This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, October 30th, 2017.

I'm Kila Brown.

When ranchers or farmers operate on public lands, they pay for their use of that land, although often they're not paying market rates.

But what about recreation on public lands? Are they paying what they should to maintain trails and other amenities?

I spoke with Holly Frettwell of the Property and Environment

Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, about pay-to-play.

What are public lands used for?

Public lands are used for recreation, for wildlife habitats. for multiple use. The majority of our public lands are supposed to be used for multiple uses and there are a lot of multiple uses out there.

All right, so when people graze cattle on public lands or mine under or on public lands or harvest timber on public lands or something along those lines, do they pay market rates for those

extractions, if you will, for lack of a better term.

Sometimes they pay market rates and sometimes they don't pay market rates.

Grazing is a formula that's calculated out and if you actually look at our grazing lands they differ tremendously across the country

so you would expect to have different rates if you were looking at a market rate and it is not different

rates.

It's one size fits all type of rate.

Timber harvest people actually bid to harvest timber on our public land so that is

approaching a more market rate because people are actually competing against each

other to remove that timber from the land.

Minerals, again, have different sorts of formulas

and methods that are determined as to what those costs

and prices actually are, so not quite approaching the market rate in the same sense.

And if you're recreating on our public lands, you probably aren't paying anything.

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