recreation land classification recommended by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission should be refined and adopted as a statutory guide to be applied to all public lands. Public lands can and do support a wide variety of outdoor recreation uses. Activities that take place on the public lands range from wilderness backpack camping and white-water canoeing, through a vacation stay at a national park lodge, to car camping in a modern national forest campground or picnicking at a roadside rest area along the highway that passes through a Bureau of Land Management grazing district. Policy standards for deciding how much money to spend on which kinds of recreation development on these lands, where the development should be located, how much of each kind of recreation opportunity to provide, and when to furnish it, are not well developed. Such standards are required for national parks, monuments, and recreation areas as well as for other classes of public lands, including those where recreation is not designated as the dominant use. In the section of this chapter addressed to resolving and minimizing conflicts among recreation uses and between outdoor recreation and other uses of public lands, we note a dual objective in the establishment of national parks for preservation of the natural en-Unique areas need to be so classified. vironment and current use and enjoyment. Accordingly, even though it is clear that some development should take place, it is not an easy task to determine where to locate campgrounds, how large each one should be, and how much of the area of each park should be taken up with roads, overnight accommodations, food service facilities, hiking trails, and back-country campsites. The problem is much more complex for national forests and the lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, because the lands are susceptible to management for all kinds of uses. Some kinds of recreation uses require no specialized development, and land can be used in its wild condition for these purposes. Other types of recreation activities require facilities near water or roads. Several of the policies we have recommended earlier in this chapter will, we believe, provide better guidelines than now exist for determining the kind, amount, and location of different recreation opportunities that should be furnished on public lands. Relating some classes of public land availability to statewide and local needs, as we have recommended, will provide some guidance that is not now applied. The Commission believes that a great deal of additional work needs to be done to develop better working standards for this purpose. The standard system of recreation land classification recommended by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission should be improved and formally adopted by Congress for application to all public lands. The Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission proposed a recreation land use classification system which the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation has attempted to apply to all Federal lands with only limited success. The major difficulty lies with the inadequacy of the definition of recreation developments and uses associated with Class III of that classification system-Natural Environment Areas. Nearly 300 million acres of the lands under study by this Commission are rated as Class III lands. The other 5 classes of areas used in the classification system appear to be adequately defined and usable. We believe that improvement of the existing classification system, a statutory requirement that it be used, and its use for planning recreation use on public lands will provide an improved basis for determining investment needs on the different classes of land identified in the system. Standards that qualify an area for a national park or a wilderness area should be refined. Standards that have been in use for a long time by the National Park Service as to what constitutes an area qualified for national park or national monument status are objective to the extent which they can be, but subjectivity in their application is difficult to avoid. We 213 |