There appear to be three groups of park users:
- Pay-as-planned;
- Pay-when-asked; and
- Sport Poacher.
The Pay-when-asked group is interesting. They know there is a use fee, but are gamblers. They play the odds of being caught then paying, not being caught and not paying, and being caught by the police and paying a fine as well as the fee. Excuses abound from this group:
- "This isn’t a State Park?”
- “I didn’t know there was a fee.”
- “Sorry”
- “We were lazy.”
Sport Poacher may really be a sub-class of the Pay-when-asked gambling group as they face the same consequences, but the motivations are truly different. Sport Poachers have a strategy to avoid fees:
- In the campgrounds
- Occupy an empty site late in the evening and then blast out early in the morning
- Pull up next to the cars that belong to a paid site and “blend-in”…camouflaged style
- In the day use area
- Obtain park pass envelope, not pay the place an apparently valid date pass on the dash
- Use camping pass from a valid paid pass as their day use pass
- Transfer an annual pass from car to car
The list could go on and on, but you get the point. They want to avoid payment and will resort to lying and fraud to achieve their goal.
My question to these last two groups, “Is it worth $5, $7 or $12 to avoid being thought of as a thief?”
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