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President Calls On Congress To Bolster National Park Service In Time For Its Centennial

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President Obama wants Congress to significantly boost investments in the National Park Service by nearly $1 billion over the coming three years, and to create several additional funding mechanisms to help pay for maintenance of the system going forward.

To help provide some of that funding, the Obama administration is seeking higher camping and lodging fees, as well as a signficant increase in the cost of a lifetime senior pass, to raise revenues that could only be spent in the National Park System if matched on a "1-to-1 basis by nonfederal donations..."

Under the National Park Service Centennial Act sent to Capitol Hill this week -- which the Republican-led Congress is unlikely to adopt in its entirety -- additional funding programs would be created to help both the Park Service and other federal land-management agencies.

“This proposal acknowledges the important place our national parks have in the hearts and minds of all Americans,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in announcing the legislation Tuesday. “This administration and this Congress have the unique opportunity to shape the second century of the National Park Service as they preserve the legacy of some of our nation’s greatest treasures for generations to come.”

The legislation also would revamp the Park Service's concessions program by creating a "Visitor Services Management Authority" to oversee contracts for visitor services in the parks, such as lodging and dining. Funds generated by these contracts going forward would be deposited into a revolving fund "that shall be available without fiscal year limitation for expenses necessary for the management, improvement, enhancement, operation, construction, maintenance of commercial visitor services and facilities and payment of possessory interest and leasehold surrender interest."

A seven-member board, including the director of the Park Service and its chief financial officer, would sit on the authority.

As drafted, the legislation calls for an increase of up to 5 percent per night on lodging and camping fees to help finance a Second Century Fund for use by the Park Service. It also would replace the current one-time $10 fee for senior passes for those 62 and older with a fee "equal to the price of the National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass," which currently is $80. Any amount above the first $10 of that new fee for senior passes would be deposited into the Second Century Fund.

While the fund would be established "for projects or programs approved by the Secretary to further the mission of the Service and to enhance the visitor experience in System units," the legislation specifies that funds "may only be used if matched, on a 1-to-1 basis, by nonfederal donations (including funds, goods or services) to the Service for specified projects or programs."

The legislation also calls for increased congressional appropriations of $300 million to be deposited into the Park Service's Construction Account each fiscal year beginning this Oct. 1 and ending on September 30, 2018, "to remain available until expended, to correct defiiciencies in National Park Service infrastructure and facilities."

And the legislation would allow creation of an endowment fund built on philanthropic gifts and administered by the National Park Foundation.

A "Public Lands Centennial Fund" would be created under the legislation -- funded by $100 million each fiscal year through September 2018, or $300 million total -- for use by the Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to fund visitor recreation services, natural resource restoration projects, improvements to facilities and trails, and to increase energy and water efficiencies.

Away from the funding provisions, the legislation seeks to bolster the Park Service's interpretive programs and ranks by adjusting programs to how people "learn and engage with the natural world" and by seeing that they "reflect different cultural backgrounds, ages, education, gender, abilities, ethnicity, and needs." The programs also should "reflect current scientific and academic research, content, methods, and audience analysis.

The legislation was praised by Theresa Pierno, the National Parks Conservation Association’s chief operating officer.

“Today’s announcement is an extremely important contribution to the debate of how to fund our parks and we hope it will help encourage bipartisan efforts underway in Congress. The Centennial Challenge Fund is based on a proven, viable, and bipartisan approach for using federal funding to leverage private dollars in order to make critical investments in our national parks," she said. "Dedicated federal dollars provides certainty for the private sector and allow for a multi-year fundraising effort. As a result, this initiative could leverage millions of additional dollars for the Parks and their surrounding communities for the Centennial and beyond.

The centennial celebration marks the National Park Service’s 100-year milestone with the goal of connecting with and creating the next generation of park visitors, supporters and advocates, a release from the Interior Department said, adding that in this second century of stewardship to America’s national parks, the National Park Service will continue its mission to help communities across the Nation preserve local history, celebrate local heritage, revitalize communities and create close-to-home opportunities for kids and families to get outside, be active and have fun.

“The National Park Service is celebrating the accomplishments of our first 100 years, but more importantly, we’re looking ahead to our next 100 years,” said Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. “This legislation gives us an opportunity to modernize our tools and meet the century-old mandate to protect, preserve and share with the American people the diverse and special places in our care."

Comments

Uh Oh!  Our parks are really in trouble now!

If Obama wants it, Congress will vote to abolish it.


Here we go again.... We seniors worked, paid our taxes to support the park system.... Now we are retired and can and want to use the parks and the government raises our entrance fees.   Raise social security to match the increase.


What the parks *need* is more tax dollars.  What the parks -- and the people who visit them -- do *not* need is lodging and camping prices so high people won't be able to afford to visit the parks that they own.

How about a two-tier pricing system, too?  One price for those of us who pay taxes to the U.S. government, and another, much higher, price for people coming from out of the country? 


Has anyone looked at the price of lodging in the National Parks.  The prices certainly are not affordable for a typical middle class family.   Take a look at lodging prices in Yellowstone & the Tetons.  

 


And they should. Park Service needs to reorganize their top heavy bureaucracy and utilize more of the funding they receive to benefit the parks themselves. Right now you could give NPS a trillion dollar budget and they would piss it away on bureaucracy and cry for more.


 Lee Dalton-  As they well should. Like the rest of us, NPS needs to learn to live within its means.  This means reorganizing top heavy bureaucracy, eliminating micromanagement, and ensuring that more of the dollars that are already received actually go to the parks themselves.

As it stands, you could give NPS a trillion dollar budget and they'd piss it all away and still claim a maintneance backlog.


These proposals, with higher fees, would tend to make the Parks once again a place for the privileged and wealthy, as they largely were in their early days.  And this would be without fixing any of the National Park Service's fundamental problems. The NPS is underfunded.  But, as Lee Dalton wrote, you could flood the agency with tax money and they would still waste much of it.  Is the President or anybody in Congress looking at the 2014 survey results of "The Best Places to Work in the Federal Government", which placed the NPS at 213 out of 314 Federal Agencies, with the most significant decline the previous year in employee confidence in its senior leadership?  


I've asked this question many times and now I do it again: "How much of the Park Service's alleged mismanagement, top heavy structure and other ills are caused by people within the Service itself and how much is imposed upon the Service and its people by Congressional fiat.?  How often have regulations or other requirements been added as one of literally hundreds of hidden riders or amendments to Congressional bills completely unrelated to our parks by Congresspersons trying to please one of those who generously grease the Congressional palm?  How many of our ills can be traced directly to that legislation by deceit when a Congressperson wants to do something they know has no chance of passing if it were to be addressed openly -- and so they hide it as one of a flood of amendments?"

The problem is that it's probably impossible for anyone to find the answer to that question.

I submit that the real problem lies not only with top brass in NPS, but at the very top of the heap.  It lies not so much with whatever administration happens to be in power at the time.  Instead, it comes directly from the incredibly powerful and destructive influence that MONEY now has in our Capitol building. 

That is where the American people need to start looking.  Until we find a way to limit the use of money to grease the slide for the benefit of a few very wealthy persons and return our government to of the PEOPLE and by the PEOPLE instead of Government of the FEW and by the FEW, any hopes of change will be naught.

The solution begins at the ballot box.


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