PITTSTON FARM – Rick and Jeannie Sylvester can recall a time when the constant slapping of screen doors on cabins and roaring campfires in the fire pits were the norm in June at their campground in Seboomook.

In the past five years, however, June has been a quiet month for the couple’s business, with fewer people traveling to Seboomook Wilderness Campground located at the tip of Moosehead Lake, north of Rockwood.

Mary and Ken Twitchell of neighboring Pittston Farm also remember a time when they had to turn people away in June from their popular Father’s Day buffet of prime rib and scallops, but that hasn’t been the case in a number of years.

Both couples say their revenues started to decline in 1999 when North Maine Woods Inc., a nonprofit organization of private landowners, took over 20-Mile Checkpoint and initiated new road access fees on Seboomook Road, a state-owned gravel road.

The first three years after NMW arrived, Pittston Farm was lucky to get 40 people at each sitting of the Father’s Day buffet.

“It was sad, we had this food and no one came,” Mary Twitchell said.

Rick Sylvester estimated that he has lost 50 percent of his profit for the campground.

“We can show 10 years of steady profitable growth, and the last five years I can show you five years of unprofitable decline,” Sylvester said during a recent interview at Pittston Farm. “If July and August weren’t halfway decent, we’d be history, and it’s getting worse and worse.”

Fee changes made by NMW to accommodate the business owners have been appreciated, but they still maintain the fees should be abolished.

The access fee is not a new concern; rather, it has been a long-smoldering issue that finally has driven the Twitchells to put their wilderness paradise, the last remaining North Woods logging-era farm, up for sale and has made the Sylvesters wonder how long they can survive.

The business owners said they had a glimmer of hope that the access fee would be abolished when the state in December 2003 completed the purchase of 329,000 acres of land surrounding their remote properties in the Ragmuff-Seboomook region.

Now that hope is fading since the state asked NMW, at no cost to taxpayers, to oversee the state lands.

20-Mile Checkpoint has been in operation since the 1950s, but access fees were not implemented until 1987 when Great Northern Paper Co., at the time the majority landowner in the region, set the fees to manage the increasing number of recreational visitors to its lands and logging roads. That fee was $4 per vehicle per trip regardless of the length of stay for visitors.

Not until NMW arrived in 1999 did the fees increase. The organization, formed by paper companies and other landowners with 20,000 acres or more of forestland, serves as a watchdog over the private and state properties. It acts as caretaker of 3.5 million acres in the Moosehead Lake region and another 180,000 acres in the Jo-Mary Forest in Greater Brownville, according to Al Cowperthwaite, NMW executive director.

Visitors traveling to Pittston Farm for a meal today are charged $1 per person, Cowperthwaite said. A day-use fee of $5 a day per person for Maine residents 15 years old and over is charged during summer months. Children under 15, seniors over age 70, the business owners and their employees are exempt from the fee.

In comparison, nonresidents pay $8 a day per person for the same period. Visitors to sporting camps in the area are charged a resident fee of $18 a day per person or a nonresident fee of $25, regardless of the time of year or length of stay. NMW does offer special rates for family camping, lessees and camp lot owners and their guests within the North Maine Woods, Cowperthwaite said recently.

Last year, 20-Mile Checkpoint generated about $151,000 in revenues, which maintains the public picnic areas and toilet facilities on paper company and state land in the North Maine Woods and funds the salaries of five full-time employees and about 60 part-time employees, the executive director said.

The NMW official said he thought the access fees are just and pointed out that concessions have been made for the Sylvesters and the Twitchells.

In addition to adjusting the fees, NMW purchased a two-way radio to improve communications at Pittston Farm, advertised the two businesses in its brochure and has kept 20-Mile Checkpoint open longer on Thursday and Friday evenings to accommodate visitors to the two establishments.

“We’ve created an incentive for people to want to stay there; if they would publicize that rather than tell people they’re being run out of business, they would be much more profitable,” Cowperthwaite said.

The questions and issues that have been raised by the Sylvesters and the Twitchells since the state’s Seboomook acquisition are not new.

“We clearly understand their concerns about the fees and what the impact has been on their businesses,” Ralph Knoll, Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands deputy director, said recently. Whether the state will continue its affiliation with NMW will be addressed when an advisory committee has been formed to develop a management plan for the state land in the Ragmuff-Seboomook region, he said.

“Overall, we support the system,” Knoll said, because the organization serves as caretakers and provides a level of security on the lands. He said it is not unusual for visitors to pay an access fee to recreate on Maine lands because the fee helps offset maintenance and management costs. If the state withdrew from the organization, the management would fall to the state, the state official said.

But Knoll acknowledged, “I think the issue is what’s reasonable and fair.”

“As small-business owners we feel we are being singled out and treated unfairly by the Department of Conservation and the North Maine Woods,” Sylvester said. “While they’re doing all the studies we are drowning fast,” he said.

When the Sylvesters and the Twitchells learned the state would be their neighbor, they figured the access fees would be eliminated because Maine residents already are paying the state to recreate in the region through the Tree Growth Tax, Rick Sylvester said.

What is especially irritating about the access fees, Sylvester said, is the fact that their visitors already pay the state a 7 percent lodging tax and a 5 percent tax on store items.

“We liken it to the state going out next week on Western Avenue in Augusta and putting up a gate and charging $5 a head to get to the Senator Inn, where they collect 7 percent lodging tax just like we do,” Sylvester said “They’re [visitors] getting a double whammy.”

Like the Twitchells, Sylvester said he couldn’t increase his rates because of the toll the access fees are taking on his customers. If the cost of a vacation in the region is too high, his customers will go elsewhere, he said.

Mary Twitchell said customers already are going elsewhere rather than Pittston Farm. Now that the day use fee is $1, attendance has improved, but customers who came for years before the fee was imposed have stopped coming.

The damage has been done, she said.

“The average family has paid its dues,” Mary Twitchell said. “It’s not about the money, it’s about the fact that people are being used. They’ve taken away a basic right of the people and they need to return it.”

Sylvester agrees. Paying state taxes “sure as hell should be enough to travel from the checkpoint to our private businesses,” he said.