THE NPS—OUT OF CONTROL

The conservative Washington Times recently offered another reason why the National Park Service is in such dire financial straits. According to the article:

"Despite limited funding for current projects, renegade employees secretly planned and designed four new major construction projects with a $243 million price tag, plus tens of millions for yearly operational expenses, the lawmakers discovered.’Diverting funds from critical backlog maintenance is unacceptable,’ they said in the letter. Park employees sidestepped a law that requires congressional approval of all construction projects costing more than $5 million by having outside ‘partners’ develop the plans."

The National Park Service is an agency out of control. They are in serious need of having their wings clipped and CONTRARY to what some people and some advocacy groups are saying, what ails the NPS can not be fixed simply by throwing money at the problem. The problem with the NPS is one of politics and ideologies. The problem with the NPS is that they have their priorities all wrong. The problem with the NPS is that the top leaders are aggressively pursuing a politician agenda and are neither looking out for the best interests of the park nor of the American People.

NOW—CELL PHONE COVERAGE IN THE NATIONAL PARKS

"The Park Service has seized upon public safety as an after the fact pretext; the agency has not even studied its public safety communications needs. Of greater concern, the logic of this new public safety argument dictates cell coverage over every square inch of the National Park System - a decision the National Park Service appeared to reach without one iota of public involvement."

PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility)

My suspicion is the issue of 'public safety' in a new NPS proposal to offer extensice cell phone coverage throughout the NPS system is little more than a red herring created by yet another PR genius to meet some existing need. More likely than not, the true explanation for blanketing our National Parks with cell towers has something to do with Park Service wanting its customers to feel confident that no matter where they roam, they will be connected to the outside world. They want their customers to be able to phone ahead and reserve a campsite or schedule a tour at their next travel destination. They even are exploring opportunities to provide 'interpretation' and access to visitor services using wireless technology... and perhaps this has a bearing on their current cell phone policies.

NPS managers know all too well that cellular phone service is crucial to business and today most successful NPS managers take their new role of being 'business facilitators' very seriously. If one were to dig below the surface, it's likely that one would discover the National Park Service's cell phone policy was developed in response to a direct request made upon them directly by the travel and tourism industry. Can anyone offer a more logical explanation than that???

LOSING FUNDING AT A NATIONAL PARK...WHO’S NEXT?

"We never want our funding to replace what is basically congressional responsibility." Friends of Acadia

Friends of Acadia is your quintessential National Parks Service "partner" organization. They actively support fee-demo, going so far as to sell park passes. They seek out corporate sponsorship for Acadia NP. They fundraise for the park and generally embrace a wide range of free-market solutions. In a nutshell, they play by today's rules. In exchange, they have earned a seat at the table.

So is it any surprise that funding for Acadia National Park is now being slashed? What better park to DEFUND than Acadia??? Where better to shift the burden of resource funding from allocated tax dollars and replace those dollars using the preferred free-market funding mechanisms of: 1)user-fees 2)volunteerism 3)partnerships 4)corporate sponsorships and 5)private philanthropy?? Friends of Acadia will be there to take up the slack, won't they!? To Friends of Acadia and indeed to all, I ask: What is the mission of the current Administration if not to replace what are congressional responsibilities with free-market solutions? What are the desired outcomes of their budget cutting, if not to promote and facilitate privatization and commercialization?? Is it better to help the Administration achieve its goals, as do the folks at Friends of Acadia??? Or is it more productive in the long-run to fight the SOBs who are destroying America, as do such truly excellent groups as Friends of Yosemite Valley, Friends of BC Parks, and Friends of the Clearwater?

Martin Luther King once said, "We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." "Today we will remember not the words of our natural enemies, but the unforced capitulations of our former friends.

NPS FUNDING CRISIS...continued.

A brand new budget-related scandal befell America's Crown Jewels today and it can be laid directly upon the Bush Administration and upon those persons occupying the topmost rungs within the National Park System, i.e.. Gale Norton and Fran Mainella.

The NPS continues to expand its system without proper funding. "We are concerned about the feasibility for management of these sites," Park Service official P. Daniel Smith said in a statement. "The sites involve extremely large facilities with tremendous potential costs of maintenance and possible issues about safety in some of the buildings."

Has anyone else noticed that the NPS appears to be going hog-wild for acquiring sites and developing new projects that are particularly infrastructure intensive, maintenance intensive and not very park-like? Everywhere I look, I see examples similar to this one. Today's politicians clearly have no intention of fully funding the NPS and so these acquisitions become, in effect, unfunded mandates. The only way that these new sites and facilities can be maintained, assuming that Congress will not adequately fund them, is through the use of public-private partnerships, outsourcing, contract-shedding, volunteerism, user-fees and similar privatization tools. Along similar lines, has anyone noticed how this administration seems to have so little interest in acquiring any additional park-like or wild-lands or in spending money for resource protection? Their interests seem to be limited to developing properties and facilities that are suitable for conversion into roadside attractions.... attractions that will, no doubt, be operated by private concessionaires charging ever-increasing user-fees.

NUCLEAR THEME PARKS..

Now we can look forward to the creation of a chain of National Park Service Nuclear Themeparks and a peek at the incredible financial drain these tourist attractions could become to park service budgets. A recent story touting the idea reports, "The laboratories where Manhattan Project scientists once worked in secret to design and make the atomic bomb could someday be national parks tramped by curious tourists... The Park Service would prefer sponsors find another backer because its budget is already strapped to maintain existing parks. The study alone could cost as much as $700,000, almost one-third of what the entire Manhattan Project cost in 1940s dollars, the service testified at an earlier hearing."

The bill's sponsor, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has been a long-time champion of recreation user fees. He has previously sponsored legislation to make these fees permanent and it's likely he will cause more trouble before the fee-demo issue is finally resolved. I wonder whether Mr. Bingaman supports fee-demo specifically because he is relying upon user-fees to fund the ongoing operation of pork-barrel, industrial-tourism projects such as these.

WILDERNESS V RECREATION—

"Almost 40 years after the Wilderness Act laid out requirements for protecting wilderness areas in public lands, the park service is largely failing to do so," said Jim Walters, an Eldorado resident and former deputy wilderness-program coordinator for the agency. "There's a big difference between bureaucratic progress and progress on the field," he said. It might come down to how wilderness is defined and whether people think it is worth protecting.

Rick Potts, acting wilderness-program manager for the National Park Service and representative to the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, said Walters' assessment of wilderness in national parks was accurate until 1993. "The story of the last 11 years has changed the essence of park management, and those statements are no longer true," Potts said. The Battle for the Wilderness is being lost because people are all too willing to redefine what Wilderness is. Clearly the National Park Service became an enemy of Wilderness when park managers began to look upon themselves primarily as providers of recreation and keepers of settings and opportunities supportive of a vibrant tourism industry. Perhaps not quite so clear, and even debatable by some, is the role a growing number of wilderness activists are playing as they attempt to redefine Wilderness in terms that better meet their needs.