Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter
A Plan for Stimulus Money: National Parks
There are any number of things that could be done with the upcoming, huge stimulus package to put Americans back to work and and improve infrastructure. About $2.5 billion of that could go to our national parks, says the National Parks Conservation Association, and they have a plan.By Joan McCarter, 1-07-09
Entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Jim Peaco, NPS photo.
Back in the 1930s, the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps essentially built our national parks:
The CCC built more than 200 museums, interpretive sites and park lodges, 2,000 hiking shelters, nearly 2,500 cabins, 400 bathhouses, 2,000 drinking fountains, and 12,000 latrines and toilets in the national parks. The corps also improved 600,000 miles of existing roads in the parks, built 125,000 miles of new roads and 40,000 bridges, and 8 million square yards of parking lots—an area equivalent to 2,500 football fields. CCC trail crews improved 100,000 miles of existing hiking trails and blazed 28,000 miles of new trails.
This staggering public work was meant to encourage outdoor recreation, and it did. America’s burgeoning car culture made vacationing in the parks and national forests easy and affordable, and the CCC’s roads, trails and facilities made those places even more attractive. In 1933, 3.5 million people visited national parks. By 1938, it was 16 million people, and 1941 brought 21 million.
That 21 million visits grew to 287.1 million, the peak reached in 1999. Visits to national parks have been declining steadily since, possibly because those 80 year old facilities and roads are what we still use in national parks today. As great as much of that construction is--you can’t visit one of the grand lodges in the parks and not appreciate that public investment--it’s getting worn a little thin. The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) estimates that the annual budget shortfall for the national parks is about $750 million. That’s led to a backlog of maintenance in the realm of $4.5 to $9.7 billion in total cost, according to the Congressional Research Service.
So the NPCA has a plan, in the form of a report (pdf), Working Assets: Reinvesting in National Parks to Create Jobs and Protect America’s Heritage. According to the press release accompanying the report:
In particular, NPCA’s new report highlights job-creating road repair projects in Acadia in Maine, Death Valley in California, and Glacier in Montana; accessibility improvements in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina; sewer system repair in Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio; historic building preservation in Dry Tortugas in Florida and Valley Forge in Pennsylvania; and construction of much-needed employee housing in the Grand Canyon as examples of ready-to-go national park projects nationwide.
Additional projects would repair trails and bridges that visitors use every day, control invasive species, “green” park facilities such as visitor centers, and launch clean energy programs. In total, these investments will create economic activity, including upwards of 57,000 jobs, and address critical park needs in time for the Park Service’s 2016 centennial.
A recent study commissioned by NPCA found that every federal dollar invested in national parks generates at least four dollars economic value to the public.
The report highlights some of the most urgent needs in our parks: at Valley Forge, two historic structures are crumbling; at Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio the deteriorating sewage system is putting the park’s waterways, wildlife, and visitors’ and staffs’ health at risk; in Death Valley, the roads are so narrow and deteriorated as to provide a driving hazard, as is true for the famous Going to the Sun road in Glacier National Park; at the nation’s most visited and most accessible park, Great Smoky Mountains, only 17 of the 94 facilities meet ADA requirements for disabled visitors.
As a complete national park junkie (I even collect the reproduction of the original WPA posters for all the parks I visit), I wholeheartedly endorse this plan for reinvestment in our parks. And as an American, I believe it’s critical that--as a nation--we reinvest in what really are the crown jewels of our nation. The thought of 57,000 jobs being created in this venture is just the icing on the cake.
The NPCA gives their top five reasons for this investment:
- National parks are significant national assets
- Chronic funding shortfalls have created system-wide needs
- National parks have $2.5 billion in ready-to-go job-creating projects
- National parks offer a tremendous 4-1 return on investment
- The nation invested successfully in national parks in the 1930s; the Park Service’s 2016 centennial offers a historic opportunity for our generation
We’ve got job creation, return on investment, great historic symbolism--it’s a win-win for the incoming Obama administration. But more than all of that, an Obama administration that fully embraced the national parks as a public good, not as yet another opportunity for privatizing so political cronies could make a few more bucks, would turn the page on the Bush administration’s malign neglect of these treasures.
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The CCC probably put jobs in rural areas for several reasons. First, putting crews out in the sticks keeps them out of potential trouble and leaves them more money to send home to the dust bowl farm.
Second, the rural areas WERE in fact hit harder by the Depression than urban areas.
Third, in urban areas hit hard, getting the unemployed out of town had a secondary function in that it took some pressure off the cooker.
We are not nearly there. So rather than uproot people or bringing in outside workers that will not be in camps as before, let's put them to work where people live and where the benefits will be felt first and most.
The CCC, like Skinner said, was long on people, and the raw material was logs and rocks in the forest. So it was hand saws, froe split boards, axe notched joinery, local rocks piled or mortared by many hands, and darn little machinery. The sewage treatment was pit toilets and trench latrines. If they put in water pipes, or sewer pipes, it was done with a #2 shovel, a pick ax, a pry bar, and lots of sweat expended, and with meat and potatoes for fuel. Grandpa called them "make work" projects, but his great-great grandson attends Y camp in buildings built by the CCC, and preserved in their historical honesty by the Antiquities Act. No roof shingle or board can be replaced without architect approval of material and construction. Pretty neat. I went there 60 years ago, and it is exactly the same today. I can have a common experience with my grandson.
However, I have no reason to believe that a present day CCC organization could build much of anything if only due to construction standards, ADA requirements, and the 70 years of tort cases lost by "inadequate" or "insufficient" or "sub standard" results that can be litigated, and would be. So it would appear to me that even just the planning to get to where you could let a contract to repair, redo, construct something new, in a National Park or Public Land of any kind would not come until well after the economy had repaired itself in the private sector, and things were well on their way to recovery. As much as we would like it to be, the government will not be the answer to building anew our economy other than by mostly not being in the way. There needs to be regulation, but at some point regulation becomes just another barrier to success. That fine line has to be walked. I have little faith in a Pelosi Congress, a Reid Senate, an Obama Presidency being one of a government that does not attempt to micro-manage the entirety of the private sector, all the while beating the drum of Republican failure. Bernie Madoff started on his Ponzi scheme in 1960, the year Kennedy was elected. So it started under Eisenhower, and only failed because Madoff announced to the world he had run a 50 year long Ponzi and could no longer service the debt, and none who had money invested with him now had a dime. No government intervention before his confession, even with complaints filed with the SEC a decade earlier reporting that his hedge fund was little more than a Ponzi.
Nope. Not one bit of faith that an Obama stimulus would accomplish anything timely or of economic value in repairing National Parks. Too much oversight and red tape, and public inputs, and gee, it is now 2015, and we have yet to let one contract and now Congress won't appropriate the money again, because we spent it fighting fire.
I still remember seeing a photo of a guy with a black horse and a Fresno leveling land around a monster pylon holding cross arms with giant transmission lines hanging from them, all coming from the soon to be completed Bonneville Dam. No backhoes. No trackhoes. Just a blind mare and a fresno, a flat shovel, and an abney.
So the issue becomes one of substituting manual labor for machinery, which we no longer do in this country or economy. Oh, maybe in some handpicking, hand weeding, for organic agriculture, we use a lot of people, but those are the jobs "that Americans won't do", and I have to wonder if Americans are prepared to drill with hand augurs, saw with hand saws, notch with chisels, and drive spikes with 4 pound hammer. If that is how we spend the stimulus, in wages, to be used for education, to support siblings and parents, we might gain some societal good from the stimulus. If the stimulus is to hire a contractor with the cheapest bid, a contractor owned offshore by some other country's entrepreneurs, then I have little faith in the whole of the deal. Just the bonding requirements to obtain a contract in this surety and banking atmosphere is nigh unto impossible.
There will be labor union wages paid to a few, and the profits will not be spent in our economy. And few will work in comparison to how many did in the CCC program. Do you really believe that you can have 500 young, racially diverse, culturally diverse, men and women in a tent camp on some national forest building trails, and not have the rodeo of all time in terms of having a modicum of discipline and deportment that will keep the local hoosegow below max occupancy? I don't think we can any longer get there from here. My opinion.
The unions went nuts. The liberal whackos accused him of trying to destroy what was left of the economy.
Why are all the liberal whackos suddenly for the exact same thing they swore would destroy us when president Reagan wanted to do it?
If he was such a monster for suggesting it, why is it such a terrific idea now?
My experience with journalism and numbers is that journalists are what they are because science and numbers is alien to their nature. Couldn't do science, wanted to make a statement in protection of the environment, became a journalist. The inability to differentiate between a board foot, a thousand board feet, a million board feet, and billion board feet, has been a stumbling block for meaningful and truthful reporting of timber, logging and lumber industry stories my whole life.
When people throw out numbers, you should find a way to relate those numbers to something you do understand or can visualize. 600,000 miles of roads. I read somewhere about 195 million acres of public land. 600,000 miles of existing roads, in the 1930s, to be improved, would be a mile of road for every 320 acres. A half section would have a mile of road. A half section is a half mile square. So you could have road along either side, or a road dividing the half section into quarters. No matter how you examine it, that is a road density that defies explanation, especially in the 1930's. The 28,000 miles of trails is very likely. I believe that in a heartbeat. I have hiked a few of those miles. As a lad, I stayed in the three sided shelters every few miles on the Skyline Trail in Oregon, now called the Pacific Crest Trail, and all those shelters were obliterated, burned, to conform with the 1964 Wilderness Act. Zealots ruled the day. Historical structures razed to satisfy a very wrong headed rule or staff decision. I believe the bridge numbers. Most of them are long gone, however, due to floods, fires, and decay. I even stayed in the former CCC camps, or in still standing buildings left over from that era, while in Boy Scouts. My scoutmaster was a USFS staff guy with a master key, and we used the CCC buildings in winter for weekend outings. All those are now gone, also.
I would like to know the real numbers, or the method of determining the numbers you refer to in the link. 600,000 miles of roads on National Park land being improved is a heady number, one that just won't pass the smell test. And the 125,000 miles of new road built on National Park land also bears scrutiny. Too many miles of road on too few acres of land to make sense.
The elephant in the living room when it comes to doing anything in NPs, or NFs for that matter, is the multitude of environmental lawsuits that would blossom like dandelions in May. They would end up with all of the money the politicos didn't get.
Thanks
You hit on part of the problem.
You want local contractors, unions will want only union workers, others will want preference given to minorities and so on.
It'll just be another handout with nobody really expected to work.
So what would the hiring process be like?
personally, i would like to see the campgrounds, especially in yellowstone go back to the park service. i saw far too much mismanagement, and never once saw a ranger driving through checking campsites for being bear clean.
Rules on noise pollution need to be made and enforced in our national parks. of course no one would argue that roads with adequate pull outs would be helpful both to the visitor and the wild life. Finally, wild life under passes should be put in to link yellowstone to the greater yellowstone ecosystem.
in the end, we will bolster gate communities, the tourist industry in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. We will educate people about the environment and the need to preserve the ecosystem. We will send people home refreshed and less depressed with a new perspective about their world. Something that is difficult to gage with economic stimulus formulas.
As for checking campsites, I got a warning for using a plain jug of water to hold my occupied sign down.
Construction contracts are (generally) local contractors with local employees from office workers to field construction employees. The current emphasis is on utilizing small business contractors.
The backlog of projects that are awaiting funding and ready to go just as soon as a stimulus package is approved will put many, many folks back to work within their respective local economies. Not to mention improvements to the Parks for concessions and so forth. The Government does not DO the building. Local folks do. This is a wise investment in our history, heritage and pride and should not be overlooked.
This is an opportunity and not another entitlement.