National parks in budget turmoil

Sifting through budgetary apples and oranges to assess administration claims was made more difficult when the Interior Department initially halted park superintendents in Utah from responding directly to the Deseret Morning News about a questionnaire it sent them about the condition of their parks and budgets.

(Other signs that Interior makes discussion of budgets difficult is that National Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers was fired recently after she told the press her agency is short on staff and money, and a group of former park superintendents released a leaked memo that had urged park employees to mislead the public if necessary about service cuts to avoid "public or political controversy" this election year.)

Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said Interior was not trying to prevent superintendents from talking to the Deseret Morning News but wanted to review their answers first to ensure that each park was providing comparable data. "We wanted to make sure we were comparing apples to apples," she said.

Only selected highlights and a compilation of data from superintendents' responses were provided to the newspaper by the Interior Department. Scarlett subsequently allowed superintendents to be interviewed directly, and most acknowledged service cuts this year. (They will be discussed in the second part of the series tomorrow.)

Assessing the parks

To help assess condition of parks, the Deseret Morning News evaluated park budgets listed online by the Department of Interior. Of 388 units in the National Park Service, 346 listed both their 2003 and 2004 operating budgets online.

Three of every four parks, or 254, reported cuts. Seven had exactly the same budget both years. And 85 parks, or a quarter of the total, had budget increases.

The list of parks with the biggest cuts includes some of the nation's best known: Minute Man National Historical Park, Mass. (cut $465,000, or 22 percent); Yosemite National Park, Calif. (cut $407,000, or 1.8 percent); Grand Canyon (cut $350,000, or 1.8 percent); Shenandoah National Park, Va. (cut $280,000, or 2.7 percent) and Great Smoky Mountains (cut $279,000, or 1.8 percent).

Among those with the biggest hikes are many of the "national icons": Independence National Historical Park, Pa. (increased $2.55 million, or 12 percent); Statue of Liberty (increased $1.13 million, or 15 percent); the Gateway Arch ($508,000, or 6 percent); and memorials along the National Mall in Washington ($482,000, or 2.7 percent).

In an interview with the Deseret Morning News, Scarlett said it "is fair to say" increases at those icon parks came largely to increase security against terrorism threats.