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ARLINGTON, VA---Memorial Day has passed and summer camps nationwide will soon fill with kids. At camps like "Summer's Best Two Weeks" in Western Pennsylvania, youngsters will be challenged to grow and mature and, in the process, they'll create memories to last a lifetime.
That is, unless the government gets in their way.
"Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources told the summer camp-with more than three decades of experience rafting with its campers without a major accident-that it must now use expensive commercial outfitters to lead its trips, outfitters that have had four deaths in the past 10 years under their watch," said David Roland, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is representing Summer's Best Two Weeks. "According to court documents the Department filed last week with the Commonwealth Court, it is all about protecting the government-imposed cartel of commercial outfitters."
For more than 30 years, Summer's Best Two Weeks (SB2W), a non-profit non-denominational Christian summer camp located about an hour southeast of Pittsburgh in Boswell, Pa., helped its campers navigate the whitewater rapids of the nearby Lower Youghiogheny River in Ohiopyle State Park. From 1969 to 2001, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania treated the camp just like everyone else-as a private boater allowing Summer's Best Two Weeks to raft on the Lower Yough-even granting the camp explicit, written permission to do so in 1987.
But in 2001, despite the Department's admission in court documents filed last week that nothing had changed in either the river's conditions, or the Department's rules regarding private groups' use of the river, or the way in which SB2W conducted its explicitly authorized trips, the Department decided that the camp would have to use the expensive and more-dangerous government-imposed cartel.
After nearly five years of trying to reason with the Department, Summer's Best Two Weeks filed suit in April 2006 in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg seeking to declare unconstitutional the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' arbitrary denial of SB2W's freedom to raft on the same terms as other private boaters.
On May 22, the Department responded to the lawsuit and demonstrated its real concerns were not protecting the public, but rather protecting the cartel of specially favored commercial outfitters. The Department's filing said that it would not continue to let SB2W guide its own trips because it "threatens the viability of the four present outfitters." This is the sort of abuse of power, loss of rights and exclusion that inevitably follows government creation of a specially favored group of service providers.
As recently as 2003, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed that when government officials infringe on citizens' liberties in order to accomplish a legitimate government purpose, the means they use must have a real and substantial relationship to the ends they are trying to achieve. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' decision to deny Summer's Best Two Weeks the same freedoms available to other private boaters is only intended to protect the financial interests of the Commonwealth's cartel of commercial outfitters. This is not a legitimate government purpose. Pennsylvanians deserve better than to have their liberties sacrificed for the financial protection of politically connected businesses. 5-30-06
© 2006 North
Country Gazette
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