An Interior Department task force has been ordered to report within 50 days on a priority list for tackling the National Park System's roughly $12 billion maintenance backlog. Grand Canyon National Park's need to replace the Transcanyon Pipeline could be near the top of the list/NPS file

In less than two months Interior Department officials intend to have a plan for attacking the maintenance backlog across the public lands in the nation.

Via a secretarial order, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt created a task force to look out across the National Park System, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lands to determine a priority for spending billions of dollars set aside through the Great American Outdoors Act for tackling the backlog.

"I’ve established a task force to maximize the impact of the Great American Outdoors Act and determine priority funding needs, so we can expeditiously serve the American public in rebuilding their national parks, American Indian schools and public lands," Bernhardt said Tuesday.

Heading the task force is Margaret Everson, who last week was appointing as the acting director of the National Park Service. Also appointed to the task force are Interior's deputy secretary; assistant secretary - Policy, Management and Budget; assistant secretary- Land and Minerals Management; assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks; assistant secretary - Indian affairs; and the department's Solicitor.

Bernhardt's order directs the task force to:

1. Develop a strategy to maximize the impact of the Great American Outdoors Act. The strategy shall ensure a timely project proposal and review process that minimizes delay and ensures decisive action; cuts across Bureaus; and includes establishment and utilization of a centralized project management office.
2. Identify an initial list of priority deferred maintenance projects that are ready to be implemented in Fiscal Year 2021 and provide the list to the Secretary of the Interior within 50 days of the date of this Order.
3. Evaluate staffing needs and direct relevant Bureaus/Offices to initiate necessary hiring and recruitment efforts.
4. Identify additional policies and/or revisions to existing policies or practices that are needed to maximize successful implementation of the Great American Outdoors Act.
5. Develop best management practices for deferred maintenance projects; and
6. Recommend such other actions as may be necessary to fulfill the goals of this Order.

As passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump, the act will send $6.5 billion to the National Park Service to battle deferred maintenance in the National Park System and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The challenges with prioritizing Park Service projects is obvious. The roughly $12 billion backlog has been growing at a rate of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in recent years ($313 million during Fiscal 2018), annual sums that will lessen the impact of the additional $1.3 billion expected to be made available annually through this funding.

Almost assuredly to be near the top of the Park Service list is funding for Grand Canyon National Park to replace its Transcanyon Pipeline, which funnels water from a spring on the North Rim to the bottom of the canyon, across the Colorado River, and then up to the South Rim.

The leaky system, also provides water to the North Rim, represents a health and human safety issue for the park. It provides water for more than 6 million annual visitors and approximately 2,500 year-round residents, and also provides firefighting water.

That project alone could cost $110 million to complete.