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Zabriskie Point in Death Valley national park. The park needs $129m to fund maintenance.
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley national park. The park needs $129m to fund maintenance. Photograph: bukki88/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley national park. The park needs $129m to fund maintenance. Photograph: bukki88/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Congress approves billions for US national parks in rare bipartisan push

This article is more than 3 years old

Great American Outdoors Act allocates $9.5bn over the next five years for previously neglected park maintenance

The US Congress has approved a sweeping, long-awaited bill to continuously fund national, state and local parks – a major boon to conservation and one of the few pieces of significant legislation the government has been able to agree on in a divisive election year.

The Great American Outdoors Act, passed on Wednesday afternoon, allocates $9.5bn over the next five years for previously neglected park repairs. And it sets up $900m a year to acquire land for conservation and continue maintenance.

“Parks are at the crux of nature access, and we’ve seen them become especially important during coronavirus, where especially communities of color are less likely to live within walking distance of a park, let alone a national park,” said Shanna Edberg, the Hispanic Access Foundation’s director of conservation programs.

“The start of the solution to that is fund for public lands.”

After years in limbo for the funding plan, Donald Trump surprised lawmakers when he agreed to back it in March. The Senate passed the legislation with bipartisan support in June. It will now head to the White House for Trump’s signature.

About 9 million more people visited national parks in 2019 than 2018. Yet national parks such as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon have a huge backlog of work that crews have been unable to perform – leading to the collapse of historic buildings and the shuttering of trails.

A National Parks Service report in 2018 detailed at least $11.9bn in backlogged maintenance and repair needs for the more than 5,690 miles of paved roads, 21,000 miles of trails and 25,000 buildings.

The Appalachian national scenic trail needs about $17m to update trails. Cape Cod national seashore could use $55m for deferred maintenance on paved roads, structures and buildings. Death Valley national park, which gets 1.7 million visitors a year, needs $129m. Seventy percent of the $9.5bn will go to park service projects – the rest will go to other federal agencies such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Education.

The legislation will also permanently allocate $900m annually to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which is used to maintain and purchase park land. Since the fund’s conception in 1965, it has only been fully funded twice. Last year, for instance, Congress appropriated only $435m.

National parks such as Yellowstone have a huge backlog of work that crews have been unable to perform. Photograph: NPS/Reuters

An influx of funding will ensure the preservation of numerous precious landscapes and historic sites. In New Mexico, the money means updates to Valles Caldera, a native Pueblo volcanic area, among other conserved lands.

In Colorado, the forest service is prioritizing LWCF funds to buy and make publicly accessible historic caves used by the Ute people, which are one of two known sites with petroglyphs, or rock carvings, recording the tribe’s history. The state will use money to make paths compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines.

Advocates are also hoping funding can help complete the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), a 3,100-mile trail from Mexico to Canada. About 730 miles of the trail need to be relocated off roads, and 172 miles of it need to be placed under public protection. Amanda Wheelock of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, a non-profit working to protect the trail, said that completing the trail will also stimulate the small businesses along it by attracting more visitors.

“You’re not going to make $1m by attracting 400 hikers per year. What you’re really going to make money off of is attracting the family who lives in Virginia and they hear about the CDT and want to take a whole week of vacation,” Wheelock said.

Critics of the act, a majority of them livestock associations from 26 states, cited issues with a clause in the LWCF that allows 40% of the fund, or $360m, to be used for land purchases across the US. They argue that over 640m acres of government-owned land is enough.

“If passed, the GAO Act sentences hundreds of millions of acres of American land to a poorly-managed future,” the groups wrote in a letter to Senate leadership on 8 June.

Some conservationists also argue that because the new funding comes from revenues from the energy industry, national parks are protected at the expense of the climate. Others say that using fossil fuel money for conservation signifies a victory.

Whatever the case, Wheelock said the coronavirus pandemic had only heightened the importance of protecting natural spaces.

“That’s the one thing that is always going to be there for us, that we can go outside and still do that safely with our families, that’s the one thing we can hold on to if we protect those places,” she said. “I’d like to think that the wide support for this bill is an acknowledgement that it takes money to protect these places.”

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