Maintenance Projects at National Parks on Track, Administration Says

From a new visitor center in California’s Lava Beds National Monument to a restoration of New York’s Federal Hall National Memorial, the Bush administration is on track to fulfill the president’s pledge to fund backlogged maintenance projects in the national park system, officials said Wednesday.

During the 2000 campaign, President Bush vowed to repair antiquated sewage systems, crumbling buildings and poorly surfaced roads that were marring visitors’ experiences at the national parks.

Over the last two years, the administration and Congress have provided nearly $2.9 billion of the $4.9 billion needed to fix or update neglected facilities and roads at the parks, according to a new report prepared by the administration.

“The report reveals the extent to which we are doing an excellent job in taking care of the parks,” Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said. “We’re ready to welcome the many families who will come to visit us this summer.”

Some conservationists said the report obscured the administration’s real national parks legacy: bad air quality and poorly protected natural resources.

“This administration -- like past administrations -- has done some good things for the parks, but the fact remains that the vast majority of the administration’s policies have been harmful to the parks and the experiences of visitors,” said Thomas Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit advocacy organization with more than 300,000 members.

Kiernan’s group gave the Bush administration a D-minus for its stewardship of the national parks this year. It cited a decision to keep Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks open for snowmobiles and a plan to replace park service positions with private contractors.

Nearly 100 former rangers and park superintendents wrote Bush and Norton in May, complaining that the administration’s policies could turn “the best idea America ever had into a grim reality of private corporations making money off of our national treasures.”

Norton said the new report should correct the “misinformation” spread by conservation groups and “set the record straight” about the administration’s commitment to improve the quality of the parks for visitors today and in the future.

The National Park Service tackled 900 repair and rehabilitation jobs in the first two years of the Bush administration, according to the report, and it will launch another 900 in the second two years. The projects include:

* Re-vegetating abandoned roads in Redwood National and State Parks in California to reduce erosion and protect watersheds and wildlife.

* Razing an old visitor center and building a new one in Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California to prevent further harm to fragile caves that were formed by volcanic activity.

* Replacing water and wastewater treatment facilities in Yellowstone to stop contamination of the streams and lakes in the nation’s first park.

* Fixing cracks in Federal Hall National Memorial, the home of New York’s 18th century city hall, where George Washington took the oath of office to become America’s first president. Vibrations from the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the nearby World Trade Center deepened the building’s existing cracks.

The National Park Service is also doing its first inventory of the nearly 7,500 facilities in all 388 parks. “We have gone from a seat-of-the-pants approach to a much more businesslike system,” Norton said.

President Bush launched the initiative in response to a report by the General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, which found that parks had a $4.9-billion backlog of projects as of 1999.

Norton said she could not put a dollar figure on the current backlog of maintenance projects. In January, the accounting office estimated that the National Park Service still had a backlog of $4 billion to $6 billion.

At least one of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, who want to make the president’s environmental record an issue, also took jabs at the report.

“Watching the Bush administration pat itself on the back for taking care of public lands is like hearing a felon brag about his good behavior behind bars,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). “No White House in recent memory has been as hostile to the environment as this one.”