Pubdate: Sun,  1 Jun 2003
Source: Daily Camera (CO)
Copyright: 2003 The Daily Camera.
Contact:  http://www.thedailycamera.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/103

OUR SHORTCHANGED PARKS

Every president since Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s has pledged to fix 
up the national parks. President Bush did so just two years ago. It's a 
popular political issue because people cherish the parks, monuments and 
historic sites administered by the National Park Service. But the promises 
have been lamentably empty, so much so that the parks suffer a $5 billion 
backlog in repair and rehabilitation. The service has a repair budget of 
barely $85 million for 388 park sites.

That makes it remarkably bad judgment for the Park Service to propose 
cutting its meager maintenance and repair budget in California and the West 
to help pay nearly $20 million for rangers to participate in anti-terrorist 
activities.

The $4.6 million targeted to be shaved off is 28 percent of the total 
regional budget for repair.

Where are all those billions of dollars appropriated for homeland security? 
Surely $20 million of that money could be spared to pay for anti-terrorism 
in the parks and, we hope, the eradication of marijuana-growing and 
harvesting in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks.

Bush waxed eloquent two years ago during a visit to Sequoia. Donning a Park 
Service jacket, he declared, "Many parks have gone years without receiving 
the kind of care and upkeep the American people expect." Bush proposed a 
$4.9 billion five-year program to eliminate the maintenance backlog. This 
year's $85 million hardly measures up. It's not entirely Bush's fault. 
Congress, whether under the control of Democrats or Republicans, has been 
negligent of the parks.

A century ago this month, President Theodore Roosevelt spent three days in 
the Yosemite wilderness with famed naturalist John Muir. Concluding the 
trip, he said: "There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the 
Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias Our people should see to it that 
they are preserved for their children and their children's children 
forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred."

It's time finally to meet that challenge.

The Los Angeles Times
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens