Confronting the crisis in our national parks - Cover Story

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1997 by James M. Ridenour

Despite occasional success stories, the national park system is slipping deeper into disrepair. Roads in Yellowstone are falling apart. Buildings need new roofs. Infrastructure items such as water, sewer, and utilities are in bad shape. Estimates of the maintenance backlog range from $2,000,000,000 to $8,000,000,000; no matter which estimate one believes, the number is big and getting bigger. The decaying infrastructure of the system is emblematic of the problem at all levels of government.

There are two strategies that need to be addressed: increasing revenues or decreasing expenditures. Some combination of these two strategies represent the only viable plan for putting the parks back on a path to a healthy status by 2010.

The Federal government has "thinned the blood" of the national parks system by adding units that do not meet the tests of national significance. This headlong rush into adding parks that do not belong in the system can be laid directly on the doorstep of Congress, which has treated the National Park Service as if it were an economic development agency, rather than the protector and conservator of the nation's finest resources.

Fiscal sanity appears to be more popular in Washington these days, but for the National Park Service, it comes a little late. Loaded with pork-barrel projects, the NPS finds itself struggling to keep the nation's finest natural and cultural resources alive and operational due to a drain that siphons off needed dollars to projects that more realistically should be operated by state or local government.

It doesn't take a genius to look at the list of national park units to understand how some of these sites came into existence. The entrance of many of these units onto the Federal payroll can be traced directly to the financial condition of state or local government at the time Congress brought them into the national system.

There was a proposed legislation a few years ago that would have addressed the issue of the NPS being loaded down with the financial burden of park sites of less than national significance. Opponents successfully labeled the legislation "a parks closure bill," and Congress got nervous and did not stand its ground on the issue despite strong bipartisan support from well-regarded parks-oriented legislators. That legislation, in some form, should be revisited.

Having less than deserving park sites on the national payroll is the single most costly issue the NPS deals with. It dwarfs other money-saving ideas that may help, but not heal, the system. There are a number of other possibilities that could increase revenues and decrease expenses, but they represent drops in the bucket compared to this major issue.

Most of the park sites I might list for reconsideration have tremendous value to the areas where they are located. These may be great tourist attractions or provide excellent local recreation opportunities. They even may have regional significance. However, their national significance is in question and I would hazard a guess that, if the money issues could be solved, state and local government or the private sector -- perhaps locally organized nonprofits -- would manage many of these sites very well. The public would continue to be well-served.

I can hear the cries and moans now! This might be tougher to do than military base closures. Congress might even consider a weaning process that turns control of some park sites back to local government over a period of years. This will be extremely controversial, but the time has come to deal with controversial issues.

I am a strong advocate of state and local parks. I was reviewing past testimony I have given in Congress and found that, as director of the National Park Service, I supported $60,000,000 to go to state and local governments from the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the 1993 budget. I bring this up as a way of saying that I think the bulk of the people served by park programs in this country are served by state and local parks. These often have a different focus than the national parks, but they are no less important. By and large, I believe that state and local governments should own and manage those parks.

One idea that has obvious merit is to increase user fees at the parks. The most obvious example is gate fees. There is more money expended on popcorn at the nation's movie theaters than is spent for the operations budget of the nation's parks. You can't take a family of four to a first-run movie and buy a snack or two as cheaply as you can take that same family through the gates of the national parks.

There is strong feeling that people will pay the increase as long as they are confident the money is going back into the park. However, they have a fear or suspicion that the money will go back to Washington, and experience tells us that money never makes the round-trip to Washington without a significant drain somewhere along the Potomac. There is further concern that Congress will cut the appropriation to the NPS by the amount that is collected from increased fees, thus punishing the parks for being more aggressive fee collectors. Unless the push for more and higher fee collections results in visible improvements in the parks, I would predict unhappy voters.