National Park Rising Prices: More Visitors, Less Staff

By Carl Segerstrom High Country News National parks have been a centerpiece of America’s tourism culture since the late 19th century, after the colonialization and displacement of many of the Indigenous people of the West. But recently what’s been called “America’s best idea” has a new label: “loved to death.”

Last year, about 330 million people visited the parks. That’s roughly 5 million more visits than the total U.S. population and almost 50 million more visits than in 2012. While visitation has increased, staffing levels have declined and the costs of overdue park infrastructure projects have ballooned to around $12 billion. As the national parks’ summer high season begins and the understaffed Park Service works to keep them clean and safe for the crowds, politicians are fighting over how to pay for the parks.

Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke has floated several proposals to increase funding for national parks. In October 2017, the National Park Service proposed significantly increasing admissions prices to popular parks; after uproar from the public and lawmakers, the agency backed off. Still, the cost for most national parks that collect entry fees will increase by between $5 and $10 starting in June.

The other proposal to increase funding for parks and address the expensive maintenance backlog pairs funding with energy development on federal lands. As part of the Trump administration’s infrastructure plan, the executive branch has asked Congress to create an $18 billion “Public Lands Infrastructure Fund” for the Interior Department. This plan would take half of the royalties from expanded drilling and mining on public lands and put them towards the maintenance of park infrastructure. The plan has broad support from Republicans and the support of some Democrats. But the proposal has also been met with stiff opposition in the environmental community, who have decried the plan as an attempt to increase the sell-off of public lands to fossil fuel companies.

Meanwhile, budget negotiations could result in cuts to staffing.

Congress rebutted last year’s attempt to decrease funding for the National Parks, but cuts in the proposed president’s budget request for 2019 would pencil out to 2,000 fewer “full-time equivalents” (FTE’s) in the National Park Service than there were in 2017. Full-time equivalents can mean a single permanent full-time job, or several seasonal workers, so those cuts could actually mean the loss of more than 2,000 employees. The job losses proposed in the 2019 budget would be on top of the more than 2,000 full-time equivalents that were cut from the agency between 2011 and 2017.

Read more at the Colorado Independent

This story was originally published June 1, 2018 on High Country News by Carl Segerstrom, editorial intern at High Country News.

Photo credit: NPS/Chris Wonderly, Arches National Park, Creative Commons, Flickr. On Memorial Day weekend in 2016, cars backed up onto Highway 191 at Arches National Park in southern Utah. Some had to wait more than an hour to enter.

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