WASHINGTON INSIGHT

TAKING PRIDE, IN PRIVATE: Saving $1.6 million a year, the Clinton Administration soon will scrap a brainchild of the Ronald Reagan Administration, the “Take Pride in America” program. Since 1985, the Interior Department has run ads and handed out awards to improve public lands and resources. California state park ranger Brad Long, for example, was recognized for planting 1,200 oak seedlings and hundreds of acorns at Black Butte Lake. . . . “The money will be more justifiably spent on park facilities and a lot of endangered-species issues, rather than on a program so successful it hardly needs to be conducted by the federal government anymore,” spokeswoman Trudy Harlow said. “There are many private groups that can carry it on.”