Professors from Harvard and Colorado State University have laid out the steps they believe can lift the cloud of financial instability off of the National Park Service/Rebecca Latson file

Congress makes annual efforts to address the National Park Service’s financial predicament, but year after year those efforts end with little significant impact on the agency’s staggering maintenance backlog or improvement to the day-to-day operations of the National Park System.

At a time when the Park Service’s annual appropriation has been relatively flat since 1999, when staffing for the agency has reportedly fallen by 7 percent at the same time that more than two dozen units have been added to the National Park System, professors from Harvard and Colorado State University have proposed a range of strategies they believe would quickly enhance the Park Service’s fiscal fitness if adopted by Congress.

What’s particularly eye opening by the research done by Professor Linda Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and John B. Loomis of Colorado State is their belief that Americans would pay an additional $92 billion a year for the parks and the many programs they provide the country.

The evidence to backup that claim, and the professors’ contention that the National Park System can conservatively be valued as a $100 billion entity, are laid down in their book, Valuing U.S. National Parks and Programs: America’s Best Investment.

“We looked at the many different kinds of values that the national parks produce. I think that the concept of valuing the national park asset is something that people know in their hearts that they attribute a value to it,” said Professor Bilmes, “but the way that the parks have traditionally thought about value has been around tourism and around the value contributed to local economies of having national parks and the tourist value that they bring, which is a kind of a value.

“But what we show in our book is that there is a much, much larger value, which includes the value of those who appreciate the parks even if they don’t visit,” she added during a recent conversation. “It includes the value of the parks in terms of education, watershed protection, carbon sequestration, intellectual property, cooperative programing with other agencies. We tried to bring together a variety of different ways to think about the value, and what we find is that looking across even a small subset of the kind of value, you can find that there’s a value of at least $100 billion.”

It’s often claimed that every dollar of federal appropriation for the National Park Service generates $10 of local economic activity, or roughly $30 billion based on the annual approporation of around $3 billion. The professors believe that claim actually undervalues the 419 parks in the system because it ignores the intrinsic value of the parks  -- “Most people feel that even if they never go to Gettysburg, they would like it to be protected as a national park,” Professor Bilmes pointed out –- the scientific value, the scenic value that movie studios parlay into blockbuster films, the value of understanding and managing ecosystems, the value of the flora and fauna.

“We were the first survey to ever look at the value of the programs, and what we found which was quite interesting and kind of surprising to us is that people really do value the national park programs, particularly the education and historical curation that the National Park Service does,” she said. “So it’s not that people are asking to just protect the land, but they’re also asking to protect all the stuff that the National Park Service does on the land, and particularly the aspect of the … telling of the American story, the curators who actually bring to life the story of the places, whether it’s the wildlife or the landscapes or the geology or the history, that all of those things are things that people value very much.”

Congress is charged with seeing that the Park Service has the resources to provide those services and experiences, but has failed to do so in recent decades. The maintenance backlog across the park system, estimated at around $12 billion, is one key example. Nearly $700 million was spent during Fiscal 2018 on maintenance projects, yet the backlog still is nearly $12 billion.

Congress had a chance last year to give the Park Service a big lift by passing legislation that would have provided $6.5 billion over five years specifically for maintenance needs. But the measure died near the end of the 115th Congress as the politicians found themselves at budgetary loggerheads with President Trump. The legislation has been introduced again to the 116th Congress, but has yet to take significant steps towards passage.

"In the case of the national parks, the funding has not only been sort of very hand to mouth in the federal government, just an annual appropriation, which doesn’t lend itself to long-term investments in the parks, it also is the case that because the national parks are so beloved they have become a kind of political football in Congress with being the first agency to be shut down or threatened to be shut down every time there’s a financial disagreement in Washington." -- Professor Linda Bilmes

So what can be done? Quite a bit, according to the two professors.

• Start by providing the Park Service with a two-year appropriation, a move that would help see that the agency doesn’t “get caught up in the constant stopgap shutdown crises, which are a feature of our current budget process,” said Bilmes.
• Create an endowment for the agency.

  “The mission of the National Park Service is a perpetuity mission. They are supposed to be protecting these places to be pristine forever,” she said. “That’s a pretty complicated mission, and the way that most organizations that have a perpetuity mission are funded is that they have an endowment, which is a perpetuity type of funding mechanism.”

• Give the Park Service bonding authority to address infrastructure repairs and needs.
• Put a check off box on tax returns that would allow taxpayers to contribute an extra amount specifically for the Park Service.
• Restructure the way concession fees and park entrance fees are collected and spent.

Currently, Bilmes pointed out, only about a quarter of the 419 park units charge entrance fees, and few have lodging and dining concessions that could generate revenues for them.

“National parks that may be geologically of very great value may not have a lot of people around them and may not have a large friends group to help raise money for that unit,” she said.

While philanthropic dollars are very important to individual parks and the park system as a whole, they can ebb and flow and so are not something that should be relied on year after year, added the professor.

“There also are limitations as to what can be funded through philanthropic dollars,” she added. ”So in addition to giving philanthropic dollars more flexibility, it’s more important to have a kind of long-term endowment that can supplement philanthropic dollars to give more flexibility to the (Park Service) director in terms of how they can use and deploy philanthropic dollars.”

The two professors hope their research will catch the eye of Congress and that they’ll be given an opportunity to appear before the House Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to explain in detail their proposed strategies.

Their work, park advocates say, is something that deserves consideration.

“We definitely applaud Dr. Bilmes for her attention to the economic importance of parks and additional funding that could help the Park Service, so we look forward to reviewing the details of the proposals,” said John Garder, senior director for budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s critical to outline the many economic values of our national parks beyond visitor spending and the billions of dollars in economic activity it generates each year.

“It was a big step for Congress to create a national parks endowment in the recent Centennial Act,” he went on, “but it will take quite some time to build up a meaningful corpus for that endowment…and meanwhile our parks continue to struggle with underfunding.”

"The idea of a two-year budget seems to get some attention in every session of Congress but ultimately is never adopted. It's an interesting idea. There are definitely some people on Capitol Hill who would say it’s a great idea, but who also wonder if that would solve the problem of an annual appropriations process that has broken down, and much to the frustration of a lot of appropriators who want to better meet the needs of our national parks and other priorities. In the end, what is most needed is a firm congressional commitment to a functional and orderly appropriations process. Year after year, we see it break down to a lesser or greater extent, from one continuing resolution to the next, and the occasional shutdown, all of which harm our parks, their staff and their visitors. It’s past time for Congress to turn a new page." -- John Garder, NPCA

The NPCA official saw potential for a tax check off, though Phil Francis, who heads the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, “would like to see how Congress’s appropriations process would ensure that the money reached the NPS.”

“The details of this idea would be interesting, and I think looking at new funding models is a necessary step to solving the problem we have,” continued Francis. “That said, there would need to be significant changes so that enough funds could be raised and protected from other uses.”

Francis, who spent four decades working for the Park Service, including stints as superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, wanted to learn more about how the Park Service could wield bonding authority and spend from an endowment.

“I am not sure that those type of accounts could be used to pay for ‘permanent’ obligations such as permanent employees under past budget rules,” he said. “I have no experience with bonds but with endowments, the corpus would have to be huge to make a significant difference in the deferred maintenance and annual operations shortfalls.”

How many of the professors’ suggestions are realistically viable remains to be seen.

"Any and all of these ideas need to be explored for their viability, but it’s also critical to note that none of them can be an excuse for Congress not to meet one of its fundamental duties, to ensure adequate funding for the National Park Service,” NPCA’s Garder said. “Poll after poll shows people want Congress to fund their parks, so it is no surprise that they are willing to pay more in taxes to finally pay down the operations and maintenance backlogs facing our parks, and the growing understaffing that has been accompanied by the challenges of increased visitation. 

“Congress and the administration need to make that commitment. It is achievable if they commit to more adequate appropriations and passing dedicated funding legislation for both the maintenance backlog and land acquisition,” he said.

The professors’ book, said Bilmes, is a roadmap of sorts for Congress, as well as the Interior Department and National Park Service, to navigate.

“One of the things that we can do now is to be changing the funding structure of the national parks to make it more sustainable,” she said, “because if we don’t it’s not just the backlog but the fabric of sustaining these places that will become more and more difficult and expensive, and we don’t have a funding mechanism to do it.”

Listen to Professor Linda Bilmes' interview on National Parks Traveler's podcast.

National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, is made possible through support from its readers and listeners. Donate today to help enable ongoing daily coverage of national parks and protected areas.