March 17, 1998
Who would have thought? Officials take a leaf from Jimmy Breslin over user fees
by Davis Helberg

There was a character in Jimmy Breslin’s first book by the name of Marvin the Torch.

Marvin charged the users of his services a fee to "build an empty lot."

The book ("The World of Jimmy Breslin") was written in 1963, so the timing is just about right for Marvin to have some adult offspring. I don’t know how many there are, but I think they all work at the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C., and their father’s motto is imbedded in their pysches.

How else to understand that every time we turn around these days the maritime industry is targeted---by OMB, we are usually told---for yet another user fee? And how do we stay competitive when these seemingly endless artificial fees threaten to drive our business to foreign ports or, domestically, to the railroads?

How, in other words, do we protect ourselves from Marvin’s legacy of empty lots?

The latest case in point is the Administration’s proposal to collect user fees through the Coast Guard and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for what’s being called "navigational assistance services."

Collections by the two agencies are targeted at $176 million annually after a partial first year (this year) assessment of $38 million. The Coast Guard portion, $165 million annually after a first-year’s take of $35 million, would come from "the placement and maintenance of buoys and other short-range aids-to-navigation, radio navigation, and vessel traffic services."

Now there’s a slippery term: "vessel traffic services." The people who dream up this stuff (presumably the latter day Marvins at OMB) like to leave themselves all kinds of room for interpretation. It’s easier, you see, to start with an ambiguity and make it fit somewhere later, especially when federal law says "user fees" may be imposed only "for specific (government) services to specific individuals or companies."

It’s also interesting to note that the tax (if I may be so non-governmental as to call it by its right name) would not apply to fishing and recreational vessels. They would be exempt.

Ol’ Marvin obviously taught his progeny how to count voters. There are 20.1 million recreational and fishing vessels in the U.S., according to Coast Guard estimates, and about 78 million recreational boaters who annually use the nation’s navigable waters.

By comparison, the Coast Guard says there are 46,000 U.S. commercial vessels (excluding those used in commercial fishing) and about 7,500 foreign-flag ships annually using the waterways.

Someone obviously remembered what happened in 1990 when a $25 federal fee was assessed pleasure craft longer than 16 feet. Congress got burned so badly it repealed the tax in six months---but let stand a 350 percent increase in the Customs Tonnage Tax on foreign ships, a blatant revenue rip-off imposed simultaneously with the short-lived boaters’ tax.

But maybe I’m too harsh on the OMB. Maybe, in fact, someone else is forcing the user-fee issue. Maybe the federal agencies charged with collecting the fees are just using OMB as a scapegoat.

Or, on the other hand, maybe we have raised a generation of the most skilled amateur boaters the world has ever known. Maybe we have 78 million recreationalists whose seafaring skills are so natural and so astounding they never need and never use any of the Coast Guard’s services.

Aids to navigation? Radio communications? Distress calls? Search and rescue? Environmental protection? Ice and flood control? Drug law enforcement?

"Coast Guard? Nope. Don’t need ‘em. I’ll just line this sucker up with that pine tree on yonder bank and let ‘er rip. Who’s got the opener?"

Sorry if I got carried away, but the very concept of another contrived user fee against an already beleaguered shipping industry is asinine.

The beneficiaries of Coast Guard and NOAA services clearly go far beyond the maritime transportation industry.

And the beneficiaries of commercial shipping are our farmers, miners, manufacturers and, at the end of the day, our consumers. Penalizing the most efficient and environmentally benign form of commercial transportation for purposes of generating more government revenue is just flat wrong.

That’s what this all boils down to, doesn’t it? Another user fee, another tax, another flimsy excuse for trying to bring more money into the federal coffers.

Congress may reject this latest scheme, but if we have learned anything in the past decade it’s that we will see this come back again in another form. They never quit over at OMB.

It’s sort of like the character called "Baccala" in another Jimmy Breslin book, "The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight."

Every morning before he went to work, Baccala laid on the kitchen floor while his wife went outside to start his car. If the car didn’t blow up, Baccala got up, went outside, patted his wife on the head and started another day.

Davis Helberg is executive director of the Port of Duluth and a regular contributor to the On the Waterfront column.