Some things I just don't understand

I live in Gwinnett County. I pay taxes. Part of those taxes go to Gwinnett County Parks and Recreation. We have awesome parks, awesome running trails. We are fortunate. But, what I don't get is why the County insists on smothering out fledgling fitness programs, or relegating them to run on the streets and sidewalks because they can't afford to pay the fines and fees that GCPR is requiring of "commercial businesses".

What do I mean? Well, I am the organizer of a new, local training program for runners. We are a fledgling group in this area, even though we are a part of a much larger group called USA Fit. We have our own budget, our own expenses, and we manage ourselves, but benefit from the experience and knowledge and assistance of our parent fitness group. USA Fit has nearly (or maybe more by now) 50 groups across the country. All of these groups find their own running routes, be they on the streets or on local trails and parks.

Yet, for some reason I am the first group to be slapped on the wrist and told that because we are receiving money from our members for training, then we must pay GCPR $10 per hour for every hour that we use the running trails on our group run days. My first reaction was "WHAT?!!" This whole argument started out back in 2007 when we held our open Registration in the park in a Pavillion that we rented and paid for. When GCPR found out about the fact that we were collecting money from runners joining the group, they went ballistic and told us we would have to pay them THIRTY PERCENT for every registration fee we collected. Talk about ballistic...I was beyond that when they told me 30%! They told me that since I was collecting money on their property I had to pay a fee, so they lowered it to $10 per hour we ran the trails.

So, we did that our first season because we had no other option. However, this season, we decided to hold our registration elsewhere - OFF of GCPR property. This eliminated that whole "you are collecting money on our property" argument. Yet, they found out that we were running as a group on the PUBLIC trails, and again have begun telling us "pay up or stop running as a group on our trails". We are a fledgling group, and $10 an hour might not sound like much but when you are running for anywhere between 1 and 4 hours every weekend, that adds up and for a budget that is already in the red, that is killer.

What makes no sense to me is that we are not requiring GCPR to do anything....no space reservations, no lights, no guard or police required, no opening early requests, no trail cordoning off, NOTHING! NADA! We just want to meet together at the Parks so that we can run SAFELY and enjoy the company of each other.

The only difference is that instead of being just a group of friends running, we collect a registration fee so that we can cover our costs - t-shirts, website, advertising, etc. $100 for new people for 6 months and $70 for returning members. Those are basically DUES! That isn't exactly the same as the $300 a month that Boot Camps charge, AND the Boot Camps require a specific space of land in the park that can't be used by other people in the park while they are on it. When we run the trails EVERYONE can still run them!

So, am I just being a pain, or is GCPR trying to be a major profit center by screwing over the local running groups?