The sad, scandalous state of the National Parks


And privatization is supposed to help? And why am I reading about this on a travel site, not in a major news magazine or paper? This is a scandalous waste of our natural resources, letting them deteriorate like this.

Endangering our National Parks: An editorial

The Bush Administration has targeted the Department of Agriculture - which oversees the National Parks and Forest services - to be analyzed for the first round of "Competitive Sourcing." That is another term for privatizing, turning over to outside contractors what are currently government payroll jobs - 1,700 of them, in the case of the National Park Service. The Administration has claimed this will produce a savings of 20 percent for taxpayers.

Since when was adding a layer of middlemen a way to save money?

The idea is that government will pay private companies to manage park resources, and those companies will in turn hire and pay workers to do it. Think about that. If the government wants to lop 20 percent off the budget for parks, that means these outside companies will have to try and take the jobs currently being done by professional, trained park employees, and do them on 80 percent of the current budget.

And, since these outside companies are, unlike the government, profit-making enterprises, some of that 80 percent will have to be set aside for their profits, which means less than 80 percent of the money will go into maintaining our parks.

(snip)
Of that $2.9 billion supposedly spent on the backlog, only "roughly $200 million to $300 million" was money spent above and beyond the regular maintenance costs according to Deputy Park Service Director Donald Murphy in his testimony before Congress last July. The remaining $2.6 billion or so was just regular park spending, not the backlog.

And those 900 projects supposedly addressed actually number 840, according to the Campaign to Protect America’s lands. Fine, I won’t quibble over the Administration’s rounding up by 60. The problem is, the vast majority of those weren’t backlog projects, but rather emergency ones (safety repairs, raw sewage cleanup and the like).

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