BEYOND YELLOWSTONE'S BRICKS AND MORTAR
Does Bush’s Budget Proposal For National Parks Really Deliver Goods?
By Todd Wilkinson, 2-08-07
Let’s hear it: Three cheers.
The President says he wants to give the National Park Service more money to run Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Grand Canyon and other crown jewels!
Who could argue with that?
Within Mr. Bush’s overall $2.9 trillion federal spending plan, his Administration is proposing a Park Service budget of $2.4 billion, which translates into a reported increase of $230 million in new money over 2007. “That is the largest increase ever for park operations and programs that directly benefit national parks,” agency director Mary Bomar said in an announcement that was echoed Tuesday in a teleconference featuring Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.
The plan also calls for flowing another $3 billion into parks over the next decade to spruce them up in advance of the Park Service’s centennial celebration in 2016.
It sounds good. But what do the numbers REALLY mean?
Historical fact: In modern times, there’s NEVER been a president (Republican, Democrat, Lame Duck, or Chief Executive flying high in the polls) who didn’t favor spending more on national parks. Claiming you’re splurging on Yellowstone at the expense of other domestic programs has been the safe no-brainer position to take for over half a century. And predictably it produces a PR bonanza.
Never mind that this unfrugal Administration is seeking $50 billion in extra spending for the Pentagon at the same time that Congressional hearings are taking place on the whereabouts of billions of dollars in printed $100 bills that were flown to Baghdad at the start of the war, divvied out like play money to bribe Iraqi cooperation, then disappeared without any accountability and apparently, so far it seems, any culpability and/or criminal charges. (In today’s newspaper, there are also reports of graft allegedly involving U.S. soldiers who were part of the process for awarding construction money to rebuild Iraq).
So let’s get this straight: We force rangers to fill out elaborate expense sheets justifying how they use taxpayer money to duct tape parks together, we send park superintendents to Capitol Hill, as we have done for years, begging for more, and as a Homeland Security precaution, we ask banks to be suspicious of any citizen moving around wadfuls of bills, but the government is clueless when it comes to how mounds of cash the size of UPS trucks, transported in military planes, can vanish into thin air?
But back to our story.
Given that the last six years of the Bush Administration have been marked by low spiraling morale in the Park Service ranger ranks; the exodus of excellent professional employees who were fed up with political meddling from Washington; and an ongoing attempt to privatize parks that still persists, I asked one of the top watchdog groups for its interpretation of the budget.
Bill Wade, a former high-ranking park manager, who today oversees the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, says there’s good and bad news emerging from the announcements this week. The upshot is that the budget gives Park Service Director Bomar, a women who is respected for having come up through the agency ranks, more money to try and fix colossal infrastructure problems.
“With Mary coming in, there’s no question that morale is improving after it bottomed out during the tenure of her predecessor (Fran Mainella),” Wade says. “Mary is the advocate the Park Service should have had all along.”
The reality, Wade adds, “is that once the halo effect of the budget proposal wears off, everyone will realize that most of these big promises aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.”
Of course, the President’s plan to bolster park funding with an added $3 billion spread out over the next decade is far from absolute. He can only try and earmark funds while he is still in office. His successors may have other ideas. Lots of presidential administrations, including Bill Clinton’s, attempted to look, think, and plan beyond their own tenures with America’s public land management only to be thwarted by those next in line.
In recent years, despite a swelling Park Service maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars and a corresponding boom in developing new structures—for example, the tens of millions of dollars being spent to erect new visitor centers at Old Faithful and Canyon Village in Yellowstone—financial priorities have worked at cross purposes. Meanwhile,Wade says there’s actually been an eroding sense of esprit de corps in the ranks as professional positions have been eliminated. Naturalists who interact with the public have been overworked, scientific research funding has been made harder to get, and the agency mission has been challenged by attempts of political appointees to gut the enabling legislation of the Organic Act (which ironically will be touted at the NPS centennial in 2016).
A flood of public opposition, led by local, regional and national conservation organizations in concert with retired Park Service managers, ultimately forced the Interior Department to fall back in retreat after Interior political appointee Paul Hoffman of Cody, Wyoming attempted in unilateral fashion to edit the legal framework of the Organic Act, which historically has emphasized resource protection over resource exploitation, so that it would leave discretion to future superintendents, regional directors, national directors and yes, even to political appointees like Mr. Hoffman who have been hostile to environmentalists.
Wade calls part of the proposed budget plan “smoke and mirrors” in which available money is simply moved around. The “new” spending isn’t really that significant when it is spread across 390 different Park Service units—all in need of money— and one considers that rebuilding roadways in Yellowstone alone costs at least $1 million a mile. “A very good park superintent friend of mine pointed out just the other day that it’s relatively easy to get money for new buildings but once they are up it’s difficult to get Congress to appropriate more money for maintaining those structures,” Wade said. “As my friend noted, deferred maintenance today is tomorrow’s backlog.”
Having starved the agency, it now appears the Administration is making a stronger case for privatization. Was this all planned out from the beginning?
A critical component of the president’s plan includes funding of 3,000 new seasonal employee positions which is a good thing yet as Wade notes the last few years have produced a huge drain of experienced human capital (i.e. rangers who were committed to the ideals of the Park Service) who can’t easily be replaced—certainly not by bolstering seasonal positions over the short term or by “outsourcing” the positions. “The attrition and frustration and anxiety that have been present over the last four to six years isn’t going to be mitigated by money alone, nor will it bring the spirit of the agency back to where it should be,” Wade says.
A central worry among members of Wade’s organization, who collectively represent thousands of years of management experience, is the proposal to fund parks through a plan that relies on public funds being matched by private funds. “It continues us down the dangerous road of privatization,” he says. “The more that parks become dependent on private funds, the more beholden they are to the private companies that are involved and the more likely that donations become quid pro quo arrangements to advance private interests. In our mind, public parks ought to be funded with publicly appropriated money.”
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Would you take $10,000 in trade to give up information that allows the US to arrest the thugs who are operating in your neighborhood if the next month it is published in the clear that people like you in a certain area were the ones responsible?
So called journalists like Mr. Wilkinson should stick to more benign writing. Maybe they should report on what the dog catcher is doing this week. That way they wouldn't be responsible for continuously putting our young men and women in the military in harm's way. Or maybe it takes a non-journalist mind to understand matters of national security enough to know when to shut up. Either way, it's a sure bet that there are no young'ens from the Wilkinson loins presently in harms way over in Iraq. I guess it's OK to blast the military as long as it's not your own son or daughter being shot at with your literary bullets.
Loose lips sink ships, and I wonder how many self styled journalist/heroes are pulling the trigger on our secure operations over seas.
It didn't take long for the smarmy, quippy writers to find something wrong with the President’s boost to our national park budget.
I'd like to see what would be said of the new budget if it was coming from a Left wing office.
I don't know why the President even bothers, nothing he does is going to be enough for the left. Interestingly the OF visitor center is on hold because they cannot get it built for the money allocated. There was nothing wrong with any of the visitor centers, but the politicians (and yes I know Thomas was behind it) had money they couldn't wait to get rid of, and the Yellowsotne Association needed bigger book stores. I can't imagine how much it costs to heat and cool the one at Canyon.
"Never mind that this unfrugal Administration is seeking $50 billion in extra spending for the Pentagon at the same time that Congressional hearings are taking place on the whereabouts of billions of dollars in printed $100 bills that were flown to Baghdad at the start of the war, divvied out like play money to bribe Iraqi cooperation, then disappeared without any accountability and apparently, so far it seems, any culpability and/or criminal charges. (In today’s newspaper, there are also reports of graft allegedly involving U.S. soldiers who were part of the process for awarding construction money to rebuild Iraq).
So let’s get this straight: We force rangers to fill out elaborate expense sheets justifying how they use taxpayer money to duct tape parks together, we send park superintendents to Capitol Hill, as we have done for years, begging for more, and as a Homeland Security precaution, we ask banks to be suspicious of any citizen moving around wadfuls of bills, but the government is clueless when it comes to how mounds of cash the size of UPS trucks, transported in military planes, can vanish into thin air?"
Again, did you read the article?
Todd, if those government employees spend so much time filling out papers in detail, why don't we know exactly how much money has been spent on the wolf reintroduction, including the killing them from choppers?
I'm happy to see more money for our beleagured parks system, but the Bush proposal is just that -- a proposal, and speculative at that. A Democratically controlled Congress has to appropriate funds, and they may or may not follow all, some or none of Bush's proposal.
Extra money ($3B) to get ready for the NPS centennial is a worthy goal, but $2B is highly speculative: $1B appropriated by Congress as a challenge grant to raise a matching $1B from the private sector. What conservatives tend to ignore is that private money comes with strings, and the greater amount of money, the stronger the strings. There is a strong possibility that those strings will benefit recreation-oriented businesses and industries, especially since a representative of the American Recreation Coalition has been invited to be a member of the committee specially formed to formulate the rules for attracting this private money and spending it.
Certainly gateway communities and recreation businesses should be considered, but to what degree? What might seem perfectly appropriate to Mr. Marks (and his recreation-based business) might seem like gross over-commercialization to another.
As for credibility on NPS issues, I have found that the coalition of retirees can speak freely whereas their still-employed colleagues cannot, not without risking retribution from political hacks in an administration that has throughly emasculated the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers.
It hit the news and it was gone fast. I have not found a single environmental writer who has probed into it. Perhaps it is so closely guarded that they can't. But where is this money kept? Who has access to it? Is it being saved to make a big show when and if there is a democrat administration? Why isn't it being used, especially since it became necessary to raise fees, will that money be stashed too?
No amount of money appropriated for NPS use is going to do any good if there is a way of getting it out of the system.
While I am not fully comfortable quoting anyone who uses the pseudonym "WMD" and not certain that either Marion or Craig are truly "paid conservative posters" (one would think that even the rightwing would spend their money getting better quality), I do, however, believe that what "Heckle and Jeckle" have orchestrated here, working off Stu Marks' leadership, is something close to a softcore version of a spam attack and I continue to believe that NewWest needs to develop a strategy and policy on these kinds of situations.
What is there about questioning certain unexplained actions by the NPS that woudl make me a "paid conservative poster", and by someone ashamed to use his own name too? You can get a pretty good idea of who I am if you read the articles I wrote. A conservative, I am, proud to say, paid, never.
NPS needs reorganizatrion and like most federal agencies it is afflicted with the perverse disincentive for efficiency that obligates them to spend their budgets no matter what before the end of the fiscal year. If NPS could save wasted money and put it into their retirement system, we might see a change in their culture. And don't give that b.s. about neocons. I used to work for the federal government. I want them to prosper, but the crass political tactic of throwing more money at every problem is a cop out to the need for efficiency to restructure to get more money to the ground by eliminating layers of bureaucracy. If only we could get some NPS rangers to testify at Congressional hearings instead of the usual bureuacrats. Thanks for the opportunity to weigh in on this matter.
Evidently the entrance fees haven't been used for much if they have put 243 million into a kitty for "big projects". The unnecessary fancy visitor centers were paid for thru special appropriations and donations.
Waste is rampant in the government, there are too many layers and too many folks are able to work the system.
Steven Clark's posting has really opened the door on this topic (thank you, Steven). Political discourse is now routinely perverted by misinformation and disinformation that is deliberately spread by cynical propagandists that are sponsored, paid, or otherwise supported by a shadow government of what are truly modern corporate versions of feudalists. No, I don't believe that they consciously think in terms of the feudal concept; but, that is what it amounts to. Neither do I believe that a pot-bellied wedding photographer or the proud product of weasel ranching sheepherders truly understand the dynamics of their inconsistent and twisted opinions; but, I do believe that they are the fruit (no pun intended despite its applicability) of these organized disinformation campaigns. Steven Clark really hit it right on the head; the goal of these people is to organize and fund efforts to aggressively "discourage and demoralize liberal discussion" and what we see here on a regular basis, coming from the same sources over and over reflects that intent. I once posted that one of you outstanding muckraking new age journalists should do a serious piece, a book, on the rise and fall of Paul Hoffman and the gateway bandits. Now add a second and perhaps even more important idea: to do a similarly serious piece following the trail of Steven Clark's posting. The propaganda machine has most of the public believing that the overtly evil intent of the likes of Spaeth Communications is just mythology. It truly is not.
I have to admit I have a little trouble understanding why a proposal by the president to increase funding should create more than a discussion of accountability by NPS.
In the earl;y days wolves were essentially non existant most of the time. It took 42 years to eliminate 56 adult wolves and 80 puppies. Like it or not, the park cannot sustain the present wolf population for ever, especially with the other major predators, who were always present in much higher numbers than wolves.
I doubt that you could find a single wildlife biologist that would claim an area the size of Yellowstone could produce enough prey for the number of wolves and other predators calling it home. In fact the prediction has been for several years that the numbers would drop.
I have thought some of this anger is from the sense of entitlement held by the left. They truly feel they are entitled to whatever they want, no matter what, be it putting wolves on private land, locking ordinary folks out fo forests, getting fee paying ranchers out of "their forests", or whatever. Anyone who stands in their way is bitterly reviled and hated.
We will never bring disgrace to this our City by any act of dishonesty or cowardice, nor ever desert our suffering comrades in the ranks. We will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the City, both alone and with many; we will revere and obey the City's laws and do our best to incite a like respect in those above us who are prone to annul or set them at nought; we will strive unceasingly to quicken the public's sense of civic duty.
Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this City not only, not less, but greater, better, and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.
The words of the Youth of Athens over 2000 years ago.
Let's stop the bickering and get back to what's best for the parks. Work together people, nothing is ever accomplished by fighting.
The funniest part is how you think so much of yourselves that you would try to threaten a libel lawsuit because someone disagrees with you on an anonymous blog. Trust me you don't have a case to take to a civil court Craig. Get over yourself you all are trying to make these articles into something they aren't.
ALL politicians are nuthin' but larks.
If and how much or how many of WHAT
Is urgent and "needed"; it's sure a GREAT lot.
But SILENCE is deafening ~ nary a word
Been spoken 'bout YOU: all yet to be heard.
Ahhh, yes ... it IS true that those buck$ come from you.
But is there not something that JUST YOU can do???
In memories of loooooooong-ago stored in my head
Are visions of Park land with pine needle bed.
But sometime around a half-century ago
That "bed" was transplanted with TRASH that YOU sow.
For each little wild flower trying to live
There's hundreds of beer cans from people who "give".
So WHY ~ don't we wonder? ~do coins need to PAY
For those to bend over to clean up each day?
The toilets are closed with destruction, disgust;
Campsites demolished make spendin' a must.
Did YOU write graffiti on walls or a tree?
Did YOU stop to pick up the trash that YOU see?
There ain't enough BILLIONS to clean up behind
And fix all the damages done by mankind.
So if YOU want "progress" to care for a Park
It NOW is far past time: YOU must make YOUR mark.
A Park Service Budget expenses should meet
The NEW and IMPROVED ... not the trash at our feet.
"Parks" are not "palaces" built to impress.
If YOU would contribute the cost would be less.
There ain't enough money to tend without CARE.
For that it is YOU who must tend to your lair.
Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."
The parks. It might be good to privatise the "play" parks which can easily get revenue at the gates, but not the wildlife and fauna preservation parks the only cost for which is, or should be, the patrolling to keep out the poachers. Human activity in such parks should be close to zero.
Rose Mary's poem hit the nail on the head. The slobs among us are creating a mess. I wish we could see what picking up after others is costing us in this country, not only in NPs, but everywhere, I'm sure it would be staggering.
Stuart, your statement that " ... (for) wildlife and fauna preservation (in the) parks the only cost ... is, or should be, the patrolling to keep out the poachers" is one that does not address the vast amount of neglect prevalent within our forested areas that we have seen vibrantly illuminated by both fires and disease in recent years. Yes, some of the fires and some of the disease has climate, nature and human contributions to blame. But the fact remains that when our forests are basically abandoned without prudent care and thinning ~ little-to-no TLC throughout the Nation ~ and these areas are very often a killer of the wildlife and the fauna you reference as well as mankind. The toll is high and the situation is worsening.
But outsourcing the operations and management in that regard might also be a good idea and certainly one worthy of further investigation.
No privately operated business of any kind could survive more than 30 days if operated like gov.org does. It is far past time for the citizens of our Great Nation to recognize this FACT and curtail our dependency and/or our expectation that gov.org is "The Answer" to what ails us.
I do not believe that was either the intent of our founders nor is it what has served our Nation well in the past. And if The People do not figure this out in the very near future it may be too late ... if it is not already too late.
The best government = the least government possible ... or so it seems to me ... and so the history of our Nation illustrates.
You are right, Craig. It is no wonder that our National Parks don't work efficiently or for the benefit of its customer base.
That's what we are when we allow things to constantly repeat, never change anything, and whine about the consistently bad results.
Two major concerns as I see it are the administration's emphasis on private funds, i.e. privitization of park services and the allowance of branding and commercial advertising in our public park domains, and the highly likely dependence on funding from the selling of mineral claims and federal lands outright and the continued assault on the ANWR for profit.
Many people say that Bush is looking to start building a legacy that doesn't involve war and that this National Parks Centennial is something his lame duckness can now afford to spread some goodwill toward. I say that this administration gives not a damn as to what people think now or will think in the future and while we can applaud the obvious celebratory actions in honor of our impressive National Park Service, we must continue with a skeptical eye to follow the money.