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Crumbling Beauty: Congress Floats Fix for National Parks

Heather Duncan

On a damp, cool morning at the Chimneys Picnic Area, cars bump along the crumbling pavement next to a rushing stream. Foreboding weather or not, visitors are eager to gaze at the riot of violets and yellow trillium that lines the Cove Hardwood Trail. In fact, the trail so popular that the parking lot is falling apart – and Great Smoky Mountains National Park lacks the money to fix it.

Maintenance like this has been put off for decades in all of America's national parks. Now some roads, historic buildings, and water systems – even the pipeline to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon – are reaching a crisis.

A spending bill passed by Congress in March will provide more than $100 million to help, but the total Park Service backlog is estimated at $11.6 billion. Congress is considering several strategies to directly fund these projects. A bill promoted by the Trump Administration provides less certainty and is paired with an incentive for increasing energy production on federal lands.

As America's most visited national park, Great Smoky Mountains needs $215 million to cover overdue repairs, says Dana Soehn, a communications manager for the park. That's 10 times the park's total annual budget.

At the Chimneys Picnic Area alone, Soehn points out the bright green moss growing on the leaky roof of the restrooms built during the Great Depression, and way the road has developed the texture of alligator skin. Most visitors see the park from their cars, and few have experience on winding mountain roads.

“If you're driving through here and not used to these narrow roadways, and all of a sudden you come upon an area that you no longer have pavement, you can quickly find yourself in a ditch,” Soehn says.

Unsafe roads must be closed. The same is true for campgrounds without water or sewage treatment. Look Rock Campground, which can host 5,600 families a year, was closed five years ago when its water system failed. Last month Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander visited to announce that $2 million from the recent spending bill will go toward reopening it. Three-quarters of the Smokies' backlog is related to its 384 miles of roads, Soehn says.

Some that need the most attention are the Smokies' main arteries, including Clingman's Dome Road and even Newfound Gap Road, which connects the Tennessee and North Carolina sides of the park. Dianne Ziemba of Pittsburgh and her sister got rattled around as they drove to the Porter's Creek Trail after heavy rains during the annual Wildflower Pilgrimage.

“The trail is absolutely beautiful,” Ziemba says. “It's just the road going into Porter's Creek Trail has a lot of really deep potholes, so you have to go very, very slow.” The car wasn't damaged, but they felt lucky.

“Because of the nature of this backlog accumulating over a long period of time, and getting worse every year as we constantly underfund the operations of the park, the effects down the line appear gradual at first but then could be catastrophic,” says Don Barger, southeast regional director for the National Park Conservation Association. (The national organization was founded a few years after the National Park system “around the issue of maintenance, because they were underfunded from the start,” Barger says.)

The park has received funding in the last year for several important maintenance projects, including replacing the wastewater treatment system at the popular Elkmont Campground and repaving the main road from Townsend to Cades Cove.

But the backlog remains huge. In addition to fixing roads, the Sugarlands Visitor Center needs to be replaced and the park needs to rehabilitate many historic structures, including churches, a working grist mill, and the historic cabins at Elkmont. Many of the Elkmont summer cabins from the park's early days were recently demolished, but the park has committed to restoring 19 of them. Four were restored in the last year. Visitors pay little head to the police tape around others.

“We are always seeking funds to be able to restore them so that people can walk inside of them safely,” Soehn says. You're going to see the buildings have 'no trespassing' signs on them, as they've got failing floorboards and attic pieces that could fall.”

This is only one of the places where safety is at stake. A few years ago, a woman in a motorized wheelchair hit a pothole in the paved Laurel Falls Trail and ended up in a ravine with serious injuries. Soehn says that trail needs a $3 million overhaul to handle the 4,000 people that sometimes use it in a single day.

Long-term solution?

Credit Brandon Hollingsworth
Broken wooden benches and a collapsed stage and projection booth attest to the neglect at Look Rock Campground since its 2013 closure.

The park service's repair backlog got a boost from the spending bill Congress approved in March. Sen. Alexander and Secretary Zinke visited the closed Look Rock Campground at the end of April to announce that it would reopen – although no one was sure when – using money from that bill. The campground is on the Foothills Parkway, which is likely to attract more visitors when a long-awaited “missing link” portion opens in November.

“What we have here is an example of not prioritizing what we love,” Zinke said at the campground. “A lot of our facilities are like this. You look at the campground space: It was designed just to accommodate the '50s and '60s park experience of a station wagon and a Coleman tent. But today we camp a little differently…. and we need a national effort again to rebuild our parks.”

Zinke noted both the popularity of national parks and their economic benefit to nearby, often rural, communities. The annual National Park Service report for 2017, released last month, indicated more than 330 million visitors spent $18.2 billion in communities near national parks, supporting about 255,000 local jobs.

After checking out the campground's collapsed amphitheater and a fallen tree laying across an old picnic table, Zinke and Alexander touted legislation that could help with the backlog. Several bipartisan bills propose using part of the money paid by energy companies which mine federal land. The first bill, which the National Parks Conservation Association endorses, would use revenue that energy companies pay the federal government to mine and drill on federal land.

The amounts are spelled out in the bill, starting with $50 million during each of the first three years and increasing gradually to $500 million a year from 2027 through 2047. Alexander is a co-sponsor of the bill.

“It would in theory actually get us caught up on the backlog,” Barger says.

That's not likely to be true of the other proposal, he says. That bill, authored by Alexander at Zinke's request, relies on the same funding source, but the national parks maintenance backlog would receive money only if more profit is made from these federal mining leases than expected. And the amount would likely fluctuate with oil and gas prices.

Even if there is extra revenue beyond what's expected, only half of it would go to national parks. Alexander estimated his bill would net the parks $7 billion over a decade. But it's unclear how the federal Office of Management and Budget arrived at that number, since the whole plan is based on profits exceeding current estimates.

Barger says there is so much uncertainty in this approach that it would be hard to accomplish multi-year maintenance projects. “If mineral revenues come in at the projected level, the national parks get nothing,” he adds.

The bill also appears to offer an incentive to boost mineral extraction on land owned by taxpayers, Barger notes, by linking national park funding to an increase in mining. The National Parks Conservation Association provided comments to the U.S. Department of the Interior stating the group “needs assurances that the funding source in this bill does not have to rely on the Secretary of the Interior’s proposal to expand drilling into sensitive areas, as stated in the Administration’s infrastructure proposal.”

But Alexander notes that there is a precedent for using energy revenues to support parks. For decades, they have been used for a land and conservation fund that feeds state and federal parks. (Under the new proposals, this wouldn't change; Park Service backlog money would be diverted from revenues that currently flow to the general treasury.)

“That principle of using an environmental burden and turning it into an environmental benefit is well-established, so I think most conservationists know very well that it's sound policy,” Alexander says. “If we're going to get money every year from appropriate exploration on federal lands – not national parks, but all our federal lands – let's use some of that to make our national parks better.”

Barger expressed gratitude that Alexander is willing to help build consensus around any version of the bills that will both help with the backlog and pass Congress. Alexander said the House of Representatives held hearings on the his bill in April and the Senate was scheduled to do so this month.

Interior conflict

Credit Brandon Hollingsworth
Since 2013, only moss has occupied this campsite at Look Rock Campground.

Zinke praises fixing park infrastructure even as his department tries to cut budgets and staff. He originally proposed a 13 percent lower 2018 budget for Interior, to be achieved partly by eliminating 4,000 employees. Instead, Congress boosted the National Park Service budget. But he hasn't given up: His 2019 budget proposal calls for cutting almost 1,800 full-time Park Service positions from the staff of around 15,000.

“Since 2010, the National Park Service has had an 11 percent decrease in staff while accommodating a 19 percent increase in visitation,” Barger said. “And that is a trend that really is not sustainable.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park has lost 23 percent of its staff in the last decade, Soehn says. The park now offers the public about 1,000 fewer programs, including junior ranger, campfire and visitor's center programs, she said. In fact, the park can't reopen Look Rock Campground without restoring staff – a fact Zinke acknowledged during his April visit.

“When you have an uptick in visitation, you also have to have a team behind it to accommodate it,” he said. “It's not just catching up on infrastructure, on repairing a roof. It's making sure the visitor experience – the same visitor experience we grew up with and love – remains sacred, and that visitor experience is maintained for the next generation too.”

Besides promoting budget cuts, Zinke has also called for restructuring his department. This would reshape regions based on watersheds, moving some staff and dividing management of Great Smoky Mountains National Park between two regions. The National Parks Conservation Association has sent comments to the Department of Interior expressing “deep concern” about this proposal because of the potential cost and distraction to an already “understaffed” park service, the lack of public involvement in the process, and the potential to link restructuring to further budget and staff cuts.

Most of the National Park Service advisory board quit early this year to protest Zinke's refusal to call a meeting or discuss restructuring, the decision to shrink several national monuments, or Interior's proposal (later scaled back) to dramatically increase entrance fees at Western parks. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is shielded from entrance fees because the land was originally donated to the U.S. government on the condition that the national park be open for free.