Serving who?

The U.S. Forest Service seems to care more about the private companies that run many of the agency’s campgrounds than it does about disabled and older people who sleep there.

Funny, we thought the Forest Service’s motto was “caring for the land and serving people.”

Apparently what the agency really means is “serving people so long as it doesn’t mess up the campground operators’ bottom line.”

Fortunately, this troubling situation has not gone unnoticed in Congress.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, for instance, doesn’t think much of the Forest Service’s proposal to slash the 50 percent discount on camping fees to 10 percent for senior (age 62 and over) and disabled visitors who have bought lifetime passes that were supposed to entitle them to the full discount.

That proposal, interestingly, would apply to only those Forest Service campgrounds — public property, in other words — that are operated by private concessionaires.

Which is about 80 percent of them, including Union Creek Campground at Phillips Lake, and the three campgrounds in the Anthony Lakes basin.

Idaho’s congressional delegation sent Tidwell a similar letter.

We hope Tidwell reads those letters, and heeds their message.

If not, the Forest Service ought to do away with the charade and delete that “serving people” phrase from its motto.

Either that or just sell the public campgrounds already and stop pretending that serving the public actually trumps the profit margins of private firms.

It’s not that we don’t understand the purpose behind the Forest Service’s proposal.

Discounts mean less money for concessionaires.

Here’s how Derrick A. Crandall, president of the American Recreation Coalition, which supports the Forest Service plan, put it in a letter to the agency: “Changes over the past decade driven by social policy, not the business agreement represented in the concessions contract, have placed increasing burdens on the campground concessioners.”

And those burdens, of course, are so terribly onerous compared with the trifling matter of being confined to a wheelchair.

Never mind the notion of selling the campgrounds — perhaps the Forest Service should just give them to the private companies and let them keep every penny campers spend.

No burden, that.

Even setting aside for a moment the notion that private companies are more deserving of the federal government’s generosity than are elderly and disabled campers, we can’t muster much sympathy for those companies’ plight.

The Forest Service didn’t force them to sign contracts, after all.

And the companies knew the federal government sold lifetime passes that entitled buyers to the 50-percent discounts.

Finally, if money is such a problem, perhaps the Forest Service can explain what it’s doing with its $650 million share of last year’s stimulus bill.