Thread: National Parks need care, not budget cuts

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National Parks need care, not budget cuts


Monitor editorial


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July 05. 2006 8:00AM


The National Park Service should replace the decorated arrowhead that serves as its symbol with a log cabin roofed with a blue plastic tarp. It's that bad. Years of budget cuts and neglect have taken their toll.

Earlier this month, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, a group of 515 people with a total of 15,000 years of park experience, warned park visitors to expect "decreased safety for visitors, longer emergency response times, endangerment of protected resources and dirtier and less well-maintained parks."

Although President Bush made a campaign promise to eliminate the $5 billion maintenance backlog facing the nation's 390 parks, recreation areas, seashores and historic sites, they have grown worse on his watch. His 2007 budget even calls for cutting $100 million from the parks' inadequate operating budget. According to the National Parks and Conservation Association, the parks system is given only two-thirds of the money it needs to operate.

The new cuts will add to a list of problems plaguing the parks. They include:

• A shortage of rangers to advise visitors and enforce the law.
• Dirty bathrooms and less frequent trash removal.
• Fewer interpretive programs and activities for the parks' 423 million visitors. The parks are down to one interpreter for every 100,000 visitors, according to the association.

• Thousands of buildings need attention. Many, including four of the 10 historic buildings in Gettysburg National Park, are in poor condition.

• Demand is heavy, but campgrounds have been closed and park hours reduced.

• There are too few rangers to protect visitors and prevent vandalism or the theft of historic artifacts.

• Poaching threatens to eliminate 19 species from the national parks, and there is little money to prevent it or to fight the invasive species that are displacing native plants and wildlife.

• Drug smugglers are using parks in California, Florida and Maine to bring in marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

• A chronic lack of money for law enforcement has allowed parts of parks in California and the Southwest to be taken over by gangs of AK-47-wielding illegal aliens.

Mexican drug lords have been sending teams of illegal immigrants into parks like Sequoia, Yosemite and Kings Canyon to camp and grow dope. The marijuana plants seized last year in California alone had a street value of $4.5 billion.

It may take sweeps through the most heavily infested public lands by National Guard troops to drive out the heavily armed growers. If so, that's a proper use of them.

The Reagan-era model of higher user fees, more help from charities and a heavier reliance on volunteers was never a good one. Parks owned by all should be maintained by all. Support for them should be generous. People rarely value anything that costs nothing. Entrance fees are necessary, but they should be no higher than needed to deter overuse and encourage good stewardship.

America's national parks are an irreplaceable legacy. They must not be stolen from the public, priced out of reach or allowed to decline.

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Where has the writer been? There will not be parks in Canamexamerica. Certainly, these too, are already at auction to foreign or private entities. The really sad thing is that we're gonna have all we can do to hold on to our own yards.