An ugly Heritage: the poor man's national park; the citizen's burden

National Review, Jan 28, 2008 by John J. Miller

A FEW years ago, Lee Ott was driving around his vegetable farm in Yuma, Ariz., when he spotted a crew of surveyors putting stakes in his land. "I stopped and asked them what was going on," he recalls. It turned out they were marking the boundaries of the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area. Ott's farm fell entirely within its 22 square miles, and nobody had bothered to tell him. "I became worried because I wanted to build a new house and a shop on the farm," he says. "I didn't need anybody to give me a bunch of rules about how they should look or whether I could even build them."

So he decided to fight back. He met with the Yuma County Farm Bureau, which then contacted all of the landowners within the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area. "About 600 people came to our meeting," says Harold Maxwell, a farm-equipment distributor. "When I asked for a show of hands from those who knew they were in the NHA, only one hand went up."

National Heritage Areas are like a poor man's National Park--they aren't actually owned by the federal government, but they're zoned by it. Instead of employing Park Rangers in stiff-brimmed hats, they're often administered by liberal groups that want to weaken the property rights of the people who hold a piece of land within or even near NHA boundaries. This is generally done in the name of historic preservation and environmental conservation. The Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, for instance, includes an old territorial prison and some wetlands along the Colorado River. Yet NHAs are perhaps best regarded as a clever combination of pork-barrel spending and land-use regulations--and they're an increasingly popular tool for slow-growth activists who bristle at the thought of economic development that they don't personally control.

Since the first NHA was created in 1984 to preserve a 61-mile canal that runs between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, more than three dozen have come into existence. Today, they're a growth industry: Ten were added in 2006 alone, and last fall, the House of Representatives passed a $135 million bill that would set up six more. Some, such as the one in Yuma, are just dots on the map. Others are sprawling. The Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area takes up the entire state.

"These are basically federal zoning laws," says Peyton Knight of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a free-market think tank that has tried to draw attention to the problem. The rules governing NHAs vary from place to place, but they tend to have a few features in common. One important element is the involvement of a "management entity" that works in conjunction with the Park Service to come up with a plan--in the case of one NHA, this means creating an "inventory" of properties of "national historic significance" that it wants "preserved," "managed," or "acquired."

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Sometimes the ambitions of an NHA amount merely to a bit of parkland pump-priming. The website of the Rivers of Steel NHA near Pittsburgh boasts that it "is spearheading a drive" to have the National Park Service absorb an old steel mill and mentions a bill in Congress. So it's a federally funded organization that lobbies Washington for ever more subsidies.

But does the National Park Service really need more parks? It already operates almost 400 sites. Although some remain incredibly popular, visits within the system have declined in the last decade--a trend that started before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 resulted in fewer foreign visitors. What's more, the Department of the Interior is having trouble maintaining the properties it already runs. Its maintenance backlog is a multibillion-dollar wish list of unfunded repairs and improvements. The National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit group, says that the parks need an extra $800 million per year just to fund their existing operations adequately. This certainly isn't the result of a Scrooge-like Bush administration: The Park Service is spending more money per visitor, per acre, and per employee than ever before.

Supporters of NHAs insist that they aren't in the business of buying or regulating property, which is true in the sense that NHAs do neither of these things directly. But they work to achieve these results indirectly, by encouraging local governments to implement restrictive land-use plans. "That's how they achieve their goals--by pushing counties and towns to do what they can't do for themselves," says Cheryl Chumley, a Virginia writer who has tracked NHAs.

They do this by dangling the prospect of federal largesse in front of potential recipients. West Virginia's Wheeling NHA, which is basically a downtown preservation project, makes this explicit, according to a Heritage Foundation report by Chumley and Ron Ott. Its management plan calls for new zoning ordinances and the acquisition of private property. And how will it achieve these goals? As Chumley and Ott write, "Major funding to support the activities ... and the recommendations of this plan will be coming from the National Park Service." In the year prior to its most recent available tax filing, the Wheeling NHA received more than $2.5 million in government contributions--and not a dime from private sources.