ShareThisBy JAY AMBROSE
Monday, October 23, 2006
Let's hop in a car and go to one of our national parks _ they are less crowded and noisy now than in the summer and awash in autumnal beauty _ and let's try to ignore the dilapidation competing with the grandeur that should dominate a celebration in 10 years.
At that time _ 2016 _ it will be the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the National Park Service. President Bush wants action on goals that will likely include fixing what's amiss in the parks, the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of neglect ranging from potholes to crumbling roadways, before we reach the centennial date.
A way to help get there is to uphold the original vision _ relying on user fees to support operations as some states successfully do with their parks, not on taxes that go to the Treasury Department and are subject to political misuse.
There are many who rightly bemoan the disrepair of a number of our 388 national parks and cry for ever higher federal allocations to restore them to their awe-inspiring best _ but who forget that long-abandoned pioneer vision. Not Holly Fretwell, a university instructor who spoke to an expense-paid journalists' seminar conducted by the Property and Environment Research Center in mountainous Montana splendor near Bozeman some weeks back.
Fretwell, also a research fellow with the center, reminds us that the early advocates of national parks said taxes would not be necessary to keep them in prime shape _ and they are not. She's done the homework of figuring out what it would cost per visitor per day at the parks based on current attendance to maintain and run them, and the numbers do not dismay you. At Mount Rushmore, for example, it would cost $1.31; at the Great Smoky Mountains, $1.70; at the Statue of Liberty, $3.49; at Glacier, $5.75; at Yosemite, $6.84; at Yellowstone, $9.84.
Many parks now charge either nothing or a negligible amount per carload, all of it adding up to maybe 7 percent or so of operating costs, but suggest something as reasonable as making up the difference and you get unreasonable objections, one of them being that visitors won't be able to afford the costs. Yes, they will, or at least most of them.
It's true that fees in some of the least popular parks would have to be astronomically high to meet expenses, and that this funding method would not work in them. It would work in most because the fees would not be beyond the means of the vast majority of families that pay far more simply in getting from their homes to these scenic natural wonders. For the disadvantaged, there are a variety of charitable, free-day and other answers, such as doing volunteer work in the parks to earn visitor privileges, an idea Fretwell especially applauds.
Some argue that the fees would amount to another tax on top of the taxes they already pay for the parks, but you could eventually phase out most tax support for the parks with this system, and in so doing, you would free the park money from competition with other national purposes and the clutches of members of Congress who sometimes divert it to outlandishly silly pork projects and away from obvious needs. You could also get past the bureaucrats who spend large shares of these dollars on _ guess what? _ the bureaucracy, not on the parks themselves.
The Fretwell proposal is that each park's revenues would be retained for its operations and that park managers would be given more authority to spend that money in accordance with what's most crucial in preserving them and serving visitors. For good stewardship, there would be rewards, and for bad stewardship, unhappy consequences.
This funding mechanism has other advantages _ those who receive the most pleasures from our parks will pay for most of their costs _ but won't be enough in and of itself to finance all capital and restoration projects. There are other funding possibilities, among them entering partnerships with private corporations that would not be allowed to convert forests into shopping malls, but would be allowed to mention park sponsorship on the wrappers of their products. There would be no wear or tear on our heritage, just dollars to help sustain it.
The issue of the moment is not the stinginess of the Bush administration _ Fretwell's charts show more being spent on the parks in inflation-adjusted dollars during his tenure than any other time over almost three decades _ but a funding system that's failing to do what a different system could achieve. Our national parks remain splendid experiences awaiting us, but they have serious problems that could be mostly solved in time for an anniversary not all that many years from now.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
