Money and Parks

America is unique in the way that it protects its natural heritage. The National Park System is the oldest and the largest in the world. The tradition of publicly protected land in the United States dates to the preservation of this city’s very own Boston Common in 1634. The first modern national park was created in 1872 when President Grant signed it into existence. This has grown into a system of parks that now preserves 79 million acres of American land and some of its most important heritage; from Valley Forge and Gettysburg to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today this heritage is under threat from its own popularity coupled with the reductions in services that come from budgetary shortfalls. That is why Congress and the Obama administration should be commended for including $900 million in the stimulus package specifically for the National Park System.

The deterioration of the National Park System is a national tragedy. It is the most extensive in the world and in 2007 attracted more than 250 million visitors. That is nearly one visit per capita. There are few, if any, other voluntary national programs that can claim that level of popularity. To lose this asset would be to lose one of the greatest tourist attractions in the country and is far more tragic than the loss of a few Wall Street bonus checks. Yet, without increasing the funds available for the Park system, towards which the stimulus package is a first step, these assets will be lost.

The National Park system currently runs at an annual budgetary shortfall of 600 million dollars, or 35%. This doesn’t include funding shortfalls for desperately needed infrastructure projects in order to bring park facilities up to date and that total at least $9 billion.
The state of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the nation’s longest and most visited park, illustrates perfectly the state of the system as a whole. Over 200 of the parkway’s restrooms are outdated and utilize sewage systems which were not designed to handle the volume of visitors the Parkway now sees each year. The roadway itself badly needs to be repaved in sections and many of the views, some of the most impressive in the South, are overgrown or no longer exist.

In terms of day to day operation the Parkway is also in dire straits. This year the management will continue a hiring freeze even though the workforce has declined 10% since 2001 and 25% of the positions are unoccupied. This number jumps to 40% in the upper levels of the management which has resulted in the delay in the development of a master plan for the Parkway’s management in the next decade. Finally, 40% of the parkway’s current employee’s will retire in the next five years and at the current funding levels the Parkway may not be able to replace them.

This pattern is replicated across the country, from Yosemite to the Hawaiian Volcanoes. In the face of these shortfalls the number of visitors to the parks increased by 6 million from 2003-2007. Without increased funding the parks will not survive the onslaught of visitors from a growing population on an aging infrastructure.

The $900 million in the stimulus package represents a first step in what will should be a long march towards rebuilding the infrastructure of the national parks. It also has interesting echoes of the past. While the first national park was founded in 1872 a large part of the current system was developed by another stimulus program about 60 years later. It was the Civilian Conservation Corp, created by Franklin Roosevelt in the Great Depression to employ the masses of recently unemployed workers, that built the infrastructure in dozens of parks all over the country. The current national park system may have been born out of a desire to conserve the precious places in the country but it was the necessity of rescuing the country from the depths of a depression that gave it an accessible and usable infrastructure in those parks. Today Obama and the Congress have the opportunity to help the country out of a recession – studies have shown that $1 invested in the National Park System generates $4 in the larger economy – by investing in the treasure that is the National Park System.

While there have been some accusations that the aid for the National Park System in the House version of the bill – 2.2 billion – was the result of questionable lobbying, the fact that the final version of the bill chose the Senate’s $900 million amount should lay these concerns to rest. This money is needed support that will not be wasted as pork in any one district. Rather, the money will be spread across the nation and it will allow the country to start repairing the damage that too much love has done to one of the nation’s greatest treasures.