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NPCA "Infographic" Lays Out Financial Bind Of The National Park Service

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A handy new graphic from the National Parks Conservation Association shows just how much help the National Park Service needs to manage the park system.

National Parks Need Help - NPCA Infographic

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source is not the NPS line item construction account. It is the stimulus bill.

So what, its money that the NPS chooses to spend. That stimulus money (and the other 14 mil) could have been directed towards maintenance instead. And the same could be said for Tahoma's follow on list.


Some good points made by all - and I appreciate the civil discussion of the topic despite varying viewpoints.

Tahoma's comment that some of the differences are based on semanics is correct, and the line between "maintenance" and "construction" is sometimes a bit blurry. I'd describe repaving a road as maintenance, but there's room for debate about how to classify widening a road that may have been adequate in the 1930s but is probably marginal to unsafe for today's larger vehicles. If an aging visitor center is to be "redone" or even replaced with a new structure, should the footprint for the new facility be no larger than the original? The answer probably varies on a case by case basis.

As to whether the NPS had complete control over how stimulus money was spent (i.e. "mainenance vs. new construction), I don't know. I certainly suspect there was considerable "input" from the Department and politicians as to which projects were funded, and the emphasis of the program was, after all, to "stimulate" the economy by doing the work with private, not NPS, labor ... and to spend the money as quickly as possible.

Do those criteria tend to favor new construction vs. basic maintenance...and did some in the NPS see stimulus money as a chance to fund new construction that would proably never be funded through "normal" channels? In some cases, perhaps so.


A couple more points. Even if private contractors do these congressionally micromanaged development projects without 'line-item' funding, surely the NPS has considerable expense from design, compliance, project management, completion reports, etc...all the way down to the press release (taxpayer funded spin) in Kurt's inbox.

It might sound as though I oppose any form of improving the parks. Not so! No doubt most of the above projects address real needs; I might have approved some, or even many, of them myself, had I that authority. A little more is fine, IF you can sustain what you've already got. It's just that NPS management's priorities seem so bass-ackwards. Sometimes the NPS seems like a slowly chugging steam train with a huge gang of politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs, civil servants and volunteers frantically building track and new stations ahead, while the line crumbles behind them. Helluva way to run a railroad.

Finally, even though the comment is four years old, here's some food for thought:

Submitted by Chris Zinda (not verified) on May 7, 2009.

/2008/02/does-national-park-service-need-quota-system-peak-seasons

"Having been a manager in several national park sites in administration, budgeting and strategic planning, I can assure you that the big parks are NOT underfunded. My last stint was with Yosemite and they have so much money that they cannot perform the necessary EIS planning to spend it - leaving tens of millions on the table every year.

Recreation Fee monies are quickly becoming a bane to the big parks. There's only so much money you can spend, only so many development / redevelopment projects to undertake, only so many employees to rationalize the spending through planning efforts.

In any case, you cannot spend your way out of a finite resource (or damage created by recreational overuse).

Rationing is the future."


Rick Smith.....years ago I didn't want to get involved in a "tit for tat" with you in response to some of your comments---but enough time has passed and yesterday I came across this one----so I thought I would. First of all, my "long running battle" with Larry Wiese, the former Superintendent at Mesa Verde, only lasted three months. I wrote my first letter asking for budget information on July 1, 2009, I wrote the second modified FOIA on September 8, 2009, and Larry Wiese announced his sudden and totally unexpected retirement from the NPS on September 22, 2009. I then wrote the Inspector General's office, and an investigation of Mesa Verde and Larry Wiese was conducted in the fall and winter of that year. The final report of the Inspector General did recommend prosecution (which in the end never happened.) I had another "battle" with the next Superintendent at Mesa Verde, Cliff Spencer, when he violated the Whistleblower Protection Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by ordering our supervisor not to rehire my wife and me---even though Linda Martin (our supervisor and the hiring official of seasonal rangers) had already indicated in three emails that we could plan on being rehired. With help from the Office of Special Council, we won that case and Superintendent Spencer was disciplined. For the record, after retiring from the ministry and 27 years as the CEO of a fairly large manufacturing company, Sara and I did have some wonderful experiences as seasonal rangers---first in Cape Hatteras NS where our supervisor and the Superintendent both were great and very competent, then two years at Mesa Verde where our supervisor was one of the most dedicated and focused supervisors we've ever had, then two years at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island where the supervisors were basically ineffectual and not very good but where the Superintendent was very good, and finally at Yellowstone NP where our supervisors were both competent and professional but where we never met the Superintendent (he never felt it was necessary or appropriate to meet his seasonal staff.) You also wrote that I use "a pretty broad brush to categorize all superintendents and other regional and national leaders as autocrats who operate without supervision and guidance". Quite frankly, in the article about which you were commenting, what I actually wrote was "some superintendents function like monocrats and manage like autocrats." (Please note my use of the word "some" and not "all" ...as you wrote.) Finally after traveling through all fifty states and visiting many, many parks and talking with scores of park employees and friends, I wouldn't change anything I wrote in that commentary or in the others I have written. There continues to be far too many superintendents and supervisors who operate without feeling the need to defend their decisions, reveal their expenditures of money, or explain their use of time and resources. And a significant part of the problem is that their successes and failures aren't measured by "profit and loss" statements to stockholders, they don't answer to a board of directors, and they feel fairly immune from any possible job loss for failure to manage properly or to abide by and enforce the rules, laws, and regulations which we all swear we'll enforce and obey when we enter federal service.


A note about FOIA - someone more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but I don't believe that federal agencies are required to, obligated to, or even morally burdened by, creat(ing) new products where none currently exist, nor are they obligated to reorganize information in a way that a requester, well, requests, to be responsive. So requesting breakdowns, summaries, annotated org charts showing corresponding budget numbers and the like are likely to be met with crickets, though follow up correspondence should at least deliver those "crickets" to your door.


Hello Anonymous...You are absolutely right!  Under the FOIA regulations,  an agency doesn't have to create anything new nor organize informaition for you;  they are required only to give you documents and reports that already exist.  Essentially, it's like asking someone to pull out documents or files or reports that are in a filing cabinet, and if they aren't there already, they don't have to do anything. Furthermore, they can charge you for looking for the documents (so it helps if you know where the documents or reports are located.)   As I wrote on my website at  http://schundler.net/FOIA.htm ...."agencies can give any FOIA request two hours of free research and review time and 100 pages of free copying...but after those limits FOIA requesters have to pay to have their request processed."  What some agencies do---and what happened to me---is that they try to ridiculously inflate the estimates of what their research and review time will be and the hourly rate they want to charge for that work, and they also tend to inflate the estimated charges required for copying.  For instance, I had indicated in my FOIA request that I didn't want them to spend more than my free two hours of free research and review time but they still wanted me to pay $1593 for my FOIA request which later was reduced to $796.50.    After highlighting carefully the meaning of 43  CFR 432:18, the FOIA officer of the NPS agreed that they should respond to my request for no cost.  In the end, what they sent was printed from standard financial report in 4 minutes and two documents were sent which could have been found on the internet with one search.


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