The National Park Service does not support the creation of additional units to the National Park System while it is trying to whittle down its $11.6 billion maintenance backlog, according to the de facto acting director of the agency.
P. Daniel Smith, during testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, told the senators that the Park Service currently opposes bills that would create:
* The Susquehanna National Heritage Area in the State of Pennsylvania;
* Revised authorities for the Lincoln National Heritage Area, the Tennessee Civil War Heritage Area, the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, and the Ohio and Erie National Heritage Canalway, and;
* The Ste. Genevieve National Historical Site in Missouri.
In each case Mr. Smith told the subcommittee Wednesday that, "in order to focus resources on reducing the National Park Service’s $11.6 billion deferred maintenance backlog and addressing other critical national park needs, funding for national heritage areas is not a priority in the Administration’s FY 2018 or FY 2019 budget."
Mr. Smith, the National Park Service's deputy director, exercising the authority of the director of the agency, also said the agency opposed legislation that would create a program "to accurately document vehicles that are significant in the history of the United States."
The Park Service, he told the senators, already has a program that tracks the "country's historically significant vehicles," the Historic American Engineering Record.
"We noted that HAER has also documented numerous ships and boats without establishing a separate program for vessels," Mr. Smith pointed out.
On other matters, the deputy director said the Park Service supported legislation:
* That would allow a transfer of 1.54 acres of Park Service land at Gulf Islands National Seashore in Mississippi for 2.16 acres of land owned by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The VFW land is not accessible other than by crossing Park Service land;
* That would reauthorize "funding for the preservation and restoration of historic buildings and structures on the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) for fiscal years 2018 through 2024, at a level of $10 million annually;
* To authorize "the National Emergency Medical Services Memorial Foundation to establish a commemorative work in the District of Columbia and its environs";
* To "clarify the boundary of Acadia National Park" to take into consideration the 2015 addition of 1,441 acres to the park for Schoodic Woods. While the addition was supported by locals, in 1986 Congress passed legislation setting the"permanent boundary" of Acadia. The legislation also allows "the traditional harvesting of marine species in Acadia and outside of the park where the NPS has a property interest. The provision would allow for the harvesting of marine worms, shellfish, and other marine species."
The harvesting of the worms and clams grew heated last fall when Acadia rangers stopped locals from digging up the worms and clams, and issued citations in some cases.
"It was kind of a shock to everybody,” worm digger Jonathan Renwick, secretary of the Independent Maine Marine Worm Harvesters Association, told the Portland Press Herald last fall. “Everybody here supports the park – it’s a wonderful thing – but we should be able to go to work the way we always have, and hopefully calmer heads will prevail and we’ll be able to.”
Comments
Good statements. Perhaps there is hope for the future.
Nice to see some common sense.
I do think a more conservative approach to pushing for new units should be taken by the agency. The agency spent the last eight years in a fairly expansive mode and it is challenging to catch up and get new unitis on line.
This is a totally outrageous, though not a surprising, position by the Trump Administration.
This not a lack of funds; it is a political choice. The $11.6 million maintenance "backlog" has been artificially created over many years by anti-park members of Congress who have held back funding so they could claim we cannot afford new national parks, or even the parks we have. Their ultimate goal is to privatize and downsize our National Park System as much as possible. Consistent with this, Trump proposes to slash the National Park Service budget and to drastically increase park entrance fees.
We could eliminate the National Park System "backlog" immediately by diverting to our parks some of the billions of dollars that we now spend annually on subsidies for logging, livestock grazing, drilling, and other exploitation of our public lands. The Trump Administration is doing just the opposite by increasing these destructive resource extraction subsidies. Clearly, a shortage of federal funds is not the problem.
It is even more hypocritical for the Trump Administration to claim we cannot afford new national parks, after just signing a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich and big corporations. Compared with the amount of revenue that tax cut would throw at the wealthy, the so-called "backlog" is barely noticeable.
We can easily afford to fund the national park maintenance "backlog," and we need to do it now. We also need a dramatic expansion of the National Park System, now. We are losing natural ecosystems, historic sites, and open space at a frightening pace. Many of these places could be saved through national park designation. Delaying the creation of new parks relegates these imperiled areas to serious or irreversible damage. Once they are gone, they are gone.