STATE OF DISREPAIR
French Creek State Park needs $2.2M in upgrades
ELVERSON >> Running a state park is no easy feat, especially when it sits on thousands of acres of land and is used by thousands of visitors each season.
French Creek State Park is no stranger to these challenges. The park sits on 7,773 scenic acres of land and is used by an average of 835,588 visitors per year.
In a report released in January, the Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation detailed the maintenance needs in state parks and forests.
Among those parks is French Creek, which according to employees is struggling with keeping up with things like restroom and facility improvements, removal and replacement of hazardous trees and the restoration of historic structures throughout the park.
The total cost of infrastructure repairs at French Creek State Park alone is $2,230,000, according to the report.
In many areas of the state parks, bathrooms are in disarray with siding that is falling apart and roofs that are in desperate need of repair. In one case, a bathroom was completely shut down and abandoned when problems with the water arose and the park did not have the funds or manpower to fix it.
“Right now staffing is almost as low as it was at our lowest point in 2011. We have more visitors and about half the staff that we once head. We just had a complaint about a cabin not being cleaned. We can’t focus on fixing the roof of a building because our job, with less staff, is to make sure that the people here are happy. All my staff is doing that and nobody’s thinking about putting roofs on buildings,” said James Wassel, state park officer at French Creek.
Among one of the buildings Wassel pointed out was the main cabin located near Hopewell Lake that isn’t quite visible to the average visitor passing down the road. Recently, the roof of the cabin completely collapsed, rendering the cabin unusable to visitors. The cabin is part of what was originally a large group of 22 buildings built by the Civilian Conservation Corps 90 years ago.
According to the National Park Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs for young,
unemployed men during the Great Depression. Over its nine-year lifespan, the CCC employed about three million men nationwide, who made valuable contributions to forest management, flood control, conservation projects, and the development of state and national parks, forests, and historic sites. In return, the men received the benefits of education and training, and a small paycheck.
“This camp originally had about 22 buildings and I think there are nine still standing. The rest have been demolished over the years,” said Wassel. “We don’t have many standing left. If we’re going to preserve
the history, we can’t just keep knocking them down. We need to find a point where we find money to save these buildings. All across Pennsylvania we need to do something if we want to protect this historical resource.”
“Pennsylvania was only second to California in terms of the number of Civilian Conservation Corps volunteers. We had 191,000 boys that were engaged in over 113 camps over the Commonwealth,” added Marci Mowery, president of the Pennsylvania Parks & Forests Foundation.
“From that time period in history, Pennsylvania ranks number two but we still have a lot of the infrastructure, and this is probably the biggest concentration of CCC memorabilia in the greater Philadelphia
area. So that amount of the population of people would not be able to understand that important part of our history. Those boys then went on to fight in World War II,” she said.
In addition to facility repair, French Creek State Park also must keep up with natural issues that arise such as removing unhealthy and dangerous trees. Park officers said the removal of these trees is both for the safety of the visitors and the health of the natural forests.
Mowery pointed out a photo of one incident in which a tree fell in the park, crushing a picnic table that was fortunately vacant at the time. Wassel pointed to another incident in which heavy rains made a nearby tree unstable, causing it to fall and crush a cabin that
had been vacated by a family just the night before.
“A need exists for $500 million each for the Bureau of State Parks and the Bureau of Forestry for maintenance and infrastructure projects,” read a release from the Pennsylvania Parks and Forest Foundation. “Years of inadequate funding and understaffing combined with natural and visitor pressures, are taking a toll. Adequate funds need to be appropriated to rehabilitate or upgrade existing facilities and natural features such as roofs, sewer and water facilities, well plugging, bridges, managing impacts of invasive species, and roads.”
To demonstrate how little funding there is for state parks in the scheme of things, Mowery used an example of a dollar and a
penny: “Imagine this dollar is the state budget. Now imagine half of this penny and that is DCNR’s budget,” said Mowery. “It’s less than one-half of one percent of the state budget. So it sounds like we’re asking for a lot. We’re really not asking for very much.”