America’s national
parks are facing a financial crisis: Overall, the parks have a $600 million
shortfall, on top of a maintenance backlog estimated at $4.5 billion to $9.7
billion, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. In response,
the National Park Service (NPS) and Congress are devising new priorities, guidelines
and methods for fundraising, some of which have proven controversial.
President Bush met with National Park
Service employees in California’s Santa Monica Mountains in August 2003,
to address maintenance backlogs in the parks, which are estimated to be $4.5
billion to $9.7 billion. Image courtesy of DOI.
NPS, established in 1916 as a federally funded agency to preserve public lands,
is responsible for 388 sites, from Rocky Mountain National Park to the Frederick
Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. Traditionally, protection
and conservation have been the focus of park system management, says Bill Wade,
former superintendent at Shenandoah National Park and chair of the executive
council of the Coalition of NPS Retirees. But priorities could change toward
a heavier emphasis on recreational use, according to language in a newly revised
management plan, he says, in review until mid-January.
Strategies are also shifting for funding the park service, which is underfunded
annually by one-third, says Craig Obey, head of the National Parks Conservation
Association, a nonprofit advocacy group set up in 1919 for the national parks
and the park system. Although NPS has always relied on philanthropy, from land
gifts to money from nonprofit foundations, such as the National Parks Foundation,
as well as new and old “friends” groups affiliated with specific parks,
the current NPS administration is putting a “strong increasing emphasis”
on partnerships with nonprofit organizations and others, Wade says. “The
shift has been dramatic in the last several years in increasing revenues from
these organizations,” a reliance Wade and others find worrisome.
Now, an additional revenue source could be corporate gifts, in a policy announced
by NPS Director Fran Mainella on Oct. 6 (the 60-day review period ends Dec.
5). While Wade and others say that allowing commercial interests in national
parks could have unexpected pitfalls, Ken Olson, the president of Friends of
Acadia National Park in Maine, says that “there is a place for corporate
funding in national parks. It’s just a matter of how tastefully the contributions
are carried out.”
In the meantime, friends groups are funding more and more of what may be considered
national parks’ everyday activities. According to a business plan conducted
several years ago, Acadia’s shortfalls amount to about 53 percent of its
current congressionally mandated budget, whereas most parks are operating with
around 30 percent shortfalls. Even though the Acadia Friends organization’s
philosophy is to not fund daily government operations, the group’s money
still supports employees who maintain more than 100 kilometers of carriage roads
originally gifted to the park by the Rockefeller family.
“We’ve crossed the bright line,” says Debra Tuck, head of the
Grand Canyon National Park Foundation, “between federal responsibility
and private opportunity.” Established in 1995, Grand Canyon National Park
Foundation has raised $14 million in mostly private donations, with only 5 percent
from corporations — given to such projects as trail-building on both rims
of the Grand Canyon, controlling invasive species in the canyon itself and protecting
endangered wild condors. “If we didn’t fund the condor program, the
program would not be funded,” Tuck says. With one wildlife biologist for
the entire 4-million-square-kilometer park, she says the organization must help
fund science there.
Olson says that if cuts from Congress continue, philanthropy groups will lose
their private donors, particularly if donations “are offset by cuts at
the park level,” in programs or infrastructure. Philanthropic donors typically
withdraw funding from what they perceive to be poorly supported enterprises,
he and other foundation heads say.
Congress has weighed in on its responsibility in several ways. Last April, Sen.
John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) sponsored bills in each
house to provide funds to address the maintenance backlog, among other issues,
under the National Parks Centennial Act. Currently under consideration, those
bills will not come to fruition for some time, observers say.
The most recent high-profile proposals for change in the national park system
have come from Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). Among other declarations, Pombo
listed 15 national historic sites and reserves to sell. Compromises in October
took much of that language out of his bill.
Pombo also called for reopening national park lands to mining and resource industry
bids, governed by the 1872 General Mining Law. Pombo would increase the controversial
law’s low fees — $2.50 or $5 an acre — to $1,000 per application.
Whether Congress will accept these measures remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the budget for fiscal year 2006 cuts back on national park funding
by about 1 percent. It is also millions of dollars less than what parks received
five years ago.
With inflation, the real-dollar reductions leave park superintendents in a bind
to decide what to fund, which normally ends up being mandated cost-of-living
increases for employee salaries and other basic operating costs, rather than
maintenance or programs deemed unnecessary.
Naomi Lubick
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