Visitors to Palm Beach County’s federal wildlife refuge will benefit from a three-year experiment that is diverting a bigger chunk of the refuge’s entrance-fee income to improvements there.

Once able to pocket only 30 percent of that money, the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge west of U.S. 441 has been allowed to keep 80 percent.

That will put possibly $80,000 in admissions revenue into its coffers instead of $30,000 for the current fiscal year.

“It is a blessing,” said Burkett Neely, manager of the 221-square-mile refuge.

That extra money should help the sawgrass-edged canoe path, which periodically becomes overgrown, stay open longer. The refuge had to close it from January to June, partly because it lacked funds to repair a trail-cutting machine used to keep it clear, Neely said.

The new revenue, collected since the program began Oct. 1, also will help the refuge replace a deteriorated tree-island picnic platform “that buzzards took over,” post new interpretive signs, pave dirt parking lots and build a new visitors’ booth at its Lee Road entrance west of Boynton Beach, Neely said.

The funds may even help subsidize the return of refuge airboat tours, which halted in 1990 with the closure of a concession and fish camp at the refuge’s Lox Road entrance west of Boca Raton.

Managing wildlife, not entertaining tourists, is the main thrust of the nation’s 510 federal refuges, said Ken Grannemann, chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s visitor service branch.

“We’re really not geared up for visitors the way the [National) Park Service is,” he said.

Still, improved public access is a goal of the pilot-fee program mandated by Congress and instituted at 60 refuges in the country.

As fees to use the refuge-system’s public lands climb – Loxahatchee raised what it charges per car from $4 to $5 on July 1 – visitors will see more of their dollars at work locally, where they spend them, Grannemann said.

The 20 percent that Loxahatchee and other heavily visited refuges must part with is helping pay for improvements at smaller ones that see less public patronage, Neely said.

With its visitor center, cypress swamp boardwalk, boat ramps, observation tower and bird-watching trails, the Loxahatchee refuge drew about 100,000 visitors in fiscal year 1996, making it the 65th busiest among all federal refuges, Grannemann said.

Neely said his refuge likely will draw more than 125,000 visitors by the end of this fiscal year. This summer, the refuge for the first time began selling a $12 annual visitor pass.

Besides the fatter admission earnings, money for Everglades restoration work is steered into the refuge’s $1.5 million annual budget, he said.

There are “the haves and have-nots” in the refuge system and “since I’m in the Everglades ecosystem, I’m one of the haves,” Neely said.

Before the entrance-fee experiment began, 70 percent of admission charges at all federal refuges – or about $1 million annually – would go into a wildlife service land-buying fund, Grannemann said.

The Loxahatchee refuge first charged an entrance fee in 1987 – $3 per car.

Some people complain about paying to use land bought with their tax dollars for public ownership, while others seem to have no problem with paying, Grannemann said.

“We have our own mixed feelings on it in the agency,” he said.

Nevertheless, he said, the wildlife service is trying to keep its rates reasonable.

“We’re not out to make a killing.”