Endangering Our National Parks: An Editorial (cont'd)

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And it goes far beyond the Golden State. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, in 2001, the park system's 280 million visitors collectively spent $10.6 billion during their visits. $4.5 billion of that went directly to personal income generation-that's a fancy way of saying the wages, salaries, and payroll benefits of the some 267,000 jobs in the parks and related tourism industries.

The Forest Service estimates that the 209 million annual visitors to America's roadless 58 acres pump $600 million into the economy and support 24,000 jobs.

The Bush White House would like to change all that.

PROMISES, PROMISES

"I will ensure that the federal government meets its responsibilities by devoting $5 billion to eliminate the backlog in maintenance and improvements at our national park." Wouldn't it be nice if a president said that?

Well one did—or at least he said it on his road to the White House. It was part of a stump speech George W. Bush gave on Oct 27, 2000, less than two weeks before the election.

Bush's team came up with $5 billion figure from the 1998 General Accounting Office estimate that, in addition to the regular annual costs to run America's National Parks, monuments, historic structures, and trails, it would take and extra $4.9 billion just top fix the crumbling facilities at parks and national monuments. This is called the backlog.

Bush crows that he's taken care of 900 backlog projects to the tune of $2.9 billion. Wouldn't that, too, be nice? Too bad it's a lie.

Of that $2.9 billion supposedly spent on the backlog, only "roughly $200 million to $300 million" was money spent above and beyond the regular maintenance costs according to Deputy Park Service Director Donald Murphy in his testimony before Congress last July. The remaining $2.6 billion or so was just regular park spending, not the backlog.

And those 900 projects supposedly addressed actually number 840, according to the Campaign to Protect America's lands. Fine, I won't quibble over the Administration's rounding up by 60. The problem is, the vast majority of those weren't backlog projects, but rather emergency ones (safety repairs, raw sewage cleanup and the like).

Park Service Director Fran Mainella has proudly pointed to California's historic lighthouse at Point Reyes as a "model for the Administration's commitment to repair projects at National Parks," according to the CPAL. The repair? The lighthouse's cogs are propped up by wooden crutches, and the thing got a new paint job.

The Mojave National Preserve can't hire the staff it needs to put a stop to poaching, hazardous dumping, and the theft of archaeological artifacts. Sequoia has closed four ranger stations. Lassen Volcanic National Park has had to cut its interpretive staff by half. Yosemite has cancelled its campfire talks for visitors. And the leaky roof at Gettysburg that Bush often cited in speeches as an example of the shameful neglect in our national parks? Still: drip, drip, drip, drip.

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