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Picnics still a hot ticket despite fee

People line up to reserve shelters, help pay for cleaning and upkeep

By Michael Andersen
Published: February 6, 2010, 12:00am

A new set of picnic shelter fees couldn’t stop Clark County’s annual stampede for summer picnic-shelter reservations.

So far, 295 people have reserved shelters at the county’s parks. There were 250 placed Monday, the first day they were offered.

That’s up from 223 reservations last year, when reservations were free.

The new fees of $25 to $100, based on shelter size, brought in $14,475 on Monday alone, according to the city-county parks office.

Bruce Sloniker, of the Sherwood neighborhood near Salmon Creek, said there were about 12 people in line when he showed up at 4:30 a.m. on a mission to score Southwest Washington’s most precious commodity: a shelter at Lewisville Park on Independence Day.

“My wife’s family has been having Fourth of July out there since time began,” Sloniker said. “We were not happy about the fees, but what do you do? Can’t stop tradition.”

He put up a $25 reservation fee for the 70-person shelter, which his family expects to fill almost completely.

The fees go toward shelter cleaning and maintenance, which was previously covered by taxpayers in general.

Some shelters don’t require reservations. Visit http://www.ci.vancouver.wa.us/parks-recreation/parks_trails/reservations.htm for a complete list.

Shelters that aren’t reserved will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Signs are posted on the shelters to signify whether they’re reserved for a given day.

Sue Mueller, an adult leader for Cub Scout Pack 326 at Lincoln Elementary School in Vancouver, didn’t face as much competition for a shelter at Vancouver Lake on Saturday, June 10.

She tried calling in at 10:30 a.m., but after hearing it could take a full day to get a staff response, she stopped by in person to reserve the shelter.

“Fifty bucks to reserve a space — that’s quite a bit of money now,” Mueller said. “I was expecting maybe $10, $25, just to keep people honest.”

But the pack couldn’t hold its event without a proper reservation, so she bit the bullet.

“It’s a way to get their last hurrah and games and stuff, so it’s worth the money,” she said. “We just take it out of our fees.”

Brian Potter, who organizes the annual park-shelter reservation effort, said he was “pleasantly surprised by how smooth it went.”

“It seemed there was enough articles, enough press releases put out, as well as the postcards we’d sent out to everybody” who’d reserved shelters in the past, Potter said.

So, if the fees weren’t high enough to stop key shelters from selling out on the first day, could some of them get higher still?

Potter said it’s always difficult to introduce fees for anything that’s been free in the past.

But he said that even with the new fees, county residents are still getting a bargain.

“There’s not a jurisdiction anywhere around the state or in Oregon that does not have a reservation system that includes some sort of a fee schedule,” Potter said. “We are significantly under what the average is for the cost of a shelter.”

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