Earth: Shabby Parklands

Laura Bush has been drawing laughs lately for her quips at her husband’s expense. What’s more of a joke, though, is that the first lady is embarking on a $10-million campaign to get more kids to visit the national parks while the president’s budgets have resulted in cuts to the campfire talks and guided hikes that are geared to youths.

The national parks are suffering from years of presidential and congressional disregard that date back far earlier than this administration. President Bush has earmarked some new money to tackle a maintenance backlog of nearly $5 billion in the parks, though most of the funds are simply being shifted from existing parks programs, and Bush still isn’t allocating as much for maintenance as he promised in 2000. Some of the progress has come at the expense of staffing for visitor centers and education. Congress doesn’t help when it adds pork-barrel “parks” at a rapid pace -- like the Rosie the Riveter park in the Bay Area -- without considering the continuing operation and maintenance costs.

The neglect culminated in an internal memo in February 2004 to park superintendents asking them to specify the cutbacks in service they would make because of reduced operations funding. Among the possibilities listed: close visitor centers on Sundays and Mondays and eliminate all guided ranger tours. The memo also told the superintendents not to let on publicly that they were cutting back and to refer to cuts as “service level adjustments.”

Similar cuts are striking operations and visitor services in the national forests. A March memo by former deputy Forest Service chief Tom L. Thompson warned, “It is likely that most forests will have to make tough decisions to close some sites, curtail operations at other sites and decommission some sites.” Bush is proposing to recoup some money by selling off surplus Forest Service property, and Congress should give this careful, if cautious, consideration. Some properties probably aren’t of value to the public anymore; selling them could bring in cash and stave off future maintenance costs. But this is only a short-term solution.

In both houses of Congress, legislation seeks to help the parks with a checkoff on income tax returns. Taxpayers could use the checkoff to donate an amount of their choosing toward the parks. That amount would be over and above their tax payments.

It’s tempting to do anything that might bring in money. But the success of tax checkoffs has been spotty, and Congress will always be inclined to reduce funding if parks are getting money from another source. That’s not supposed to happen, but look at how increased park fees have supplanted, rather than supplemented, federal funding. Tax checkoffs are an unreliable year-to-year source of funds -- and private donations shouldn’t have to make up for the government’s failure to do its job.