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The appended article titled "Rescuing Our Parks" is not truly a new piece -- it is more like reheated ideological left-overs that have been served many times before. It is certainly not a news piece. It is at its core, pure, unadulterated, propaganda.
The person being interviewed, Holly Fretwell, is a Senior Fellow at Property and Environment Research Center-- a hard-core free-market think tank at which former Interior Secretary Gale Norton was also a Senior Fellow.
The reporter, although not identified as such, is a Senior Fellow and the even MORE RIGHT WING and more strident Libertarian think-tank -- the Independence Institute .
http://www.i2i.org/main/author.php?author_id=98
Jay Ambrose, a senior fellow at Independence Institute and former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, returned to Colorado to write nationally distributed columns and take up other pursuits last December after nine years in Washington, where he served as director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers.
It drives me to speak of Fascism when articles such as this appear in the media masquerading as news and without being identified as collusion. The source represents one ideologically driven, corporate funded, think thank. The so-called "reporter" represents a second think tank which espouses similar ideology.
Neither of these think tanks seek to "Rescue Our Parks".
They seek to privatize them.
Scott
-- begin quoted ---
October 20, 2006
Commentary - Rescuing our parks
By JAY AMBROSE
Let's hop in a car and go to one of our national parks they are less
crowded and noisy now than in the summer and awash in autumnal beauty
and let's try to ignore the dilapidation competing with the grandeur
that should dominate a celebration in 10 years.
At that time 2016 it will be the 100th anniversary of the
establishment of the National Park Service. President Bush wants action
on goals that will likely include fixing what's amiss in the parks, the
hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of neglect ranging from potholes
to crumbling roadways, before we reach the centennial date.
A way to help get there is to uphold the original vision relying on
user fees to support operations as some states successfully do with
their parks, not on taxes that go to the Treasury Department and are
subject to political misuse.
There are many who rightly bemoan the disrepair of a number of our 388
national parks and cry for ever higher federal allocations to restore
them to their awe-inspiring best but who forget that long-abandoned
pioneer vision. Not Holly Fretwell, a university instructor who spoke
to an expense-paid journalists' seminar conducted by the Property and
Environment Research Center in mountainous Montana splendor near
Bozeman some weeks back.
Fretwell, also a research fellow with the center, reminds us that the
early advocates of national parks said taxes would not be necessary to
keep them in prime shape and they are not. She's done the homework of
figuring out what it would cost per visitor per day at the parks based
on current attendance to maintain and run them, and the numbers do not
dismay you. At Mount Rushmore, for example, it would cost $1.31; at the
Great Smoky Mountains, $1.70; at the Statue of Liberty, $3.49; at
Glacier, $5.75; at Yosemite, $6.84; at Yellowstone, $9.84.
Many parks now charge either nothing or a negligible amount per
carload, all of it adding up to maybe 7 percent or so of operating
costs, but suggest something as reasonable as making up the difference
and you get unreasonable objections, one of them being that visitors
won't be able to afford the costs. Yes, they will, or at least most of
them.
It's true that fees in some of the least popular parks would have to be
astronomically high to meet expenses, and that this funding method
would not work in them. It would work in most because the fees would
not be beyond the means of the vast majority of families that pay far
more simply in getting from their homes to these scenic natural
wonders. For the disadvantaged, there are a variety of charitable,
free-day and other answers, such as doing volunteer work in the parks
to earn visitor privileges, an idea Fretwell especially applauds.
Some argue that the fees would amount to another tax on top of the
taxes they already pay for the parks, but you could eventually phase
out most tax support for the parks with this system, and in so doing,
you would free the park money from competition with other national
purposes and the clutches of members of Congress who sometimes divert
it to outlandishly silly pork projects and away from obvious needs. You
could also get past the bureaucrats who spend large shares of these
dollars on guess what? the bureaucracy, not on the parks themselves.
The Fretwell proposal is that each park's revenues would be retained
for its operations and that park managers would be given more authority
to spend that money in accordance with what's most crucial in
preserving them and serving visitors. For good stewardship, there would
be rewards, and for bad stewardship, unhappy consequences.
This funding mechanism has other advantages those who receive the most
pleasures from our parks will pay for most of their costs but won't be
enough in and of itself to finance all capital and restoration
projects. There are other funding possibilities, among them entering
partnerships with private corporations that would not be allowed to
convert forests into shopping malls, but would be allowed to mention
park sponsorship on the wrappers of their products. There would be no
wear or tear on our heritage, just dollars to help sustain it.
The issue of the moment is not the stinginess of the Bush
administration Fretwell's charts show more being spent on the parks in
inflation-adjusted dollars during his tenure than any other time over
almost three decades but a funding system that's failing to do what a
different system could achieve. Our national parks remain splendid
experiences awaiting us, but they have serious problems that could be
mostly solved in time for an anniversary not all that many years from
now.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for
Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas,
and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
)
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- Privatization 
