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Sewage pipes and water lines aren't the sexiest things in national parks. But they're critical.
The main water line in Grand Canyon National Park, a park considered a crown jewel of the conservation agency, breaks or sprouts leaks between five and 30 times a year. "The line is always breaking," said Jon Jarvis, the former director of the Park Service who stepped down in 2017.
The infamous water line is part of a now nearly$12 billionbacklogin the agency's collection of busted roads, pipes, and facilities. Yet a couple of weeks ago, an intensely divided Congress finally passed the Great American Outdoors Act — giving parks more than $6 billion to start repairs — and President Donald Trump signed the historic bill on Tuesday (while butchering the word "Yosemite"). Park experts say the act, while certainly not a remedy to all the Park Service's considerable infrastructure woes, is of critical significance to the parks' future — and the millions who visit.
"These are non-sexy items but they're incredibly important," said Jarvis.
The Park Service — teeming with historic buildings, old battlefields, and heavily used roads — is responsible for the second-largest amount of infrastructure in the federal government, second only to the Department of Defense.
Members of Congress and organizations like the National Parks Conservation Association and the Pew Charitable Trusts spent years fashioning and moving this bill forward, emphasized Jarvis, who noted the Trump administration was of little to no help in advancing the bill. (Elsewhere, the Trump administration's public lands record includes shrinking national monuments, weakening a bedrock conservation law, and restarting an environmental review process to build an unprecedented mining district in the heart of Alaska's fat bear country.)
The Great American Outdoors Act does two main things:
It provides $9 billion to repair and maintain projects in national parks and other federally managed lands (which includes $1.3 billion each year for five years for the Park Service). This is called the "National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund."
It requires mandatory funding of $900 million per year for the Land and Water Conservation Fund — a 56-year-old, historically underfunded account that uses taxes from the fossil fuel industry to protect and buy land around the nation.
In total, the law is a big boost to the nation's grossly underfunded national parks.
"It is a really important step forward to restore parks to the level where they're functional," said Linda Bilmes,an expert in public finances at Harvard Kennedy School and a former member of the U.S. Department of Interior National Parks Advisory Committee.
"Our parks have been struggling with overdue repairs for years," said John Garder, the senior director of Budget and Appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, an organization that supports the national parks. "Visitor centers, water systems, trails, roads, and more will finally get the care they need."
The Lockwood House in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.Credit: npca
A potholed road in Yellowstone National Park.Credit: npcaPayin' for the parks
The money isn't coming from any new taxes. It's largely coming from the royalties oil and gas companies pay the U.S. for extracting fossil fuels from offshore drilling on federal property. This may sound inconsistent with the goals of a conservation agency: Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are rapidly heating the planet. This warming is shrinking glaciers, raising sea levels, and threatening native plants and animals in national parks.
(The annual $900 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund comes from fossil fuel royalties and half of the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund will come from general energy revenues — oil, gas, renewables — produced on federal land).
This revenue the U.S. receives from fossil fuel companies — corporations that will be around for a while even as they might transition to producing significantly less gas but more renewable energy — all goes into the U.S. treasury. So this money might as well support underfunded public lands. The Park Service budget is around one-tenth of one percent of the total U.S. budget.
"That [fossil fuel revenue] could be spent on military equipment," noted Jarvis. "Or it can be spent on the National Park Service."
"It's basically taking [revenue] out of the pockets of oil and gas companies and reinvesting it in the public," noted Harvard's Bilmes.
Yet fossil fuels can't support the national parks forever. In fact, if the U.S. and global society want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change this century, carbon emissions would need to start falling dramatically, right now. (The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record high this year, likely the highest amount in millions of years.) But the way we power our cars, homes, and lives likely isn't going to flip a switch overnight — which is, unfortunately, to our potential peril. For the short term, at least, fossil fuel revenues will play a major role in rebuilding the parks.
"This is an important statement of purpose which reflects where we are at the moment," said Bilmes. "As the situation evolves in the future, we’ll have to evolve too."
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This evolution means guaranteeing public lands adequate funding without tying it to oil extraction or something similar. "This bill will not be a panacea for park disrepair," said Garder. "It's important Congress doesn't just rest on its laurels after the bill revenue runs out." In the U.S. budget, allocating $900 million a year to support degrading public parks would be relatively small.
"$900 million really is, in the scheme of things, very tiny," said Bilmes. "We’ve spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afganistan."
For decades, the Park Service has largely operated on an "operational budget," meaning it's given money to run parks and pay rangers. But the federal government hasn't provided the agency long-term funding for fixing things, such as broken water lines when they break (like a city would allocate money for decades into the future to make sure a vital bridge could be maintained when things inevitably degrade).
So the parks have been gradually falling apart. "A lot of stuff in parks has been there for 30, 50 years," said Bilmes. "[Deferred maintenance] has been pilling up."
"The return on investments for national parks is extraordinary."
Yosemite National Park, for example, needs $118 million to fix a wastewater plant and rehab roads, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. Kalaupapa National Historical Park in Hawaii has a failing electrical system, the association said.
Investing in parks has historically had an outsized payoff. "The return on investments for national parks is extraordinary," said Garder. "It's more than $10 in economic activity for every dollar invested in the Park Service," he said, noting the $40 billion in annual economic activity generated by park visitation.
Though Bilmes estimates the economic value of parks at$92 billion a year, when accounting for the resources they provide the TV and film industry, education, watershed protection, and beyond. "That’s 30 times the amount the federal government appropriates," Bilmes said. "And $92 billion is a conservative estimate," she added.
Public lands are objectively a wise investment. Even in a time of utmost political polarization while a historic pandemic surges across the U.S. and the White House has sought to discredit the most reputable infectious disease researcher in the nation, powerful members of Congress realized the benefits of public lands. The parks got rare bipartisan support.
"This isn't something that just benefits us today," said Bilmes, "but generations ahead."