National park staffing would be cut under Obama budget
WASHINGTON -- America's national parks would hire fewer seasonal staffers and put off all but the most pressing maintenance work under President Obama's fiscal 2013 budget, advocates say.
The president's $2.6 billion request for the National Park Service is $13.5 million higher than what Congress gave the agency in fiscal 2012.
But the increase would be eaten up by costlier insurance premiums, higher rents and other costs of doing business, according to park service spokesman Jeffrey Olson.
Advocates say the extra money wouldn't go toward hiring more people at the 397 parks and other wilderness areas maintained by the park service's 28,000 employees.
The spending plan would cut operating costs by $21.6 million, which would eliminate 218 full-time positions in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, according to John Garder, a budget and legislative analyst for the National Parks Conservation Association.
"The president has been very supportive of the national parks and so we're very surprised to see such an austere budget," Garder said. "It's essentially a flat budget. But what's happening is they are paying for things that have to be paid for, and in order to do that they're cutting . . . personnel."
People make about 280 million trips to national parks each year, a number that has increased steadily over the years. The most visited park is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee and accounted for 9.5 million of those trips. Visitors to national park properties spent $12 billion on food, lodging and retail purchases in 2010 and helped sustain 258,000 jobs, the National Park Service said Tuesday.
Rather than cutting full-time staff, park superintendents across the U.S. are likely to cut back on seasonal staffers who lead tours, work at summer camps and guide visitors at information booths and visitors centers, said Dennis Propst, a forestry expert at Michigan State University.
"What would affect the user experience in the national parks is if they cut seasonal staff," Propst said. "They're the ones who wind up being on the front line in dealing with visitors. They're the ones you talk to first when you go through the booth and pay your fee, and when you go the visitor's center to get orientation and your map."
The White House's budget request, which Congress is reviewing, contains money only for top-priority maintenance projects, which wouldn't put much of a dent in the $11 billion backlog that has built up over years, Garder said. Decades of inattention to maintenance is catching up, said Propst, who called the backlog "huge and growing."
"You can build a beautiful facility, but what eats you alive is the yearly maintenance on it," he said.
Environmental groups praise the White House for increasing funding for another big priority -- conserving ecologically sensitive land, especially in watershed regions.
The $450 million request for the Land and Water Conservation Fund — a 30 percent increase from the fiscal 2012 funding level -- proves the administration "knows that there is a lot bang for the conservation buck," according to Alan Rowsome, a conservation expert at The Wilderness Society.
But House Republicans object to increasing the fund, which pays for the federal government to buy land within parks and gives grants to state and local governments to make similar purchases to curb sprawl and development.
Rep. Doc Hastings, the Washington Republican who heads the House Natural Resources Committee, said it makes little sense to buy more land when the government "continues to have a maintenance backlog on federal lands that measures into the billions."
"We should not be increasing spending for land acquisition when the government cannot maintain the land it already owns," Hastings said in a statement.
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