FEDERAL LAND AGENCIES: IS THERE EVER SUCH A THING AS TOO MUCH MONEY? A HISTORY.
At the core of this issue’s cover theme is the notion, perpetuated by the land agencies of the federal government, that public land administrations are severely underfunded, that the parks and forests and BLM lands are suffering as a result, and that without this needed infusion of money from the federal fee demonstration program (fee demo), the management and infrastructure of all public lands will crumble and collapse.
To quote Seinfeld, "yada yada."
I have the unique perspective of having been a government employee for over a decade. True, I was only a lowly seasonal ranger at Arches National Park. And it’s also true that it’s been a while since I wore the grey and green. But from what I can observe, not much changed since I left the National Park Service, 15 years ago. Then as now, it was never a matter of not having enough money to efficiently and adequately run a national park; instead it was the park’s inability to prioritize its needs and spend accordingly.
For several years, in the mid-eighties, I used to make a bet every March with the chief naturalist at Arches. Every spring, the administration at the park was hit with the threat of possible budget cuts and spending restrictions and the staff responded accordingly. It usually meant that the seasonal staff would be brought on duty later than planned, to save money. Despite the fact that, even then, tourists were pouring into the park in droves by mid-March, the park was often without a staff to protect the resource or provide aid and assistance to the visitors. "There’s no money! What else can we do?" cried the park superintendent. "Money is as tight as bark on a tree," he used to say.
The chief naturalist concurred and so one year, I asked her to put her money where her mouth was. In the federal government, the fiscal year runs from October 1 to October 1. There was also a rule that prohibited any federal agency from carrying over surplus funds from a previous year. So, when it comes to spending, as the fiscal year draws to a close, the battle cry is, "Use it or lose it." They are required to spend their allocated budget by October 1.
"I’ll bet you," I said, "that by early September, you’ll be even be coming to the seasonals, looking for ways to spend the ‘year-end’ money you’re about to lose."
She took the bet. I won. The stuff the park used to buy in September was mind-boggling. We’d get all kinds of new camping gear and medical equipment to replace the equipment we already had, which was already quite adequate and which had usually been purchased with previous year-end spending spree money.
The chief naturalist paid off, I got my steak dinner and received my free meal every year for the next two years until my winning became such a sure deal she wanted odds.
I used to see money squandered in ways that would make a fiscal conservative pull his hair out. Just a few examples from my archive of goofy NPS spending sprees:
* Arches could never decide how to handle its garbage collection. In the early years, in the campground, for example, the NPS maintenance crew collected trash from standard-size cans placed strategically throughout the campground. The system seemed to work. Then it decided to replace the cans with a reduced number of bins. The old cans were discarded, new bins were purchased at a cost of $20,000, new hydraulics were installed on the trucks to lift the bins at a cost of more thousands of dollars, and a year later, the NPS dumped trash collection by NPS staff altogether and went to a private contractor. That didn’t work and a year later, the NPS took over again and replaced all the bins with cans, reinforcing the Cyclical Theory of Stupidity.
* A decade or so ago, the NPS decided to replace all the fire grates in the Devils Garden campground. The old grates were still working and their new replacements didn’t look any different. The NPS hauled all sixty steel grates to the dump where an enterprising local commercial campground owner grabbed them and used them in his own business. For once, at least, someone benefitted from Park Service ineptitude.
* When I first arrived at Arches, the visitor center was cooled by a refrigerated air conditioning system. It was expensive to operate and the superintendent at the time decided to replace the system with more energy-efficient, evaporative air coolers–swamp coolers, we call them here in the West. They worked well, but when a new super arrived in the late 80s, the first thing he did was to tear out the swamp coolers and replace them with, you guessed it, a refrigerated air conditioning system. By then, I was here at The Zephyr and I asked for an explanation. He said it was needed because the new computers could not handle the heat, which I found sort of odd since I’d been cooling my computer room with a swamp cooler for years.
* The Arches Entrance Station. For years the pay station at Arches was a small kiosk-like structure, about the size of an outhouse, that sat in front of the visitor center. In the early 90s, it was torn down and replaced by something quite similar. The Zephyr even reported the new construction and praised the NPS for its fiscal restraint. We learned that the new entrance station had been built for $10,000 using Park Service day labor to build it. It looked like this:
With visitation soaring in the 90s, the need for another station became apparent. Often cars and RVs backed up to the highway as visitors waited to pay their fees. Last year, the NPS, working with the Utah Department of Transportation, designed and built a new entrance road. They extended the road almost a half mile south to a point where visitors can exit US 191 more safely. No complaint from here on that move. I didn’t like it but it was necessary.
But when it came to the entrance station itself, what was wrong with the old one? They could have moved the old entrance station to its new location and built two more just like it, for a cost of maybe $30,000. Instead they built this:
I’ve asked the NPS for the cost of this new monster entrance station–it looks like an airport terminal to me–and have not heard back, but my guess is that it’s about $500,000.
What was the point? Does this somehow enhance a visitor’s park experience? Does a tourist feel better forking over his inflated entrance fee when he can pass beneath the portals of a structure like this? Meanwhile, the interpretive staff suffers, the backcountry suffers, all because there isn’t enough money in the budget.
And what else has the NPS done with its fee demo money? Well, they constructed a half million dollar cut stone stairway in the Windows and they installed heaters in the campground toilets and winterized the campground water pipes, mostly so they could justify charging fees year-round.
So the bottom line here is that nothing has changed. FEE DEMO is a new angle on an old story. It goes on and on, year after year, decade after decade. These federal land agencies never have enough money. They always want more. But the cold hard truth is, if they ever learn how to efficiently use the funding they receive, if they ever learn to spend their budgets in the places where it’s most needed, they won’t have to complain. They will have finally learned how to live within their means, the way most of us have to live.
(I welcome input and criticism from the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Tell me where I’m wrong. Or even where I’m right.)
FREEDOM: WHO NEEDS IT ANY WAY?
On page 4 of this issue is an essay by Michael Wolcott and his recent travails at the Glen Canyon Dam visitor center. According to Michael, the War on Terror has now reached Page, Arizona. In fact, I suggest you stop here, read Wolcott’s Point Blank article and then come back. See you in a few minutes...
OK, now you have yet one more example of how ridiculous we’ve become as a nation since September 11. We are a fearful and timid people. We’re pitiful. I had my own experience at the dam, just a few weeks after Michael. I’d read his essay but didn’t somehow grasp the extent of the search operations at the visitor center until I walked through the reflective doors and encountered the uniformed lady with her wand and pistol. This security staff wasn’t even Park Service and when I asked them if they were federal agents, they got downright huffy–it turned out they were a private security company, "under contract to the federal government," as one of them snarled. Or "rent-a-cops" as Wolcott more succinctly called them.
After I’d been patted down, I stopped to linger a moment on the other side and watched one bewildered tourist after another walk through the front door. A little old woman in her 80s objected meekly, "But I don’t want to go in the dam. I just want to look at it from the window." It didn’t matter. "Beyond this point, you are subject to search," the guard said mechanically.
"Oh...OK."
But more than this pathetic submissiveness is the way many Americans openly and vehemently reject the idea of individual freedom while, at the same time, they embrace that concept to justify our military adventures overseas.
I am a sucker for conservative talk radio–maybe I just like to be angry all the time–but it has its enlightening moments. Frightening and enlightening, all in the same broadcast. A common theme on all the shows, passed down, of course, by our fearless leader Mr. Bush ("Like a rock, only dumber") and a theme all of you have heard, is the notion that we are in Iraq to give these people their freedom. You hear that word all the time. Freedom. We want them to be Free. Let Freedom ring!
And yet, these same Freedom Worshipers don’t have much use for it in the States. Or in their own lives. Most of them embrace the Patriot Act, have no use for other people who exercise their freedom to protest, and even seem willing to sacrifice their own individual liberties. The other day, I listened with amazement to a caller on the Sean Hannity radio show. With all kinds of oozing patriotic pride, he proclaimed, "The way I look at it, anybody that is afraid of a wire tap must have something to hide. Heck, if the FBI wants to tap my phone they’re more than welcome. I got nothing to be ashamed of." He really said that.
How can a word like ‘freedom’ be so consistently abused by the people who claim to understand its meaning better than the rest of us? The truth is, they don’t understand freedom. Had they been around at the time of the American Revolution, Limbaugh and Hannity and their ilk would have been the Loyalists, devoted to the King, and intolerant of anyone with a different perspective. They would have hated Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and would have called for their imprisonment. Or worse.
Somerset Maugham once said, "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort and money that it values more, it will lose that too."
In 2004, if half of America doesn’t even know what freedom means, how can they possibly know if they’re about to lose it? Or that they already have?
STILES’ SUMMER DRIVING RULES OF THE ROAD #2
With the summer tourist season upon us, I am going to abuse my editorial right once again and make a personal plea to drivers everywhere to get the hell out of my way. Last year, about this time, I was driving my truck to Tooele to get the Zephyr printed. I made the mistake of going to Salt Lake the "usual way," via US 6 & 50 over Soldier Summit to Spanish Fork. It’s a nightmare highway, always congested, and I should have known better.
I’d just left Price and was behind a car who was dawdling along at about 35 MPH. I patiently endured him, knowing that in just a half mile or so, I’d have a passing lane and the opportunity to go around. But as soon as the passing lane appeared, he sped up. I tried to get around him, but it was uphill, my old truck doesn’t have the oomph it used to (neither do I for that matter) and this ‘dawdler’ was now going 70MPH. I gave up, but as soon as the road started to narrow again, he started slowing down again...right back down to 35.
I was already in a bad mood and I said to myself, "Screw this." Even though I had a double-yellow line, I could see clearly ahead for half a mile and knew I could easily pass him, especially at the speed he was moving. So I did it.
Unfortunately, there was a Utah Highway Patrol trooper directly behind me who, in my zeal to pass the Dawdler, I had failed to notice. He pulled me over, gave me a lecture, and wanted to know if I thought I was "special" in some way that gave me the right to break the law.
Normally, I grovel at the threat of a ticket. But this time I was unrepentant. "I broke the law but I’d do it again," I growled. "It’s drivers like that guy who should be pulled over. He’s the menace, not me. He was rude, not me. But to hell with it...Do your duty."
The trooper had initially accused me of reckless driving, speeding and illegal lane change. When he handed me the citation, he said, "I’m only writing you for the lane change. You shouldn’t have done that, but I understand your frustration."
An empathetic cop. I was almost grateful.
So...to all you dawdling drivers, listen up. If you want to dawdle, that’s fine. As long as you don’t impede the normal flow of traffic, as long as you are courteous enough to pull over and let faster traffic pass, I salute you. But if you don’t pull over and plan to lumber along while traffic backs up behind you, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, at least when you get to a passing lane, DON’T SPEED UP. Let us go around you. That’s all we ask. Is that so much? I know you can see us, all stacked up and seething in your rear view mirror. You can’t be driving with your head up your ass–otherwise how could you dawdle along staring at the scenery? So acknowledge us, move over, and let the rest of the world go by you.
Meanwhile, I stay off the Soldier Summit road these days. It takes me an extra hour to make Tooele, but I have the road to myself. And does anything feel better than an open road?
THE IRREPRESSIBLE KEN SLEIGHT
After mounting and dismounting a horse a few hundred thousand times, Sleight’s luck finally ran out last month. Dismounting after a morning trail ride, the horse came down on top of him, then sort of stomped around on Ken a bit before moving on. The fall cracked six of Ken’s ribs, punctured his lung, and crushed his collarbone. He was flown by air to a Grand Junction hospital where his lung was re-inflated, a pin put in his collarbone and he was released a couple days later.
When I heard about the accident, Ken was already back home. I drove up to see him, knocked on the door, and who should open it but Ken himself. I stared at him with disbelief. "How are you feeling?" I asked, amazed to find him anywhere but flat on his back.
"Oh," he said, "pretty good."
Actually he was in a hell of a lot of pain. But there he was, dressed and more annoyed by his injuries than suffering from them. "It’ll just take some time and I’ll be alright," he grimaced.
Anyway, I gave Ken a pass on this issue but he’ll be back with a story in August/September. In fact, he’s already working on it.
