Wildlife refuges desperately underfunded, report says

America’s wildlife refuges are so short of money that one-third have no staff, boardwalks and buildings are in disrepair, and drug dealers are using them to grow marijuana and make methamphetamine, according to a group pushing for more funding.

“Without adequate funding, we are jeopardizing some of the world’s most spectacular wildlife and wild lands,” said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Assn. and chairman of the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement, which released its report to Congress last week.

The report says the nation’s 548 refuges and the 100-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System -- about the size of California -- are underfunded by 43%. The refuge system needs at least $765 million a year but is receiving only $434 million, the report says.

A decrease in law enforcement has left the refuges vulnerable to criminal activity, including prostitution, torched cars and illegal immigrant camps along the Potomac River in suburban Washington, D.C.; gay sex hookups in South Carolina and Alabama; methamphetamine labs in Nevada, and pot growing operations in Washington state.

“The refuge system has been underfunded for years but it has really mushroomed in the past several,” Hirsche said.

The cooperative is recommending that Congress increase funding for fiscal year 2009 to $514 million and that full funding be reached by 2013.

The House and Senate are expected to take up the issue in coming weeks.

The report says the refuge system has cut 300 staff positions. Without more funding, a plan to reduce staffing by 20% will continue. The system needs 845 law enforcement officers, the report says, but has 180.

“In some cases, we find that drug operations have set up shop in refuges,” Hirsche said.

Alaska has 76 million acres of refuge lands and accounts for 83% of land in the refuge system. Managing those lands can be particularly daunting given the size and remoteness of many of the state’s 16 refuges, said Todd Logan, regional chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System in Alaska.

It’s even harder when money is tight, he said. For example, the visitor center at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge is inadequate, the exhibits need updating and the carpet needs cleaning, he said. The boardwalk needs fixing from ice and water damage this winter.

“We have a pretty significant maintenance backlog,” Logan said.

The report says the nation’s refuges receive 40 million visitors a year and contribute an estimated $1.7 billion in annual sales. They provide more than 27,000 jobs.

This Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of thousands of Americans will visit one of the nation’s wildlife refuges, only to find at many of them there is no one to greet them, Hirsche said.

The nation’s refuge system was created in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt after a trip to tiny Pelican Island in south Florida, where giant shotguns loaded with 10 pounds of shot were being used to kill hundreds of birds at a time to satisfy the market for fashionable feathers. Roosevelt went on to create 50 more refuges, stretching from Florida to Alaska.

“It is a shame we have taken this grand vision and neglected it to the degree we have,” Hirsche said.