imported post
lockman wrote:
The general policy of USFS is to assimilate state law on almost everything (traffic, firearms, hunting, alcohol, etc.), but District Rangers can, and frequently do, issue stricter rules when they feel justified in doing so. Sometimes it's for their whole district, but usually it's for one particular area or campground in response to an ongoing problem.
If they make it up does it have the force of law? I thought stuff like that had to be proposed by the agency and published in the Fereral Register and commented on prior to becoming law.
It becomes a regulation, but not one with force of law the way it would if they published it in the CFR.
The case with which I'm most familiar is a wilderness camping area in north-central Arkansas. My fraternity has--
had-- been holding campouts and reunions there since 1981. The ranger and the FS personnel knew us well, because we always cleaned up not only our own messes, but left it cleaner than we found it. And we also drank a
lot of beer while we were there, trying to pretend we were still in college and bulletproof. Harmless middle-age stuff.
Thanks to an incident involving another group at a different time of year, where a FS LEO was attacked, the district ranger completely banned alcohol from that campground. Previously it was just like the surrounding county: you could drink in your own campsite, but anywhere else it would be "drinking in public", which is illegal in Arkansas.
I don't know what the penalty would be, but I do know we were promised that if anyone possessed alcohol they would be going to the Newton County jail until a federal magistrate (100+ miles away in Fort Smith) decided their fate.
And so after 25 years of a good thing, we moved to private land.