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June 26, 2004

Fixing Up the National Parks

For the most part, the history of the National Park Service is a sad tale of an idealistic vision undermined by the government's neglect. Despite some bursts of growth and the public's enormous support for America's national parks, Washington has chronically failed to pay the bills. The parks' operating budgets have nearly always been too skimpy, and in recent years a substantial backlog of deferred maintenance has built up. Every now and then, a politician offers to do something about it. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower began a successful 10-year campaign, called Mission 66, to spend a billion dollars upgrading services and facilities. And during the 2000 campaign, George Bush promised to do away with the maintenance backlog within five years.

But what this administration is likely to be remembered for is telling us how big the problem is, not solving it. To his credit, President Bush has asked the National Park Service to create a detailed inventory of the condition of such things as roads, bridges and buildings in the park system. If nothing else, this means a giant national to-do list and, perhaps, a meaningful dollar figure for what it will really cost to bring the parks back up to snuff.

Right now, the best guess of the cost of all that deferred maintenance hovers somewhere between $4.1 billion and $6.8 billion. The administration says it is on track to have spent $4.9 billion on the backlog by next year. But according to the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, this administration has added only $662 million in new spending for the national parks since it took office. The rest is creative accounting.

Park visitors certainly notice things like bad roads and rundown buildings, which are the results of deferred maintenance. But what this summer's tourists are also going to notice is a serious reduction in staff levels, the result of an operating budget for the park service that by some estimates is $600 million lower than it should be.

The administration has proposed a very modest increase in the park service's annual budget, but most of that increase has been absorbed by rising costs, including some that stem from homeland security issues. In fact, what that new budget entails, according to the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees, is often a drop in the budget for individual parks, leading to fewer seasonal rangers and interpreters, and shorter hours for visitor centers. It's also likely to mean inadequate law enforcement and emergency services. When people talk about smaller government, they usually don't mean fewer park rangers.

Most Americans know why Congress and the White House can't find the money to fix the parks: tax cuts and war, which have sharply reduced the money available for other programs.

Indeed, as time has passed, Mr. Bush's language on the parks has gotten softer and softer. Once he was going to eliminate the backlog. Now, in his current budget request, he merely hopes to address it. He can address it all it wants, but it's going to take another Mission 66, a wholehearted national effort, to set the National Park Service back on the right path.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company