"Named must your fear be before banish it you can," says Yoda. Was he talking about national park privitization? He stands guard in front of the Lucasfilm Letterman Digital Arts Center in the National Park Service managed Presidio. eltonlin photo via Flickr
Let's start with a little park trivia. Where in the national park system will you be able to view materials illustrating the vision and legacy of Walt Disney? No, I promise this isn't a trick question. Here's a hint, it's at the same park where you can go to stand in front of a sculpture of Yoda and reflect about galaxies far, far away. Honestly, this is a real place in the parks, in fact, it is inside the second most visited park unit in the country. OK, last clue, this park is currently accepting Requests for Proposals to build a public museum to display the private collection of contemporary art belonging to Doris and Donald Fisher, the co-founders of The Gap. If you haven't guessed yet, take some time and play a round of golf, maybe the answer will come to you.
If your answer is the Presidio, you nailed it. Located at San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the Presidio is a former Army base that was transfered to the National Park Service when the base closed in 1994. Quite a gift. The trouble is, the yearly maintenance bill for the 469 historic buildings is far more than Congress has given the park to spend. The solution from Washington was to make the Presidio the first park in the system to operate self-sufficiently. If it isn't turning a profit by the year 2013, the entire base could be turned over to developers.
Earlier this week, I wrote a summary of the Presidio story for the Frommers.com daily newsletter. The story, "Trading Spaces: The Park Service Turns Over the Presidio to Private Parties", covers some of the costs and consequences of the operations game in the park. The article provides a "backgrounder" of sorts of how privatization entered the picture at the Golden Gate NRA.
At the end of the Frommer's article, I suggest that if the money-making plans at the Presidio succeed, it wouldn't be hard to imagine similar plans being created for other historic structures in park units around the country. What I didn't mention in the article, is that a similar type of development plan is under way on the other side of the country in New Jersey, at Fort Hancock in the Gateway National Recreation Area.
Things haven't been going as well for the private developer at Fort Hancock. Nearby residents are fighting tooth-and-nail to stop the development inside their park. Plus, the developer has munged things up so badly, that now the Inspector General is looking into the 60 year lease agreement signed with the NPS. Congressman Frank Pallone described the entire lease and development process as a debacle.
Longterm lease agreements for private developers? A Walt Disney museum? Managing the park for profit? Little public accountability? These places feel less and less like they are operated in the best interest of either the public or the parks.
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Comments
And, just like the booze party at the Charlestown Navy Yard, it creates a PRECEDENT, which would make any future handover of parks to private developers much easier to slide through.
To avoid the precedent issue,, they just need a new unit designation so such activities would be restricted to those particular types. Let's see... National Hysterical Park and Playground?
-- Jon Merryman
I'm not sure, if the Presidio of San Francisco should be a unit of the NPS, but the way they manage it, seems very well done. It was an US-Army base (1848-1994), and before one of the Spanish (1776-1822) and Mexican Army (1822-1848). Thousands of people lived there and worked there for several centuries. It includes a National Cemetery as well as a golf course, the former air field "Crissy Field", where a number of aviation pioneers reached records. The 9th Cavallery (Buffalo Soldiers, I might add) did their patrols of Yosemite National Park, Sequioa National Park and General Grand National Park (now Kings Canyon NP) out of the Presidio, before in 1916 the National Park Service was founded and took over. The soldiers for the Spanish-American War 1898 and the following war in the Philippins embarked there. First World War Commander of the European theater, General John Pershing, came from the Presidio, not long after he returned from the expedition against Pancho Villa. In Second World War the Presidio was the HQ of the 6th Army, and the school for military intelligence, where the Navajo "Wind Talkers" were trained. In the Cold War Nike-Rockets were installed.
This was always a hub of activity, on the forefront of technology. And it contains living quarters with a view on the bay, on the Golden Gate Bridge, and downtown San Francisco. They are among the most valuable places in the world.
You can't manage a place like this as a museum. It has to be used. With modern uses. Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic and LucasArt are only so many of the tenants. There is Alexa Internet, the Internet Archive, there are about 30 non-profit-organizations mostly in the field of education and art (they get the space at a discount for non-profits), and a number of firms from finance to law. The living quarters are completely rented out, after a decent renovation.
And already in 2005 the Presidio Trust reached the break-even-point and was able to spend more on restoration of the landscape. Because there is "Crissy Marsh", a brack water marsh down at the bay. The next project it to restore a small watershed in the hills of the area. And there are the woods, that shall be turned to local species over time.
Again, I'm not sure if this is a job for the NPS, but they are doing it very well.
If you want to see how privitation has destroyed a park look at Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia. All of the natural aspects of the park have been paved over and blocked off in order to make golf courses, hotels and amusement park type areas.
It is the horror that will happen if private firms take over our parks!
Of course, all of this govt. vs. privatization misses the point that the national parks and private businesses have been in partnership since the very beginning and that there probably isn't a piece of the parks that hasn't been contracted out at some point to some private corporation.
It's a false dichotomy; either way, most of us don't have a lot of say about what goes on unless we have the dollars or the political influence (oh, I forgot - they're the same thing).
The railroads wanted the government to set aside national parks because they didn't want anyone to cut in on their action. Of course, some would celebrate this because they ended up kicking out small businessmen who were destroying thermal features (for instance, in Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone) by using them as baths for medicinal purposes. They kicked out hide hunters who were wiping out buffalo, but then they went on to poison all the wolves.
If you look at a lens from the largest actors to the smallest actors on this stage, incompetence and mismanagement abound. You leave it to government, and they rip apart forests, contract out hotels, stores, gas stations, build roads and turn parks into law enforcement zones. You leave it to corporations, and they monopolize interests, do all the same, and have to be accountable only to the segment of society that pays their bills and sustains their business. If you leave it to small businesses and individual entrepreneurs, they only pay attention to the needs of their particular business, and the rest be damned. If they happen to be stupid at what they do, they kill and destroy every last bit of their resource before moving on. No one has a monopoly on destruction. And, for all the good things that have been done, it only takes a few bad apples in any direction for irreparable harm to be done.
It's no small wonder that there's anything left in these places that are worth cherishing; remarkably and miraculously, there are. The places themselves are astounding in their ability to withstand all our management methods.
All this tells me that we aren't going to fix the parks just by seeing this as either government control or private control. A lot of other things are screwed up, too. I'd no sooner trust the corporations, the small entrepreneurs, or the government to best manage Yellowstone or the parks; in all cases, we're bound to make choices on a range of better and worse too narrow to be of any good to any of the parks as a whole.
We're playing with forces bigger than our minds. Tinkering with who gets to make ultimate decisions won't make much difference.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
This is definitely a very intriguing and thought-provoking discussion. I have, however, a question or two for those promoting the turning over of parks to NGOs.
For starters, how would science in the parks be handled? Currently, the NPS has its own science arm that addresses this across the system. I realize it's not perfect, that it is hamstrung by a lack of staff and funding in many areas.
However, if the system were to be broken up into dozens of independent units managed by NGOs, who would take over the science, both on a per-park basis as well as across the entire system?
And what about the law enforcement responsibilities? Would these simply be contracted out?
Of course, a huge question revolves around funding. Would you have Congress simply continue the revenue stream and divide it among the NGOs, which in turn would supplement that by instituting new fees and raising existing ones?
*Yawn* Is every conversation on this website going to be turned to the privatization/NGO topic? Fear mongering goes both ways, ya know...
I've played the 9-hole course at Yosemite. It's not all that enjoyable or memorable. It should revert to meadowland.
And please -- if you're going to point out others' speling [sic] mistakes as some sort of cheap shot, don't make any of your own. It's Xanterra, by the way. If you're annoyed by me pointing that out, please consider refraining from doing the same to others, and I will too.
-- Jon
The park is not one continuous locale, but rather a collection of areas that stretch from northern San Mateo County to southern Marin County, and includes several areas of San Francisco.