Not a Walk in the Park

Although President Obama recently fulfilled his promise to better fund America's national parks with a bill he signed Oct. 30 that will add $218 million to the parks budget next year, the small increases his administration is providing are unlikely to be enough to make up for years of neglect. (Article continued below...)

Obama said during his campaign he "will repair the damage done to our national parks by inadequate funding," but so far, he has done only slightly better than George W. Bush when it comes to boosting the parks' budget. Since 2007, the annual budget has increased by more than $100 million a year. Next year's increase of $218 million is an improvement, but it's hardly transformative.

"It's a very little increase that Obama has managed to get through the Congress," says Bruce Hamilton, deputy executive director of the Sierra Club. "It may be a step in the right direction, but it's not nearly enough. Much more needs to be done by Congress and the administration to find much larger public funding investment in future years. They will need to keep adding more."

Last year, under Bush, the parks budget was about $2.5 billion. This year, it is a bit over $2.7 billion. The parks have a maintenance backlog of $9.2 billion and an operating deficit of about $580 million. Their annual budget is less than 0.1 percent of the federal budget and is less than what America spends in a week in Iraq.

"When you look at the federal numbers, and a billion dollars is lost here and there, and the National Park Service budget is so tiny, you wouldn't think it would be so hard to make a larger investment," says Phil Voorhees, a fellow at the National Parks Conservation Association.

The number of park law-enforcement officials has been drastically slashed in an effort to deal with funding shortfalls. The 469-mile-long Blue Ridge Parkway National Park in North Carolina and Virginia, for instance, has had to cut back 40 percent of its staff. It now has only about 35 law-enforcement rangers to deal with 16 million annual visitors to its 300 miles of trails, and the reduced number of rangers has a direct effect on park visitors. Phil Francis, superintendant of the park, says that one of his rangers recently had to decide whether to respond first to a potentially deadly car crash or to a person who was having a heart attack: "Imagine if you have to wait for someone to drive 40 or 50 miles to respond to a medical emergency."

In 2008, there were a record total of 136,186 reported criminal offenses in national parks, including homicide, rape, assault, kidnapping, and robbery. "At one point, the park ranger job was the most dangerous law-enforcement job," says Denis Galvin, a retired deputy director of the National Park Service. "One reason being is that you're in such remote, hard-to-reach places."