Raft trip runs aground in court

BY KIRK SWAUGER
The Tribune-Democrat

BOSWELL July 29, 2008 11:15 pm

— A Somerset County Christian camp is prohibited from organized whitewater rafting at Ohiopyle State Park unless it hires one of four licensed outfitters, a panel of the Commonwealth Court has ruled.
Summer’s Best Two Weeks had sought an injunction ordering the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to allow the camp to conduct the trips through the private boat-launch reservation and quota system at the park.
For more than two decades, more than 15,000 campers and counselors have rafted the seven-mile stretch of the lower Youghiogheny River with no accidents or fatalities, state records show.
Judges Bernard McGinley, Dan Pellegrini and Mary Hannah Leavitt concluded state law bans all commercial activity within state parks without written permission by the DCNR. Under the broadest sense of the law, camp officials did not dispute that the rafting trips constitute commercial activity, though they challenged the regulation’s constitutionality.
A DCNR spokesman in Harrisburg said the agency will not comment on the ruling.
“Obviously, we’re disappointed in the ruling,” Kent Biery, the camp’s executive director, said Tuesday.
Biery said the camp will explore its options, noting that Leavitt said in a concurring opinion that Summer’s Best Two Weeks may not be a commercial activity within the meaning of the law.
The camp stopped providing the trips under state orders in 1992, saying it would be too expensive to hire an outside outfitter and incompatible with its mission.
“The wilderness-trip pinnacle was always the rafting trip,” Biery said. “There’s not really any way to replicate that.”
In 1978, the state granted licenses to four existing outfitters at Ohiopyle: Wilderness Voyageurs, Laurel Highlands River Tours, White Water Adventurers, and Mountain Streams and Trails, which later was purchased by Ohiopyle Trading Post.
Under the agreements, the outfitters pay the state a license fee of 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross receipts.
The state maintained Summer’s Best is a commercial guide service because it uses its own rafts and guides.
As such, state officials contended it would compete with the licensed outfitters.