Final Spending Bill Shortchanges Parks
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Department of Interior's final 2004 spending bill, signed into law recently by President Bush, allowed the administration's process for privatizing park jobs to proceed and left parks and public lands vulnerable to harmful road construction.
The final bill requires the Department of Interior to spend no more than $2.5 million on job outsourcing studies and related expenses this year and to extensively report back to Congress on how studies are going.
The first privatization studies are expected to examine Park Service jobs at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, and more studies are expected next year.
"The good news is that Congress clearly remains quite doubtful about and is attempting to force more transparency into the administration's privatization process," said Craig Obey, NPCA's vice president of government affairs.
"The bad news is that [NPS] still has to waste millions of its scarce dollars on a flawed process that does more to hurt rather than help the national parks."
The final bill did not include park-protective language related to R.S. 2477, a 19th century statute written to promote expansion in the West that leaves parks vulnerable to right-of-way construction and off-road vehicle use-despite the fact that a large majority of the House supported the language.
The final spending bill includes a $55 million increase in funding for park operations, amounting to an increase of 3.5 percent. The amount fell short of last year's $68 million increase and well short of the $178 million boost sought by NPCA's Americans for National Parks campaign. The parks continue to operate with only two-thirds of the needed funding-an annual shortfall of more than $600 million.
This year's increase does not cover cost-of-living increases for existing staff, let alone the addition of new staff, and could result in some parks reducing staff and cutting programs.
Though the bill fell far short of meeting the funding needs of the national parks, according to NPCA, it provided funding increases for a handful of important projects:
- $5 million for Valley Forge National Historical Park in Pennsylvania to purchase land that had been bought for development of a subdivision.
- $3.5 million for the acquisition of threatened lands near Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas.
- $1.25 million for Fort Clatsop National Memorial in Oregon to acquire sensitive coastal lands in a historic area that represents the culmination of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
- Nearly $1 million to Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. to rehabilitate the structure.
- $900,000 to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona to boost visitor and resource protection along its 30-mile border with Mexico.
- $750,000 to Obed Wild and Scenic River in Tennessee toward the purchase of 1,231 privately owned acres remaining within the river's boundary.
- $500,000 for Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in California to improve the park's environmental education; the park now has a two-year waiting list for education programs.
- $160,000 for Mount Rainier National Park in Washington to maintain more than 150 historic park resources.
