National Parks need more help from Congress

As the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary Friday, what famed Western writer Wallace Stegner called America’s best idea needs help in the worst way.

The 4 million people who visit Yosemite National Park every year can attest that many of our most coveted national treasurers are being loved to death. The challenge of climate change, increasing the threat of wildfires, drought and severe storms, only adds to the vulnerability of the system.

Congress needs to place a higher priority on maintaining and protecting our national parks for future generations.

Polls show that nearly 95 percent of Americans agree we have to protect the 400 national parks and monuments in the system. Entrance fees and donations only go so far. The polls offer overwhelming evidence that even those who don’t visit the parks are willing to pay more in taxes to provide the level of care they require.

President Obama is on board. He made a plea for additional funding while visiting Yosemite in June: The the park, which was first protected from private development by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, has $100 million in urgent needs to address pressing problems with the park’s 1,000 buildings, bridges, lodging and camping facilities and 1,000 miles of trails.

This should not be a partisan issue. Public support crosses political divides.

Congress doubled the money for park maintenance in its last budget to $116 million. The new five-year transportation bill will add nearly $1.5 billion for work in parks. But deferred maintenance has led to $12 billion (with a ‘b’) in needs to restore buildings, replace bridges and update crucial water systems, campgrounds and facilities.

Congress agrees that more use of private enterprise would help, but members bicker over the extent. The celebration of the National Park Service centennial should push them to compromise and show the vision that the system’s founders and builders have shown.

California’s nine national parks alone represent a backlog of $1.17 billion in deferred maintenance and repairs: Yosemite ($552 million), Sequoia and Kings Canyon ($184 million), Death Valley ($159 million), Point Reyes ($106 million), Joshua Tree ($83 million), Lassen ($45 million), Redwood ($25 million), Channel Islands ($15 million) and Pinnacles ($8 million).

Stegner, revered as the Dean of Western Writers, captured the mandate eloquently in his collection of essays, memoirs, letters and speeches, “The Sound of Mountain Water”:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” he wrote. “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”