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Quoted from appended article:
Joshua Tree, Yellowstone and Organ Pipe Cactus parks have cut educational programs, and Congress has suggested extending the temporary $20 park entrance fee at national parks beyond the scheduled September expiration to help pay for anti-terror measures.
Hmmmm. Who would have guessed that fee-demo would become a de-facto mechanism for replacing tax revenues lost with Bush's tax-cuts? Who would have ever suspected that recreation user fees would have become a funding mechanism for Bush's War on Terror?
Ya' know .... in re-reading the legislation which authorized this temporary program, I can't find a damn thing that allows National Park fees to be used to pay for anti-terror measures. Heck, based upon what the NPS has long said about the value of this program to the general public, I thought fee-demo revenues paid for toilet paper, toilet cleanser and those other things that the Park Service can no longer afford.
Scott
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June 29, 2004
RECREATION: Parks at a loss
Terror alerts deprive some national parks as staff are shifted to other sites.
By Bonnie Obremski, Times Staff Writer
With the always-frantic Independence Day weekend looming, a nation
jittery over potential terrorist attacks will find some national parks
short-handed because the federal government has redeployed personnel
for homeland security duty.
Throughout the summer, more rangers will guard Mt. Rushmore and more
officers will patrol the St. Louis Gateway Arch during heightened
terrorist alerts. The Interior Department has identified both sites, as
well as pipelines in the canyon country near Four Corners, as among 19
potential terror targets, and will move rangers to them, leaving other
parks with fewer staffers to confront belligerent campers and
tranquilize marauding bears.
Visitors will enjoy their monuments, historic sites and recreation
areas despite the personnel shuffle, says National Park Service
spokesman David Barna, adding that at some parks the change will mean
"cutting the grass once a week instead of twice."
Others aren't as sanguine.
"Pulling rangers out of parks means there's no longer rangers to
prevent vandalism, poaching and other crimes," says Jeff Ruch,
executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
After Congress urged Park Service police to concentrate on protecting
the Washington Mall, drug investigations and traffic enforcement
dropped at other sites, and the agency's top cop, Teresa Chambers, went
public with concerns about declining safety. She said the 620-member
nationwide park police force, which guards such national treasures as
the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument and San Francisco's
Presidio, needed a major expansion in the post-Sept. 11 era. Last
December, the Park Service placed Chambers on administrative leave for
talking to a reporter about the problems.
The Park Service has spent about $50 million of its $1.6-billion annual
budget on homeland security measures this year, but advocates for the
national parks say the budget was stretched dangerously thin before the
Sept. 11 attacks and scold Washington for failing to kick in more money
for homeland security.
One park ranger is available for each 10 square miles of land, and one
employee is available per 32,000 visitors, according to the Assn. of
National Park Rangers. The group's report, released in April, concludes
that staff and budget constraints could force the Park Service to merge
or close seven parks by 2009.
This summer, during orange alerts, some park visitors will experience
the rearrangement of resources when rangers search unattended backpacks
and watch visitors with surveillance cameras.
Meanwhile, budget cuts are forcing some sites to close their gates early.
Joshua Tree, Yellowstone and Organ Pipe Cactus parks have cut
educational programs, and Congress has suggested extending the
temporary $20 park entrance fee at national parks beyond the scheduled
September expiration to help pay for anti-terror measures.
Each time the Homeland Security Department raises the nation's current
yellow alert status to orange, the Park Service says it spends an
additional $1 million a month to enforce such measures as barring
pedestrians from the Golden Gate Bridge, closing some trails and
herding visitors to Mt. Rushmore through metal detectors.
The House Government Reform committee has requested that the General
Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, examine the
effects of homeland security on the national parks - places that for
many Americans are synonymous with summer.
The report is scheduled to be released in November.
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