Maintenance backlog looms large over many national parks

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Dozens of cast-iron cannon carriages, recently sandblasted to remove layers of lead paint and grime built up over 100 years, sink into the dirt floor of an open barn. Their wheels are slowly turning shades of speckled orange from rust caused by wind and rain entering through broken windows.

“It’s almost been useless,” Dave Dreier, maintenance chief at Gettysburg National Military Park, says of the $400,000 program to restore 300 of the battlefield’s cannons and their 1,580-pound carriages over six years.

Instead of completing 60 cannon carriages a year, park preservationists are lucky to do half that.

The cause is a budget crunch that has led Gettysburg and the 387 other sites managed by the National Park Service to scale back hours, cut interpretive programs, close facilities, defer millions of dollars in maintenance and leave scores of vacancies unfilled when workers retire or leave for new jobs.

Glacier National Park in Montana has a $400 million maintenance backlog, much of that needed to reconstruct the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, a national historic landmark.

The sinking visitor center at the USS Arizona National Memorial in Hawaii could cost $20 million to repair. Shenandoah National Park in Virginia eliminated 79 percent of its seasonal maintenance staff, opened its visitor centers later this year and reduced hours at some.

” ‘Coping’ is the operative word,” says Bob Miller, spokesman for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the busiest in the country with 9.3 million visitors last year.

The park, about half of which is in Tennessee and the rest in North Carolina, utilized savings from 19 unfilled positions last year to pay for a mandated $1.5 million upgrade of its radio system, which dated to the 1960s.

“There are radios in some cars that have outlived four or five cars,” Miller says.

The national park system, with a $2.4 billion budget, has never been awash in funds, yet park workers and advocates say the current money crunch is unprecedented.

Though the park service’s operating budget has increased by about $500 million over the last 10 years and the Bush administration says more than $2.8 billion has been devoted to eliminating an estimated $6.8 billion maintenance backlog, cuts in other areas and shortfalls in operating funds are eroding any progress, according to park officials and interest groups.

“What they are trying to take care of is a lot of things that have built up over the years,” says National Park Service spokesman Gerry Gaumer. “It’s trying to get back up to a square where you have a fighting chance.”

Park advocates applauded President Bush’s pledge during the 2000 campaign to eliminate the maintenance backlog that had built up under previous administrations. But now they say his administration’s claims of success are overstated.

“Clearly the administration promised something that they couldn’t deliver, and they didn’t,” says Ron Tipton, senior vice president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group.

Rapid expansion of the park system by Congress in the 1990s is partly to blame. But the maintenance backlog and underfunding have been persistent.

“The squeeze at the individual park level is unprecedented,” Tipton says.

Gettysburg, like most parks, estimates its $6.2 million operating budget provides only enough to fund about two-thirds of its annual needs. Gettysburg is down 12 full-time employees and 10 seasonal workers in the last two fiscal years.

Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state cannot fill 10 staff positions. Shenandoah has not filled 18 vacant positions over three years.

Tipton’s group estimates an annual systemwide shortfall in excess of $600 million.

Park officials say they have tried to minimize the impact of the cuts on visitors’ experiences by deferring maintenance and not filling positions instead of making more visible changes. Eventually, they warn, the cuts will be hard to hide and could end up creating new costs.

“I don’t think that visitors coming this year will see a discernible difference in the service they get,” Miller says of the Great Smokies park. “The visitor center will be open the same hours and campgrounds will be open the same months. They’re not going to notice more trash or dirtier bathrooms.

“Next year,” he says, “it’s hard to say.”

Miller notes that 13 of 19 staff vacancies are maintenance positions. The losses ultimately will worsen the park’s $173 million maintenance backlog as preventive maintenance is postponed, he says.

Parks increasingly have relied on volunteer groups for maintenance, interpretive programs and funding. Gettysburg, for instance, is paying its mowing crews and seasonal interpretive workers with donated funds that were supposed to be used for rehabilitation projects.

At Great Smoky Mountains, 1,900 volunteers work about 95,000 hours annually and two groups supplement the park’s $15.3 million budget with $2.2 million annually.

But Miller says volunteers usually aren’t as knowledgeable as professional staff and require extensive and time-consuming training.