PERSPECTIVE ON NATIONAL PARKS : Our New ‘Crown Jewel’ Is Trashed : Rep. Jerry Lewis gets his way, engineering a $1 allocation for the Mojave Desert preserve.

Millions of Americans, along with travelers from around the world, will visit California’s desert parks and preserves this year and they will spend millions of dollars doing so. A national park, like a professional sports team, brings prestige, a high profile and significant revenue to the region in which its located.

This economic fact of life is lost on Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) who cannot see any value--economic, ecological or spiritual--in California’s desert parks and actually wants to wipe one of them off the map.

If Lewis, long a champion of off-road vehicle users, hunters and mining interests, has his way, the newly created Mojave National Preserve would be no more. The crown jewel of the California desert, a 1.4-million-acre wonderland of vast sand dunes, dramatic geologic formations, a dozen mountain ranges and the world’s largest Joshua tree forest, would be stripped from the stewardship of the National Park Service.

While smart politicians generally take a you-win-some-you-lose-some approach, Lewis and fellow grumps who took their lumps after passage of last year’s landmark California Desert Protection Act are still fighting desert preservation, this time by choking off funding.

There’s magic--and money--in the words national park. Millions of tourist dollars are left behind in and around gateway towns outside national parks, and the towns near the Southland’s desert parks are no exception. Already, Death Valley National Park, Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve have become a national and international tourism magnet as the “three desert parks tour.” In Baker, gateway to the Mojave National Preserve, the conversant-in-a-dozen-languages staff of the Mad Greek restaurant even offers foreign newspapers for customers to peruse. Occupancy at the Hotel Nipton in the northeast corner of the preserve has increased 80% from pre-preserve days.

No wonder business owners and officials in eastern San Bernardino County, where the preserve is located, have appealed to Lewis to stop his park-bashing.

Nevertheless, even as a House Appropriations subcommittee was committing another environmental atrocity by lifting California’s offshore drilling ban, Lewis succeeded in scrapping the $600,000 the National Park Service needs to set up a visitors center and for patrolling the Mojave reserve. On Tuesday, the full Appropriations Committee voted on the preserve’s allocation for fiscal 1996: It will get $1.

This is not only mean-spirited; it’s also potentially dangerous. In the remote Mojave Desert, a well-staffed visitors center is essential to the safety of people exploring the preserve. A strong park service presence is also required for law enforcement and to protect resources from irresponsible users.

Lewis says that the park service has been “hassling people,” a claim that strains credibility, considering that there is exactly one permanent field ranger assigned to Mojave National Preserve. At a time when anti-government extremists are threatening rangers and public lands managers elsewhere in the West, Lewis and his fellow sore losers should watch what they say.

National parks remain one of the most revered institutions of modern American life, widely admired around the world. Most Americans, even the most fiscally conservative ones, would be embarrassed by the situation in the new Mojave preserve: park service seasonal employees and their families living in substandard housing and a park without a visitors center or even a decent map.

Even if certain Congress members cannot hear the silent symphony of the desert or appreciate the beauty of its composition, they should at least listen when money talks and cash registers ring. Mojave National Preserve must have its funds restored; then it must be upgraded to national park status so that Lewis and other politicos deaf to the desert’s music and blind to its beauty keep their hands off our public lands.