July 28, 2008 – Page 2039
First Lady Laura Bush is a passionate fan of the national parks. Every year, she joins old friends from Midland, Texas, to go hiking in a park. Her daughter, Jenna, accepted a marriage proposal at Acadia National Park in Maine. As honorary chairwoman of the National Park Foundation, Laura Bush has made preservation of the parks one of her signature issues.
“We want everyone to have the opportunity to make memories in our national parks, especially children,” the first lady said last year. “One of my children has already discovered that the national parks are also a great place for romance.”
During the final months of the Bush administration, she and Interior Secretary
“This administration is going to say, ‘We started the effort moving’ . . . the initiative of moving investment back into America’s parks,” said Lyle Laverty, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.
The administration’s hope is that the “Centennial Initiative” will reinvigorate the Park Service for a new century of visitors and cement the administration’s legacy as a defender of the parks.
With just weeks left in this session of Congress, however, time is running out for legislation to implement the program, and action probably will have to wait until the next Congress and administration. Moreover, critics describe the proposal as a last-ditch effort to patch up what they call the administration’s troubling record as steward of over 84 million acres of parks, monuments and preserves.
Over the past seven and a half years, the Interior Department made a series of management decisions about the parks that angered environmentalists, most notably in the reversal of a Clinton administration plan to phase out snowmobiles from Yellowstone National Park. A proposal that was eventually scrapped would have put a greater priority on visitor use of the parks — at the expense of protecting natural resources, in the view of its opponents. And Kempthorne is now in the midst of a dispute with House Democrats over uranium mining claims near the Grand Canyon.
Administration critics say that, despite its positive rhetoric, the government has spent its time promoting the agendas of interest groups and ignoring the needs of the parks. While the administration calls the Centennial Initiative a bold program, others argue it is not nearly ambitious enough to deal with a growing list of problems at the sites of many of the nation’s unique natural wonders.
At the most basic level, critics say President Bush hasn’t fulfilled promises to ensure the parks have adequate funding. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush touted his commitment to the Park Service to bolster his environmental credentials against former Vice President Al Gore. Standing beside the Skykomish River in Washington State, Bush pledged to spend billions of dollars to eliminate a backlog of park infrastructure repairs.
Park Service officials say Bush met this promise with almost $7 billion in spending over two terms. However, the parks now face an even larger $8.7 billion backlog in deferred maintenance. A report late last year to the Transportation Department, which maintains roads in the parks, found that 90 percent of them are in fair to poor condition. Watchdog groups say roofs are falling apart and that heating and cooling systems are in disrepair.
These deficiencies may not be obvious to casual visitors, said Dwight Pitcaithley, a former chief historian at the Park Service. “The heavy public use areas get the money so the visiting public is generally not aware of the problem,” he said. Now a professor of history at New Mexico State University, Pitcaithley worries that historical exhibits are out of date: “The average age of exhibits is 20 years.”
Since Bush took office, the administration and Congress have kept the Park Service’s budget almost flat. Counting Bush’s request for fiscal 2009, appropriations for the parks have grown by about 9 percent since 2001, and have fallen by almost 11 percent after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, Park Service funding surged 83 percent under President Bill Clinton and 49 percent in real terms.
Spending for Park Service operations, however, which pays for ranger salaries and other day-to-day expenses, has risen during the Bush administration, including a requested 8 percent increase for fiscal 2009. For this summer, the Park Service hired 3,000 new seasonal employees, bringing the total to almost twice as many as last year.
“When it comes to National Parks, I don’t want sound bites, I want sound policies,” Kempthorne said at a recent gathering of park superintendents. “That is why I recommended the largest operating budgets ever.”
Nonetheless, the increases haven’t allayed concerns that the parks lack sufficient staffing. For visitors, “a very common refrain is, ‘we spent three and a half or four hours there and we never saw a ranger,’” said Bill Wade, who is chairman of the executive council at the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees. And Scot McElveen, president of the Association of National Park Rangers, said guarding against terrorism has become an additional burden, inhibiting efforts to stop poaching and the theft of artifacts and fossils.
Meanwhile, increases for daily operations have cut into other parts of the budget. Spending on construction and rehabilitation of structures is 57 percent lower than in the last year of the Clinton administration, according to an analysis by Denis P. Galvin, who was deputy director of the Park Service under the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations. Money for land acquisition is down 92 percent, limiting expansion. Congress authorized a 125,000-acre addition to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona in 2004 but hasn’t provided the money. Also, Bush has added only a handful of units to the system.
But defenders of administration policies say the Park Service’s financial ills are easy to exaggerate. William Horn, who was assistant secretary of the Interior for fish, wildlife and parks under President Ronald Reagan, said the backlog of maintenance projects has been a problem for decades. Horn compares the backlog to a list of projects every homeowner wants to complete someday. “You don’t have unlimited resources, and given the size of the system you can come up with these enormous numbers,” he said.
The maintenance backlog will “never go away completely,” said Mary Bomar, director of the Park Service. In her view, the agency has made progress by completing an inventory of needed maintenance to better target priorities. “We now know the condition of every one of our buildings. We could not tell you that eight to 10 years ago,” Bomar said.
The administration is hoping a spending increase under its Centennial Initiative will establish a record of improvements to the park system. The goal is to provide $100 million a year in new spending for basic park services over the next decade. An additional $100 million would go to a new mandatory spending account to fund special projects, matched by a further $100 million in private donations.
Congress provided $25 million in seed money for the initiative last year, with that amount matched by private funding. The first round of special projects includes a $9 million revitalization of the Georgetown waterfront in Washington.
But long-term support for the initiative requires congressional action. The House Natural Resources Committee approved a bill this spring to set up the mandatory spending program, but the administration and Congress haven’t reached agreement on how to offset the cost and comply with congressional rules intended to keep a lid on the deficit.
Democratic Rep. Ra??l M. Grijalva of Arizona, chairman of the Natural Resources subcommittee with jurisdiction over the parks, said it may be too late for the administration to improve its image. “Unless they make a commitment to help with realistic offsets, and unless they quit talking about what we can get out of public lands and not what we can put in, then it’s a last-minute gesture to what I think is a legacy of ignoring and to some extent starving our public lands,” Grijalva said.
Several pending, controversial actions complicate the administration’s image. The EPA is finishing up a rule that might make it easier to build power plants near park boundaries. Proponents say the proposal makes scientific sense, but environmentalists counter that parks already face a pollution problem.
Even more contentious is a pending regulation to allow loaded guns in national parks. The National Rifle Association, along with more than half of the Senate, has argued for a change in the current policy to make park firearm rules consistent with state laws. Guns aren’t allowed in the parks now unless they are unloaded and stowed.
Activist groups have vowed to file suit if the gun regulation is made final, making it likely that the controversy will continue into the next administration. “Kempthorne’s legacy may be that he can’t protect anything and he put guns in the parks,” said Kristen Brengel, campaign director at the Wilderness Society.
In spite of these unresolved issues, Grijalva said the Centennial Initiative will remain a priority after Bush leaves office. “It would be a good thing to do,” he said. “If it moves into the next session, so be it.”
FOR FURTHER READING: The House Centennial Initiative bill is