WASHINGTON (AP) — The Interior Department is increasing fees at the most popular national parks to $35 per vehicle, backing down from an earlier plan that would have forced visitors to pay $70 per vehicle to visit the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and other iconic parks.

A plan announced Thursday would boost fees at 17 popular parks by $5, up from the current $30 but far below the figure Interior proposed last fall.

The plan by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke drew widespread opposition from lawmakers and governors of both parties, who said the higher fees could exclude many Americans from enjoying national parks. The agency received more than 109,000 comments on the plan, most of them opposed.

The $35 fee applies mostly in the West and will affect such popular parks as Yellowstone, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain and Grand Teton parks, among others.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the fee hikes were needed to help maintain the parks and begin to address an $11.6 billion maintenance backlog.

“Every dollar spent to rebuild our parks will help bolster the gateway communities that rely on park visitation for economic vitality,” Zinke said.

Zinke thanked those who made their voices heard through the public comment process: “Your input has helped us develop a balanced plan that focuses on modest increases,” he said.

The maintenance backlog “isn’t going to be solved overnight and will require a multi-tiered approach as we work to provide badly needed revenue to repair infrastructure,” Zinke added.

Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Park Conservation Association, hailed the revised plan.

“The public spoke, and the administration listened,” Pierno said. The plan to nearly triple fees at popular parks was opposed by a range of businesses, gateway communities, governors, tourism groups, conservation organizations and the public, who all “said this was the wrong solution for parks’ repair needs,” she said.

The revised fee plan is “a big win for park lovers everywhere,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

“This is a prime example that activism works,” Grijalva added. “The American people raised their concerns, participated in the public comment period and made sure that the Trump White House knew the proposal was unpopular. If it wasn’t for the power of the people, Secretary Zinke would have gone ahead with his ridiculous proposal.”

Grijalva encouraged the public to speak out against a Trump administration plan to shrink some national monuments and open most U.S. coasts to oil drilling.

The plan announced Thursday sets a $5 increase for all parks that charge entrance fees. Parks that previously charged $15 will now charge $20; a $20 fee will rise to $25; and a $25 fee will now be $30.

The current $30 fee is the highest charged by the park service and applies to the 17 most-visited parks. More than two-thirds of national parks will remain free to enter.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Interior Department is backing down from a plan to impose steep fee increases at popular national parks in the face of widespread opposition from elected officials and the public.

The plan would nearly triple entrance fees at 17 of the nation’s most popular parks, including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and Zion, forcing visitors to pay $70 per vehicle during the peak summer season.

While plans are still being finalized, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said officials have “taken the public’s suggestions seriously and have amended the plan to reflect those” comments.

Zinke announced the fee hike last October, saying it could raise $70 million a year to pay for maintenance projects at the National Park Service. The plan drew immediate resistance from lawmakers and governors of both parties, who said the higher fees could exclude many Americans from enjoying national parks.

Most of the parks affected by the plan are in the West, including Mount Rainier and Olympic parks in Washington state, Rocky Mountain in Colorado and Grand Teton in Wyoming. Acadia National Park in Maine and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia also would be affected.

The park service received more than 109,000 comments on the proposal, most of them opposed, during a two-month comment period that ended in late December.

One commenter told the agency, “If I were considering a trip to one of these parks and suddenly found that the trip would incur an exorbitant entry fee, I would not…repeat NOT take my family on this trip.”

Emily Douce, budget and appropriations director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said she was glad that the Interior Department appears to be listening to the public.

While the group recognizes that fee increases are sometimes necessary, “We were adamantly against the fee proposal that came out,” Douce said. “It was too much, too fast.”

Spokeswoman Heather Swift said Tuesday that Zinke “remains laser-focused on rebuilding our park infrastructure” and addressing an $11 billion maintenance backlog in the parks.

The fee hike, along with a bipartisan bill pending in Congress to create a parks maintenance fund, “will provide a historic investment” in the park system, Swift said.

A bill co-sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, Steve Daines, R-Montana, and other lawmakers would use revenue from energy production on federal lands to help reduce the long-standing maintenance backlog at national parks.

The Washington Post first reported Interior’s reconsideration of the fee hike.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will announce plans next week to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds, an action that environmentalists and tribal leaders called illegal and another affront to Native Americans.

Trump has already offended Native Americans by overriding tribal objections to approve the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines and using a White House event honoring Navajo Code Talkers to take a political jab at a Democratic senator he has nicknamed “Pocahontas.”

Leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Trump plans to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 85 percent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half. The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state’s red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres to about 1.2 million acres.

The proposals prompted an outcry from environmental groups, tribal leaders and others who say Trump’s actions threaten important archaeological and cultural resources, especially Bears Ears, a more than 1.3 million-acre site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

Trump has told Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Utah officials that he will follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink both monuments, but the White House and Zinke’s office have not offered details about how they’d redraw the monument boundaries.

Trump is traveling to Utah on Monday and is expected to announce details about his plan to shrink the two monuments, the first and the largest monuments targeted for reduction by Trump after a review of monuments nationwide launched earlier this year.

The proposed changes would be the most significant reductions by any president to monument designations made under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president wide authority to protect federal sites considered historic or geographically or culturally significant.

Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments created in the past two decades, with Bears Ears the top priority. Trump called some monument designations by his Democratic predecessors a “massive federal land grab” that “should never have happened.”

President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears monument last year after tribal leaders and environmental groups clamored for protection of land considered sacred by Native Americans.

Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

The Washington Post first reported on the documents, which include proclamations that will split up both monuments into several smaller ones that will be renamed. The plan would cut the overall size of Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to 201,397 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante from nearly 1.9 million acres to 997,490 acres.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department said the newspaper “has very old, outdated and inaccurate information.”

The spokeswoman, Heather Swift, declined to offer any other details.

Utah’s Republican leaders, including Hatch, have said the monuments declared by Obama and Clinton unnecessarily locked up too much land and asked Trump to shrink or rescind them.

Hatch said in a statement Thursday that “details of the president’s announcement are his and his alone to share,” but added: “I appreciate his willingness to listen to my advice and even more importantly, to give the people of Utah a voice in this process.”

Trump’s action, “following Secretary Zinke’s fair, thorough and inclusive review, will represent a balanced solution and a win for everyone on all sides of this issue,” Hatch said.

Natalie Landreth, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said her group has already drafted a lawsuit to challenge Trump’s action, which she called unprecedented and illegal.

“He will not be able to bask in one day of applause at the Salt Lake City airport” before being sued, she said.

Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called Trump’s actions a disgrace. “He wants to turn public lands over to corporations to mine, frack, bulldoze and clear-cut until there’s nothing left,” she said.

Twenty-seven national monuments, mostly in the West, face the curtailing or elimination of protections put in place over the past two decades by presidents from both parties, the Interior Department said.

President Donald Trump ordered the review last month, saying protections imposed by his three immediate predecessors amounted to “a massive federal land grab” that “should never have happened.”

A list released Friday includes 22 monuments on federal land in 11 mostly Western states. These include Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Nevada’s Basin and Range and Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine.

The review also targets five marine monuments in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including a huge reserve in Hawaii established in 2006 by President George W. Bush and expanded last year by President Barack Obama.

Bush, Obama and Bill Clinton were among a host of presidents who protected hundreds of millions of acres under a 1906 law that authorizes the president to declare federal lands and waters as monuments and restrict their use.

Trump said the protections imposed by his predecessors “unilaterally put millions of acres of land and water under strict federal control, eliminating the ability of the people who actually live in those states to decide how best to use that land.”

The land-controls have “gotten worse and worse and worse, and now we’re going to free it up, which is what should have happened in the first place,” Trump said at a signing ceremony marking the executive order.

Trump accused Obama in particular of exploiting the 1906 Antiquities Act in an “egregious abuse of federal power,” adding that he was giving power “back to the states and to the people, where it belongs.”

In December, shortly before leaving office, Obama infuriated Utah Republicans by creating the Bears Ears National Monument on more than 1 million acres of land that’s sacred to Native Americans and home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings.

Republicans in the state asked Trump to take the unusual step of reversing Obama’s decision. They said the monument designation will stymie growth by closing the area to new commercial and energy development. The Antiquities Act does not give the president explicit power to undo a designation and no president has ever taken such a step.

Trump’s order also targets the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, created by Clinton in 1996, and Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, created last year by Obama. At 87,500 acres, Katahdin is the only one of the 22 monuments under review that is smaller than 100,000 acres, the minimum size designated by the order.

The Interior Department said Katahdin will be reviewed under a provision that singles out whether a monument was created or expanded without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders. The land east of Maine’s Baxter State Park was bought by Burt’s Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby, whose foundation donated it to the federal government.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been directed to produce an interim report next month and make a recommendation on Bears Ears, and then issue a final report within 120 days.

Zinke, who will visit Bears Ears and Grand Staircase early this coming week, said the department, for the first time, is seeking public comments on national monument designations. Public comment is not required when presidents create monuments under the Antiquities Act.

The request for comments “finally gives a voice to local communities and states when it comes to Antiquities Act monument designations,” Zinke said in a statement.”There is no predetermined outcome on any monument.”

But environmental groups said the Trump administration appears intent on lifting protections for federal lands.

“Trump wants to carve up this beautiful country into as many corporate giveaways for the oil and gas industry as possible,” Travis Nichols of Greenpeace USA said.

He urged the public to “resist the latest in a trend of senseless rollbacks by the Trump White House and demand the Interior Department protect the land and water for people in their states and across the country.”

Members of a coalition of five Western tribes that pushed for the Bears Ears designation have said they’re outraged the administration will review a decision they say was already scrutinized by the Obama administration, including a multi-day visit last year by then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.

“Once it’s designated, it’s designated,” said Davis Filfred of the Navajo Nation. Trump “should just honor our past leaders and those who were before him. He’s disregarding the Native Americans, the first people of this nation. This is sacred land.”