Park Service Comes Under Fire Two Northwest Republicans Accuse Department Of Financial Mismangement

The National Park Service is guilty of financial mismanagement and poor maintenance of the parks, two Northwest Republicans charged Thursday.

Parks officials replied that their staff is too small and their visitors, too many. They asked a special joint hearing of House committees for more money.

But House Republicans quickly made clear that is not an option.

After reviewing an audit that was highly critical of the park system, freshman U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, called the Park Service’s financial records outrageous.

“In private business, if a person were given a report like this, that person would either be fired or put behind bars,” Chenoweth told Parks Director Roger Kennedy.

Freshman Rep. Linda Smith, R-Wash., said the Park Service should be “declared bankrupt and assigned a receiver.”

Smith and Chenoweth tore into the Park Service during a joint hearing of the National Parks, Forests and Lands subcommittee and the Interior Appropriations subcommittee.

Earlier in the day, the two panels had been given a General Accounting Office audit criticizing the Park Service for not keeping track of its money and not maintaining its parks.

The agency’s financial statements are inaccurate and unreliable, Joyce N. Fleischman, the Interior Department’s deputy inspector general, told the panels.

Park Service officials don’t care enough about management controls or accurate financial data, she added.

Kennedy said he recognized the problems and offered a new management plan.

“It is still difficult for the Park Service to keep pace with ever more pressing needs for resource protection and demands by visitors and individual parks,” Kennedy said.

He suggested the Park Service cut administration to increase staffs in the parks and give managers more training. He promised to report progress to the committees.

“This new organizational structure is our attempt to make the NPS more effective, responsive and efficient,” Kennedy said.

But Fleischman said the Park Service is in such bad shape it can’t even predict whether the reforms will work. It doesn’t know how to spend its diminishing resources and doesn’t know how far out of balance its budget is, she said.

Some of Kennedy’s proposed changes have the support of both environmentalists and conservative committee members.

Panel members did indicate they will consider requests to close some of the least-popular parks, remove excessive regulations and allow the Park Service to keep entry and user fees. Park fees now go into the U.S. treasury.

But they rejected Kennedy’s request for an increase in his budget.

“We have to do more with far less,” Chenoweth said. “I’m amazed you’d ask us for more money.”

She suggested he return with an itemized list of everything the agency owns along with each item’s value.

Kennedy said some things, such as the Washington Monument, can’t have a price tag put on them.