Forest green: Cabin owners seeing red over proposed fee hikes

CLIFFDELL -- You can hear the rushing water of the Naches River from the cabin that Marcella and Rusty Mulcahy have shared with their kids and grandkids for nearly 35 years.

The cabin, a crude construction of not-quite-right angles with a leaning chimney and an outhouse, has been owned by someone in Marcella's family since the early 1950s. The ground beneath it, however, is leased from the U.S. Forest Service.

As a result, the Mulcahys can't cut down a single tree to create a view of the river they can hear but can't see through 60 yards of thick forest. And any improvement to the cabin entails a tedious process of federal red tape and hoop-jumping.

Across the river on private land, there are no such restrictions on cabin owners.

Cabin owners such as the Mulcahys said they are being unfairly treated like private land owners when it comes to annual fees being proposed by the Forest Service and property taxes leveled by the county.

"They're trying to assess us the same as the places across the river, which is all deeded property," Marcella Mulcahy says. "That doesn't make sense. It's just not the same thing."

Given the restrictions, it's understandable that cabin owners on Forest Service land are unhappy with proposed fee increases of 100 to 1,000 percent. That might mean rising from $500 to $1,700 or so on more-rustic cabins like the Mulcahys', or skyrocketing from $1,400 to $14,000 on some more tony spreads around Lake Wenatchee.

On the other hand, the Forest Service -- faced with cabin owners' appeals and congressional action -- has twice backed off new fees, first in 1999 and again this winter. That's left cabin owners paying lease fees based on appraisals that are a quarter- century old.

During that same time period, private property values in Yakima County's most comparable area off Chinook Pass rose more than 400 percent.

Since 1999, by continuing to rely on 1985 appraisals, the Wenatchee National Forest has annually lost out on collecting roughly $960,000 in fees on its 653 cabins.

Nearly a million bucks a year.

The Mulcahys' cabin, which sits roughly a quarter-mile northwest of Whistlin' Jack Lodge -- is one of 532 on land leased from the Wenatchee National Forest within the Naches Ranger District. Another 121 cabins are farther north, most of them nestled around Chelan County's Lake Wenatchee.

They're remnants of a century-old, somewhat anachronistic program initially intended to create greater use of the national forests.

Today, the cabins are a logistical headache for dwindling Forest Service staffs. And the fees, which are supposed to go up every 10 years, are a source of frustration for cabin owners.

The 1999 appraisals, the first on the Wenatchee National Forest since the mid-1980s, saw proposed fee spikes ranging from 100 percent to 1,000 percent. Cabin owners saw the increase as unfair, but it wasn't far from the rise in property values of comparable property nearby. Between 1985 and 1999, Nile Fire District 14 rose 150 percent. Since then assessed property values have more than doubled.

Those 1999 appraisals, though, were shelved after cabin owners appealed to Congress, which passed the 2000 Cabin Users Fee Fairness Act, which essentially stalled the fee hikes.

Last year, the Wenatchee National Forest again tried to assess fees based on that decade-old appraisal. But 84 cabin owners appealed and the federal agency backed off once again when it was unable to find sufficient supporting documentation in the 1999 appraisal process even to address the appeal.

The 1999 process, in the view of some cabin owners, was rife with problems.

"They had us down as a river view lot, recalls Marcella Mulcahy. "They had four categories at that time; the lowest, in terms of the fees, was a wooded lot, then a river view, then a river front and, at the high end, a lake front. Well, the cabin next door was a wooded lot, and somehow ours was a river view?

"I took the appraiser out back and said, 'OK, tell me where you can see the river from here.' And she couldn't."

Assessing the worth of the cabins is made difficult because they're vacant much of the year, leaving assessors to guess at what might be inside -- or make assumptions based on the amenities of neighboring cabins.

The Mulcahys' cabin has no running water, although there is a shallow well from which they can hand-pump water that is definitely not potable; they'll boil that well water to wash dishes with, but any drinking water is hauled in from town.

There's no bathroom, just the outhouse. And while there's enough electricity to power the lights, a stove and refrigerator, the only thing keeping the place warm is a propane heater and the fireplace.

Yet when the cabin was assessed at $58,200 by Yakima County last year, said Janet Short, one of the Mulcahys' children, "We started looking at the amenities that were listed and saw things this place doesn't have. They had us down for running water, an inside bathroom, electric radiant heat. What?"

The county later lowered its appraisal to $48,200.

Lease fees are supposed to equal 5 percent of a cabin's appraised value, although how that is calculated has changed over the years. Before 1932, that 5 percent was based on 25 percent of market value; between 1932 and 1973, it was 5 percent of 50 percent of market value. Now the fees are assessed based on full market value.

And the actual value of those cabins depends a great deal on one's perspective.

In one sense, it seems like the cabin owners have a sweetheart deal -- especially because they're still paying fees based on appraisals that are 25 years old.

If a cabin owner finds the fee structure onerous, he or she could sell it in a heartbeat. Even the more rustic ones have that outdoorsy ambiance.

"Those cabins don't stay on the market very long," said Dave Cook, Yakima County's assessor. "It's word of mouth."

Yakima real estate agent Ed Keniston owned a 1,200-square-foot cabin with a "partial water view" of Andy Creek north of Rimrock Lake for nearly a decade. When he decided he and his wife didn't use it enough to make it worth the expense, he sold it just like that -- for $245,000.

Because the cabins are on leased federal land, borrowing the money to buy one is almost impossible: "These sales are cash sales," Keniston said. "Nobody finances them."

Which means the buyers are largely wealthy sorts who can afford to pay cash. Forest Service employees grumble about this quantum shift, in which people like the Mulcahys are lost as leasees. In their wake are the elite who use their speed dial to grouse to politicians about increasing fees and the red tape keeping them from installing hot tubs. It's a far cry from Gifford Pinchot's plan -- the genesis behind the cabin-lease program so many decades ago -- of making the national forests affordable and accessible to the middle class.

Which is what many of those cabin owners have been. For generations.

"(The cabins) have been in these families for decades," said Mike Berriochoa, president of the Chinook Pass Cabin Owners Association. "A lot of these people are on fixed income, retirement income, and they can't afford the lease fees.

"You could take the cold, hard approach of 'sell it and be done with it,' but that's kind of a slap in the face of these people who have been there for a long time. ... They love the forest, they're good stewards of the forest, they've been the eyes and ears of the Forest Service."

The limits on what cabin owners can and can't do is a touchy area.

"The crazy one," said Keniston, who sold his summer cabin, "is that a cabin owner cannot cut down or gather wood in his own front yard. However, if you were camped at Indian Creek and wanted to walk across the road to pick up firewood, you could do it."

When the Mulcahys drove to their cabin for the first time this spring, they found the remains of a campfire someone had built in the middle of their driveway -- which, of course, isn't exactly theirs.

"If somebody wanted to pitch their tent right outside my front door, they could. It's Forest Service land," said Doug Gann, president of the Lake Wenatchee Summer Home Association. He calls it "apples and oranges" to compare cabins leased on Forest Service land to simple, deeded property.

"We're not arguing that we just want lower fees," Gann said. "We want the fee to be fair for what we get."

Gann, Berriochoa and other cabin-group representatives support a bill introduced last month by U.S. Rep Doc Hastings. H.R. 4888, the Cabin Fee Act of 2010, would establish five lease tiers based on appraised value. That, in turn, considers such aspects as desirability of location and amenities -- which would then be assigned an annual fee schedule (from $500 to $4,000, based on the tier) that would rise in concert with national inflation.

Certainly that would make things easier in some ways for the Forest Service, which no longer has the staff to do what it used to. A decade ago, the Naches Ranger District had two employees administering its summer-cabin program. With budget cutbacks, the district is now struggling to fund one person.

And revenue generated by the cabin fees doesn't stay in the Wenatchee National Forest. It disappears into the federal general fund, which is a frustration to parties on all sides.

"If our cabin fees went to the Naches Ranger District, we'd feel a whole lot better about this," said Berriochoa, the Chinook cabin-owners group president. "The Forest Service has a very difficult situation on its hands. Its budgets are continually being cut. You could even make the argument that, hey, are cabins even what the Forest Service should be about anymore?"

For now, though, it is. The Rusty and Marcella Mulcahys of the Naches Ranger District's cabin-fee system will continue to enjoy the family reunions, volleyball games and barbecues at their cabins as long as the fees remain reasonable. Should that time pass, some software multimillionaire or business magnate will be waiting in line to pay top dollar.

"There's such a demand for these cabins because there's just not that many of them," said Cook, the county assessor. "The number there now is the number there's going to be forever. They ain't makin' any more."