It has been 50 years since a significant investment has been made in the infrastructure of the National Park System/NPS

Not since Mission 66, a concerted, decade-long effort to prepare the National Park System for the then-novel vacation traffic of Baby Boomers, has the system seen a significant infusion of funding for infrastructure, a House subcommittee was told Thursday.

"Through Mission 66, a billion dollars was spent in ten years. Most of those projects, including over 120 visitor centers, are still serving the American public," Deny Galvin, a former deputy director of the National Park Service, told the House Federal Lands Subcommittee. "There has been no comprehensive infrastructure effort since the end of that program in 1966. Most park facilities are, thus, over 50 years old."

In today's dollars, that $1 billion infusion would translate to about $7.5 billion, according to John Garder of the National Parks Conservation Association.

"It just shows the size of the investment they made then, started out under a Republican president," Mr. Garder, NPCA's budget expert, told the Traveler following Thursday's committee hearing.

The hearing ostensibly was held to look into "innovative" solutions to reviving the park system's ailing infrastructure, which sports an estimated $12 billion repair backlog. But it also gave Mr. Galvin a chance to explain not just how the Park Service's maintenance backlog grew, but why the agency has been unable to rein it in.

"The chief cause of the growth of the maintenance backlog is insufficient funding to maintain, repair, and in some cases, reconstruct park assets. After the Department of Defense, NPS has the most assets of any federal agency, with 75,000 assets, 41,000 of which struggle with deferred maintenance," he testified. "Caring for these many resources requires consistent and sufficient funding. Unfortunately, the Park Service has not been receiving this funding. In FY15, the latest year for which reliable numbers are available, the Park Service needed $820 million just to keep the backlog from growing, but received only $473 million, or 58 cents for every dollar the agency needed just to keep the problem from growing worse."

Also testifying was Reed Watson, the executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center based in Bozeman, Montana. That group "is dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets," and as such Mr. Watson told the committee that as Congress appropriates fewer and fewer dollars for the Park Service, the agency will have to rely more and more on user fees.

"Today, the majority of user fees can be retained where they are collected, rather than being sent back to the U.S. treasury, providing park and forest managers with an important—albeit insufficient—funding source to address infrastructure maintenance without relying entirely on congressional appropriations," he said. "Congress should act to permanently reauthorize federal land agencies to collect entrance and recreation fees and to expand the discretion of park superintendents and forest rangers to set their own fee schedules without having to obtain additional approvals from Congress or the Secretary.

"For example, park superintendents could be given the discretion to charge higher fees during holiday weekends and other popular times, thus allowing them to collect more revenue for maintenance and use prices to limit congestion."

Coupled witih relying more on user fees, Mr. Watson said, should be a reduction in land acquisitions by the Park Service and U.S. Forest Service. And he suggested greater reliance on contractors to manage facilities and collect fees. 

"Under this approach, private contractors have a financial incentive to provide good stewardship of the site or road and to be accountable to visitors to ensure high-quality experiences. They are dependent upon the revenues they earn to cover costs, while also being held accountable by their contract with the federal land agency providing oversight," he said.

Finally, Mr. Watson suggested that Congress give hard thought to franchising national park units, a topic Traveler explored in 2014.

"For properties proposed as new additions to the National Park System, franchise agreements could be struck between the National Park Service and private management parties. Franchised parks would be held under the National Park Service umbrella but individually managed by non-profit organizations, businesses, or individuals," Mr. Watson said.

Also suggesting private management of national parks was John M. Palatiello, the president of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition. Along with allowing for privatization of some units, he said the government needed to do a thorough inventory of all its real estate holdings and determine which could be sold off, with the revenues then applied to maintenance backlogs.

"The government estimates that it owns more than 640 million acres of land. What is not known is where that land is, what it is being used for, where its accurate boundaries are located, and whether the land is being put to its best use. The Government Accountability Office found over 30 federal agencies control hundreds of thousands of real property assets worldwide, including facilities and land, worth hundreds of billions of dollars," he told the committee. "However, the portfolio is not well managed, many assets are no longer consistent with agency mission or needs and are therefore no longer needed, and many assets are in an alarming state of disrepair. GAO also found there is no reliable government-wide data on these assets."