{"id":103642,"date":"2017-09-11T17:33:09","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T23:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/nps-maintenance-deferred-repairs-at-our-nations-parks-and-monuments-put-them-all-at-risk\/"},"modified":"2017-09-11T17:33:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T23:33:09","slug":"nps-maintenance-deferred-repairs-at-our-nations-parks-and-monuments-put-them-all-at-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/nps-maintenance-deferred-repairs-at-our-nations-parks-and-monuments-put-them-all-at-risk\/","title":{"rendered":"NPS maintenance: Deferred repairs at our nation\u2019s parks and monuments put them all at risk"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A portion of the Balcony House site at Mesa Verde National Park. This represents one of the nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites that the NPS is charged with preserving and maintaining at Mesa Verde.<\/span>Luke Perkins\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mesa Verde is just one of 400 park units that account for a total of $11.3 billion in needed repairs.<\/p>\n

Hovenweep National Monument needs $255,000, and Yucca House, an isolated archaeological site that has few improvements, needs $125,000.<\/p>\n

Inviting the public to visit public lands involves costs that must be met. Unfortunately, they haven\u2019t been, and the result is a laundry list of urgent needs. The National Park Service budget has not been adequate for all its needs for many years, and there is no reason to believe that will change, especially with federal disaster-response needs growing daily.<\/p>\n

The problem more likely will continue to grow worse year by year, which is poor stewardship of public resources. And just catching up on deferred maintenance doesn\u2019t move parks forward; it simply prevents them from falling farther behind.<\/p>\n

Inadequate maintenance has a domino effect, though. Eventually conditions become bad enough to discourage visitation, revenue goes down, and recovery becomes nearly impossible without a large infusion of cash.<\/p>\n

Public lands advocates have various ideas about where in the federal budget that cash could be found, from the president\u2019s golf vacations to various projects that, depending on one\u2019s point of view, do not seem necessary. It\u2019s relatively easy to identify enough savings for one park; finding enough for all is far more challenging.<\/p>\n

Private funding and public-private partnerships offer welcome assistance but are not a universal solution because of the potential for attached strings.<\/p>\n

National parks and monuments must, first and foremost, serve their preservation mission and public, and their funding sources must not undermine those goals.<\/p>\n

Nor must the Department of the Interior. It\u2019s one thing for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to announce that he\u2019s not altering the majority of the monuments under his review; it would be another entirely to announce that the Trump administration has committed to eliminating the maintenance backlog and adequately funding the park units going forward.<\/p>\n

The experiences to be had in each park have intrinsic value. They are visited and loved by many millions of people every year \u2013 331 million recreational visits in 2016, including 583,000 at Mesa Verde \u2013 and regional economies are intertwined with the visitation to national parks. Those are important points to make, because closing a park or monument to save money (or to appease other interests) isn\u2019t nearly as uncomplicated as it might sound to a politician or a president who has little familiarity with the National Park Service.<\/p>\n

It also would be politically dishonest.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s tackle the problem openly and consider the full range of available solutions for taking care of the public\u2019s property.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A portion of the Balcony House site at Mesa Verde National Park. This represents one of the nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites that the NPS is charged with preserving and maintaining at Mesa Verde.Luke Perkins\/Durango Herald Mesa Verde is just one of 400 park units that account for a total of $11.3 billion in needed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5821,5819],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-103642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","category-opinion","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103642"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=103642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}