National parks and monuments do not exist to make money. They exist to preserve a piece of the nation's heritage, history and natural beauty. They provide a continuity that links each generation of Americans to the next.
If members of Congress were to frame the debate over the future of the National Parks Service in this context, there would be no talk of privatizing or closing parks and monuments; no blustering over how many Civil War battlefields are worth preserving. Instead, the emphasis would be on finding ways to help them survive and prosper.After all, a nation's heritage is a terrible thing to give to the highest bidder.
Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, seems to understand this. As chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Lands, he has said he doesn't want to gut the park system. He simply wants to find ways of running it more efficiently.
This is a worthy goal because the way the nation now runs its parks and monuments makes little sense.
That being the case, Hansen ought to put his clout behind allowing the park service to retain the fees it collects. Currently, all money collected goes into the nation's general treasury. Until this changes, talk of raising entrance fees to fix parks and monuments rings hollow.
Together with the bill Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, has introduced to force park concessionaires into open competition for contracts, fee retention could set the crumbling park system on the road to recovery.
No one can deny that many of the 368 national parks and monuments are in sorry shape, the victims of "accumulated rot," as Park Service Director Roger Kennedy puts it. The backlog of repairs is estimated to cost $4 billion, which dwarfs the parks service's annual budget of $1.3 billion.
Roads are decaying in Yellowstone. An estimated 22,000 historic homes and buildings are slowly rotting. In addition, employees at many parks live in dilapidated and substandard trailers that would take an estimated $67 million to replace.
In Utah, a state rich in parks and monuments, many sites are suffering from the pressures of popularity. Zion National Park, for instance, has seen its number of annual visitors more than double in a decade - from 1.4 million in 1983 to 2.9 million in 1993.
Meanwhile, Congress continues to create new parks, many for political reasons, that add even greater burdens to the system. A House bill Hansen is pushing takes this into account, starting a process of setting firm guidelines for new park designations. But it goes too far in setting up a commission to decide which parks to close, give to the states or privatize.
Allowing political considerations to determine which parks to create is bad enough. Allowing it to determine which ones to close or sell could be disastrous. And states should not be saddled with the cost of maintaining sites that are of significance to the entire nation.
Still, the parks service can't adequately address its problems without the money it collects, and it can't maintain its parks and monuments without the ability to increase fees to cover maintenance and repairs. Current fees provide only about 10 percent of park operating costs.
Even at that, national parks and monuments won't become money makers. They serve a higher purpose.