<DOC>
[109th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:25530.wais]
THE NATIONAL PARKS: PRESERVATION OF HISTORIC SITES AND THE NORTHEAST
REGION
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,
DRUG POLICY, AND HUMAN RESOURCES
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
AUGUST 24, 2005
__________
Serial No. 109-109
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
index.html
http://www.house.gov/reform
_____
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee DIANE E. WATSON, California
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
DARRELL E. ISSA, California LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
JON C. PORTER, Nevada BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
KENNY MARCHANT, Texas ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia Columbia
PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina ------
CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina (Independent)
------ ------
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
David Marin, Deputy Staff Director/Communications Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian/Senior Counsel
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman
PATRICK T. McHenry, North Carolina ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DAN BURTON, Indiana BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JOHN L. MICA, Florida DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota DIANE E. WATSON, California
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
CHRIS CANNON, Utah C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina Columbia
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
J. Marc Wheat, Staff Director
Brandon Lerch, Professional Staff Member
Mark Pfundstein, Professional Staff Member
Malia Holst, Clerk
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on August 24, 2005.................................. 1
Statement of:
Kennedy, Roger, National Council chairman, National Parks
Conservation Association; Marilyn Fenollosa, National Trust
for Historic Preservation; Ken Olson, president, Friends of
Acadia National Park; and Lt. John McCauley, museum
curator, Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of
Massachusetts.............................................. 29
Fenollosa, Marilyn....................................... 46
Kennedy, Roger........................................... 29
McCauley, Lt. John....................................... 57
Olson, Ken............................................... 52
McIntosh, Robert W., Associate Regional Director for Planning
and Partnerships, Northeast Region, National Park Service.. 6
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Fenollosa, Marilyn, National Trust for Historic Preservation,
prepared statement of...................................... 49
Kennedy, Roger, National Council chairman, National Parks
Conservation Association, prepared statement of............ 31
McCauley, Lt. John, museum curator, Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company of Massachusetts, prepared statement of.. 60
McIntosh, Robert W., Associate Regional Director for Planning
and Partnerships, Northeast Region, National Park Service,
prepared statement of...................................... 12
Olson, Ken, president, Friends of Acadia National Park,
prepared statement of...................................... 55
Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Indiana, prepared statement of.................... 4
THE NATIONAL PARKS: PRESERVATION OF HISTORIC SITES AND THE NORTHEAST
REGION
----------
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and
Human Resources,
Committee on Government Reform,
Boston, MA.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m., in
Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA, Hon. Mark E. Souder (chairman of the
subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representative Souder.
Staff present: Brandon Lerch and Mark Pfundstein,
professional staff members.
Mr. Souder. Good morning and thank you all for joining us.
This hearing is the third in a series of hearings about the
critical issues facing the National Park Service.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the national parks
is aware of the continuing pressures the National Park Service
is facing. The National Park Service manages a diverse number
of parks, seashores, historic sites, and lake shores. The
Northeast region is a perfect example of this diversity. Acadia
National Park, Cape Code National Seashore, and Minute Man
National Historical Park are just a few of the NPS units in the
region.
This hearing will examine northeast regional sites. The
natural parks of the region provide recreational opportunities
for millions of people. They preserve open spaces, and sustain
a variety of wildlife, natural formations, and picturesque
landscapes.
The northeast region is also home to a variety of cultural
landmarks and historical sites. Just as natural parks provide
benefits and inspiration to millions, historical sites offer a
window to the past and help us relate to those who have come
before us. Given Boston's role in our country's history, it is
appropriate that we examine historical preservation in this
most historic of cities.
The preservation of our historical and cultural heritage is
one of the most important and challenging missions of the
National Park Service. These sites represent our history and
the story of our Nation. Preserving them is vital if we are
going to pass our history to our children, grandchildren, and
future generations.
Preservation, restoration, and maintenance of these sites
is not cheap. It takes much time and money to keep them in
operating order, to make sure that they are safe, and to ensure
that they can adequately convey their story and context in
history.
All too often important artifacts are lost through neglect
or purposeful destruction. When this occurs there is not much
we can do to recover the site. Creating replicas of sites is
possible, but they do not convey the same experience. It is
imperative that we not let these sites be destroyed.
Acquiring and keeping these sites in good repair is a
central mission of the National Park Service. Unfortunately,
maintaining historical sites, particularly those acquired in
poor condition, is expensive, and the National Park Service
budget is tight. This hearing will examine how the National
Park Service makes the decisions regarding these treasures.
Furthermore, no assessment of the Park Service can be
complete without also speaking to outside groups. The groups
represented here today are passionate about the national parks
and historical preservation. They have been able to mobilize
the public and keep them interested in these issues, sometimes
for generations. They have unique perspectives and can inform
us how to raise awareness among the public.
Today I am joined on the first panel by Robert W. McIntosh,
the Associate Regional Director for Planning and Partnerships
for the Northeast Region of the National Park Service and a
veteran of these hearings who was at our first one in
Gettysburg, and Michael Creasey, the Superintendent of the
Lowell National Historical Park and Chair of the Granite
Subcluster.
On the second panel I would also like to welcome my friend,
Roger Kennedy, the National Council chairman of National Parks
Conservation Association, and former director of the National
Park Service, and famous author. Also, welcome to Marilyn
Fenollosa of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and
Ken Olson, the president of Friends of Acadia National Park.
Our final witness on the second panel is Lt. John McCauley who
is the museum curator for the Ancient and Honorable Artillery
Company of Massachusetts.
Before I proceed with the process of this committee, a lot
of times when we are doing field hearings I try to explain what
the Government Reform Committee is and what this subcommittee
is just briefly so those in attendance kind of understand what
our role is.
In Congress we will have an authorizing committee that will
do legislation so, for example, Parks legislation comes to the
Resources Committee. The Appropriations Committee funds the
actual budget. The Government Reform Committee then is to look
at whether the funds that are appropriated and authorized are
both being spent the way Congress intended them to be spent and
whether or not there are things that either need to be changed
through regulations, through laws, or through adequate funding
questions.
Historically whenever we plunge into an issue, whether it
be oversight of problems ranging from in the last
administration our committee was most famous from everything
from the Travel Office to Whitewater to China investigations.
Most recently most people know us as asking Mark McGuire
whether he had ever done steroids and him not being able to
remember.
Whenever we do these different types of hearings, the
authorizing committees somewhat have some concerns. The fact is
the oversight committee existed in the early days of Congress
before the authorizing committees. What we have been doing here
systematically because though my Subcommittee is Criminal
Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources and we have oversight
over Justice Department, HHS, Department of Education, as well
as Department of HUD, and any drug policy in any agency, also
because of my personal interest in negotiating with other
subcommittee chairmen was able to have national parks come
under oversight of my subcommittee as well as a number of other
issues.
One of the things we are doing is a systematic look at our
entire National Park System and looking at it as we move toward
our centennial, as we look at the various problems and
pressures on the park system. This is the third of what will
likely be a minimum of eight hearings around the country moving
toward a 2-year report.
We did this a few years ago on Border and that became the
fundamental report that we used as we created the Homeland
Security Committee and the Border Subcommittee there and we
want to do a strong analysis working with all the different
groups as well that we can then try to discuss as we try to
figure out what in Congress we need to do working with the
administration on how best to preserve our national parks.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
Mr. Souder. With that background, first let me do two
procedural matters. I ask for unanimous consent that all
Members have 5 legislative days to submit written statements
and questions for the hearing record and that any answers to
written questions provided by the witnesses also be included in
the record. Without objection it is so ordered.
I would also ask unanimous consent that all exhibits,
documents, and other materials referred to by Members may be
included in the hearing record, that all Members be permitted
to revise and extend their remarks. Without objection it is so
ordered. Those are procedural things we do with our field
hearings.
Let me make one other comment. These hearings are very
bipartisan. Mr. Cummings, ranking member and Democrat of this
committee, couldn't be here with me today. He was with me
yesterday at a field hearing on Meth in the Midwest.
The mere fact that we are holding this hearing without him
present indicates this is a bipartisan effort and we are doing
this in a pretty much completely unanimous way in our
subcommittee and look forward to continuing to involve him and
the other members of the subcommittee. That is not typical of
the way Congress is working right now. On this subcommittee we
have been able to do that both on narcotics and in the parks
area.
One of the things we do as an oversight committee is ask
all our witnesses to testify under oath. Rafael Palmiero is
going through this with his attorneys right now learning why we
do this. We don't expect to have that problem today and Mr.
McIntosh has already shown that he has made it through the
first round fine.
If you could rise and, Mr. Creasey, if you could as well,
raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Souder. Let the record show that both witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
Now I would like to yield and we are going to have a--for
those of you who don't know me, I am a very conservative
Republican so this is hard to say. We are going to have a very
liberal clock today. We have a 5-minute rule. We have asked
everybody's testimony to be at 5 minutes but if you want to go
over, that is fine. We will put the clock on so you know when
the yellow comes on with 1 minute to go.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT W. McINTOSH, ASSOCIATE REGIONAL DIRECTOR
FOR PLANNING AND PARTNERSHIPS, NORTHEAST REGION, NATIONAL PARK
SERVICE
Mr. McIntosh. Thank you, Congressman. As was the case at
Gettysburg, I did have a little more extended remarks so the
clock expired but if you really want me to stop, just point the
finger and I will do that.
Mr. Souder. If you see me doze off, that would be an early
warning sign.
Mr. McIntosh. I am certainly pleased to have the
opportunity once again to participate in these hearings and
welcome you. Mr. Creasey and I welcome you to Boston and to the
Northeast Region of the National Park Service. We hope that our
comments today will be helpful in the committee's work and
deliberations.
Before I continue, I would like to also, on behalf of the
National Park Service, welcome to this session the
distinguished former director Roger Kennedy. Roger is a
colleague and a friend of, I think, all of the Park Service
employees that were in service at the time of his leadership
and we deeply and truly appreciate his commitment and
dedication to us at that time.
The extent of my testimony will focus primarily on the
parks in northern New England. I think we have tried to limit
the scope to Maine and Massachusetts and we have one park in
Vermont and one park in New Hampshire.
As my testimony indicates, the region itself is 238 square
miles with a population of about 68 million people. We are home
to about 24 percent of the Nation's population with a
population density of 288 people per square mile.
That is against the national average of about 80. We have a
lot of folks who are busy in their education and in their work,
as well as in their recreational pursuits. We play in the
northeast a large role in providing close-to-home recreation as
well as destination visits to our great national parks in the
northeast.
We service about 51 million people a year. That is about 18
percent of the national total. Region-wide the 13 northeast
States contain about 75 congressionally designated units of the
National Park System. We have 25 affiliated or related areas
including 14 national heritage areas. Within this region in
these parks we have about a quarter of the system's museum
collections, a quarter of the historic structures, and almost
half of the Nation's National Historic Landmarks.
I noted with some pride this morning in the business
section of the Boston paper, the Globe, that the owners of
Fenway Park are seeking National Historic Landmark status so
that they might qualify for the Historic Preservation tax
credits which provide developers of commercial development,
commercial use business properties up to 20 percent credit for
the rehabilitation work that they do. It is aside from the
operation of the parks, but it has been a major contribution in
this country to historic preservation over the last almost 30
years at this point.
In addition to administering the parks in this region, we
provide strong assistance, significant assistance to these
heritage areas. We have a very effective Rivers, Trails and
Conservation Assistance program that works with local States
and local communities. We administer the Land and Water
Conservation Fund which provides money for Federal land
acquisition as well as allocations to the State for 50 percent
cost sharing for acquisition and development of recreation and
open space lands.
Most recently we are active in working with the General
Services Administration [GSA] and the Coast Guard in the
transfer of historic lighthouse properties. That is done
through a Request for Proposals [RFP] process and it makes the
property available to nonprofit organizations free of cost as
long as they provide for the historic preservation of those
properties and for public access.
The region has approximately 4,000 employees that are
working across the region in the central offices as well as in
the parks. We benefited, at least in 2004, from 825,000
volunteer hours. If you do the math, that is equal to about 496
work-years of effort. In a sense, our work force has increased
by that amount. These people, Volunteers in the Park, have a
long tradition and a long list of dedicated individuals who
provide assistance to the service across the system.
The region's budget, $261 million in fiscal year 2005, $230
million of those $261 are dedicated in the parks to the
operation of the parks. The remainder of that amount is made up
of $8.3 million for cyclic maintenance; $10.2 million for
repair/rehab; $2.1 million for cultural resource preservation;
$1.4 million for natural resources; $1.5 million for
collections management; and $7.7 million in other project
funds.
These are annual funds that are provided to the service and
the projects move from park to park through various priority
rating systems as to what parks get what projects in what year.
In fiscal year 2006 the appropriations bill will increase the
park's financial capabilities in meeting the President's goal
to address the maintenance backlog. The amount of $230 million
includes the congressionally authorized base increases of 4
percent in 2005.
The 2006 act provides for about a 3.1 percent increase
across the board in the Park Service. Those numbers are very
telling because while they are increasing it is basically
enabling us to stay afloat given the fixed cost of operating
the business. Most recently obviously the energy costs that all
of us suffer personally and in our businesses and certainly in
the Park Service.
One simple factor in that equation is that the benefits of
the Federal employees that almost without missing a year we
received a pay increase but not every year do we receive the
amount of dollars equal to that increase to sustain those
costs.
We rely obviously on other funding sources. Namely one of
the most important ones is the recreation fee authorization
that was reauthorized in 2005 giving the Park Service a 10-year
window to use the fee program. At Boston Harbor Islands
National Recreation Area, $120,000 went to trails, campsites,
and building rehabilitation in the Harbor Islands.
I think it is significant to note in this particular case
most of that money went to supplies, materials and supervision
of a youth project within the city or from the city that
committed the labor for that effort.
At Cape Cod National Seashore $1.7 million went for beach
and park improvements and visitor safety. At Lowell National
Historic Park, Mr. Creasey's park, almost $419 million for
rehabilitating and upgrading the radio system--yes, you keep
track of that, don't you? $418,000 for the radio system,
visitor and employee safety measures, and conservation of the
historic walkways and landscape along the canals and the
Merrimack River.
At Acadia National Park the fees since 1997 were $10
million, which have been committed to some very important and
very visible projects providing visitor services, resource
protection, and maintenance. A notable accomplishment includes
the development and operation of the Island Explorer which is a
transportation system that responsibilities are shared with the
Park Service, the local communities, and the State of Maine as
well as Friends of Acadia, the nonprofit Friends group that
ably supports us.
Historic preservation, obviously given the statistics of
this region and given the history of this region, is a core
mission for us. Obviously within this region, in Boston and
Philadelphia and New York various activities that constituted
the debate that this room itself is significant in American
history for the striving for independence from colonial powers
and so on.
Boston National Historical Park is made up of a series of
historic sites that were significant at that time. Paul
Revere's home, the Old North Church. Just south of town in
Quincy the Adams Homestead. That along with the John F. Kennedy
Birthplace are the two Presidential sites within the National
Park System in New England.
Then a little further to the west and certainly significant
in the strive for independence was Minute Man National
Historical Park in Concord. Minute Man just completed, or is
completing a major project, the rehabilitation of the Old North
Bridge and the landscape surrounding that and the two monuments
that are at that location. That is a park which is significant
in visitation and the tourism industry in Massachusetts and
receives about 1.2 million visitors a year.
Most recently as well at Minute Man a significant effort
was undertaken to bring the battle road unit to life. That is
the largest unit in the park and its significance is the route
of Paul Revere's ride as well as the line of retreat for the
British after the battle at the bridge. In addition to that,
the landscapes along that route as well as several historic
properties that were extant at the time of Paul Revere's ride
and the battle have been restored.
At Lowell most recently the park has joined forces with the
Friends of Longfellow to recover the rich and historic
landscape of the formal garden properties to its former glory.
A capital campaign completed by the Friends in 2005 raised
$800,000 in public and private donations for that effort.
Longfellow as well was one of the first projects of Save
America's Treasures and in the late 1990's received a
combination of funding sources but received about $2 million to
rehabilitate the historic structure and provide for fire
suppression and air conditioning and other necessary things for
a historic structure like that. In this building, and just down
the street at the old State House, in 2004 they received
significant meticulous renovations that took care of the many
aspects of deterioration and maintenance needs of these two
buildings.
I think one story that is important to tell here is that it
is only 15 years ago that we spent a significant amount of
money in these two buildings as well but not because of overuse
and not because of anything but historic structures or any
structure that requires ongoing maintenance so 15 years later
we are touching up and fixing many of the things that were
fixed 15 years ago.
Once we provide funds for a project, it is not that we need
to be thinking in that time line and that is the importance of
those cyclic programs and the repair rehab programs to provide
that type of funding.
At the Boston Navy Yard, funds are provided for the
Historic Paint House and the Commandante's House. This year
just recently the Boston Historical Park broke ground for the
restoration of the Bunker Hill monument and the parkland
surrounding it.
In Acadia, again, Federal funding and partner funding for
the rehabilitation of the historic campgrounds built in the
1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps and rehabilitation of
the trails which were laid out originally prior to the
establishment of the National Park System and prior to the
establishment of Acadia National Park. The Friends of Acadia
once again provided significant help and leadership in making
those projects real.
In the maintenance backlog realm the region in the new
system of quantifying our resources, we have 6,814 assets which
are made up of structures, roads, water, waste water systems,
and the like. That is about 10 percent of the total assets of
the National Park System. Interestingly enough the actual
square footage of our buildings is about a third, or 33
percent, of the total in the system. While the west can brag
about its acres, we can brag about our structures.
The region has completed a comprehensive condition
assessment of 64 of those 75 parts. We can't go on without
noting that many of these resources like this building, like
buildings at all of our historic parks, as well as the natural
resource parks, are priceless and irreplaceable. Ongoing
maintenance is critical to their preservation.
Between 2002 and 2005 in the various fund sources we
dedicated about $120 million toward the backlog maintenance in
this region. I would just add parenthetically that the system
that we were working with adds up about $756 million backlog or
ongoing maintenance projects in this region. It is a very fluid
system with numbers being added and adjusted on a daily basis.
In a snapshot taken a couple of weeks ago, it looked like about
$756 million and that looked like about 13 percent of the
services total.
Maintenance projects are also preservation projects and the
testimony lists various projects, at Marsh-Billings, at New
Bedford Whaling National Historic Park, at Frederick Law
Olmsted, a new project just underway and the park is closed for
this purpose, to rehabilitate the building and provide
necessary HVAC and other critical needs in that park. Again,
back to Acadia more than $22 million have been dedicated to
park maintenance projects over the last 5 years.
In your instructions on this hearing you mentioned Homeland
Security. I would point out that since 2001 the service has
been provided $11 million in operating base and line item
construction projects directed toward enhancing the security
and the protection of the resources of the icon parks as well
as the visitors. In 2003 Boston Historical Park received a
permanent base operating price of $1.2 million for enhanced
security and $3.7 million for emergency preparedness as well.
I would note also that Federal Hall in New York received
$16 million in the aftermath of September 11th itself. Federal
Hall on Wall Street is just a few short blocks away from the
World Trade Center site and it received extensive damage at
that time.
The region is also a very successful participant in the
Federal Lands Highway Program and the Alternate Transportation
Program. We received approximately $10 million annually. Again,
our premiere example of that is the Island Explorer at Acadia
but other parks are benefiting from that program as well.
In the sense of our initiatives and management and just
general park management we have been developing over the years
various tools to try to get us more informed and increase our
ability to make better decisions. One is the budget cost
project tool. Actually, that is a projection tool. It is a
system that is based on past averages and trends, and the
current situation in terms of appropriations, so we can model
various scenarios into the future.
What is critical here obviously is the percent of our park
base that is dedicated to payroll versus other costs. When you
have a park that has a high percentage of payroll, which many,
if not all, of our parks do, and you increase the payroll cost
against a more-or-less fixed budget bottom line, you quickly
put the park in peril and you quickly provide money for
salaries but you have a few dollars left to maintain the
bathrooms, let alone buy the paper towels.
This new facility management software system is the system
that is allowing us to collect information about all our
assets. We rank those assets in terms of priority, in terms of
park mission, and we rank those assets in terms of their
condition so that allows us in a very park-wide, region-wide,
and service-wide way to get a picture of what the condition of
our parks are across the board on a relatively even playing
field, which has been very important.
In the past it has been the art of the author in terms of
the funding proposals that has dictated some decisions. This
still has not opportunity but it does allow us to level the
playing field quite a bit.
And this CORE Operations Analysis which is just getting
underway in the Service is parallel to the Facility Management
System, an attempt to try to get on an even playing field with
what the operational requirements of each of the individual
parks are.
In line with OMB Circular A-76 we are also working toward
the Preliminary Planning Efforts at the national parks of New
York Harbor which is Gateway National Recreation Area, Statue
of Liberty, and Ellis Island, Manhattan Sites, and Governor's
Island National Monument. These parks have completed the work
performance statement for facility and maintenance functions
and are currently developing their most efficient organization.
As you know, under that direction we then look at comparables
in the private sector as to what the most efficient way to do
our business is. Just now beginning in Boston National
Historical Park is the Preliminary Planning Effort as well.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my formal comments. Again, I
want to express our appreciation for your leadership in
undertaking this effort and having these hearings across the
country. We look forward to answering your questions and we
look forward to your deliberations as they go forward through
the summer and fall. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McIntosh follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED]
Mr. Souder. Thank you very much for your comprehensive
testimony. Let me start with a couple of medium broad budget
questions. So Boston Harbor Island is now a national recreation
area? I think when I was here it was a national park area.
Mr. McIntosh. The legislative title is national recreation
area. We have locally adopted the formal but unofficial
legislative title as a national park area.
Mr. Souder. When that was added to this system, did you get
an increase in regional funds?
Mr. McIntosh. The park got a modest increase in their
establishment funds for the park base operations. The region
itself did not get an increase because this park or any other
park is added to the system.
Mr. Souder. So, for example, when the Charleston Harbor
gets added--what I am trying to figure out is because we
certainly having spent a number of years on the Park
Subcommittee and on the Resources Committee watching the budget
process, when the bills go through usually by the time they get
there under suspension with minimal amendments we never have a
discussion of is this going to add to the 3 percent increase
that the national parks are getting. But I am wondering
internally how you handle that then. Do you get a regional
budget with occasional earmarks coming out of Congress and do
funds get shifted between regions or do you have to manage this
within your region?
Mr. McIntosh. There is no one answer for all situations but
generally speaking we manage within the region. There is no
contract between the Authorizing Committee and the
Appropriations Committee with respect to a new park and the
guaranteed allocation of funds, line item of funds for that
particular park.
Sometimes it comes simultaneously. Sometimes it comes a
year or 2 years later. In the meantime the mobilization, the
implementation of that park, the activation of that park, is
begged, borrowed, and stolen from either the regional office or
neighboring parks that might support with staff.
Governor's Island in New York is a good example. That
monument was declared. No funds were provided. It was declared
by Presidential proclamation and no funds were provided. For
the first couple of years within the New York area the regional
office provided staff as well as the parks loaned staff to get
that park mobilized.
Mr. Souder. Having been around this for some time, and
possibly answering this question somewhat at your own peril,
this is not a new debate but sitting on my side and being very
interested, I don't even know how you get information to make
an intelligent decision because under the current
administration every time there is a new park they oppose it.
Under the previous administration I don't think they ever
opposed one. We never get told when the park is coming up. It
usually divides on whether you favor spending more money or
less money. There is no kind of nuance answer. Boston Harbor
Park area is beautiful. We don't own land there at the Federal
Government but it has several different State parks and local
things in it, the first lighthouse and all sorts of great
sites.
But there is no question there was a political motivation
in developing that would be the classic of Mr. Ridenour's park
barreling to some degree. And Charleston Naval Harbor openly
says it. While we were worried the Naval Yard was going to be
closed, it doesn't mean it is not an important part of history
but I am trying to figure out the value process.
Now, what we are not doing in the tradeoff process here
because I basically believe that if a historic site falls down,
you will never get it back. Therefore, I am not against new
additions but we are not knowing what tradeoffs we are making
when we do new additions.
Do they ask you as regional director and say, because, one
thing, if a Congressman was told in that area or in a region,
``If we are going to get a new park in our area, here is what
we have been looking at,'' do you do any forward thinking in
the sense of here are sites that would be nice to have in the
system?
We do analysis and, finally, we are doing much better
analysis of here are the sites that are most critical to keep
from falling down. Here is where we need to do the investment.
We are doing analysis internally. I know there are risks of
doing external analysis because then you could get speculation
on the property, other groups thinking, ``The Federal
Government is going to take it over. I don't have to take care
of it anymore.'' That type of risk, but do you do that kind of
analysis that would ever come up and say, ``Well, look, if you
are going to do this, here is what we really need here.''
Mr. McIntosh. We do part of what you are suggesting. There
is no analysis currently where the Park Service looks at the
landscape and for whatever the values and for whatever the
reason says we should be considering this area or that area for
potential inclusion.
As you know, the Thomas Bill of the mid 1990's, the Omnibus
Parks Management Act provided that all studies or all
inclusions in the National Park System are subject to what is
called a special resource study and that study is aimed to do
several things. One is to determine the national significance
of the area. Second, determine the feasibility of that.
Basically that is an examination of the potential of that
site in terms of the resource. Is there integrity there? Is
there the capability to provide public programs. And the
suitability in the sense of is it necessary or appropriate for
the National Park Service to take over the administration of
this site.
Many sites that we are asked to consider are already State
properties or owned by nonprofits and some obviously are
private properties. In doing that we are also required to
provide budget information as to what the land acquisition, if
necessary, would cost, and also what the operating cost over
the first 5 years, let us say, what impact that would have in
terms of the Park Service budget.
That information is done with NEPA compliance. Therefore,
those reports are provided to the public for public comment
prior to the finalization. The Thomas Bill provides that the
director must make a professional finding of the service's
professional determination of the significance suitability, and
feasibility of that site and the Secretary would make a
recommendation when she transmits that report to the Congress.
Mr. Souder. So what you are basically saying is that it is
a reactive process primarily to some degree designed----
Mr. McIntosh. To provide a very general summary, yes. I
would say it is a reactive process.
Mr. Souder [continuing]. Designed pretty much by my party
to say, ``Look, we have concerns about whether there has been a
systematic review of the process.'' It was an attempt to get at
what I was saying but it is still a reactive process. In other
words, a Member of Congress thinks of something he wants in his
district which may be motivated by everything from
environmental to economic shutdown to a variety of different
questions which may not be related to its historic
significance, national significance, risk of being lost.
Presumably a good politician is going to listen to some of
those interests in his area, too, but often the kind of
national and systematic interest aren't the same as local
driving issues such as this is good for business, for jobs, or
other types of things which means it would be pretty cheap to
criticize pork barreling if there is no other alternative to
pork barreling.
In other words, its the only way to add things to the
system. Furthermore, we have spent at least a year trying to
get from the National Park Service the list of how many of
these studies for national heritage areas that were actually
out there. We were passing heritage areas through the Resources
Committee like crazy.
Finally, when we got the data, it was, I believe, 32. This
is a couple of years old. Something like 30 or 32 studies of
which they could do eight a year with the complicated process
you were doing, particularly under the budget crunch which
means we are already backlogged 4 to 5 years.
Well, since congressional terms are 2 years, the whole
process you just said is, of course, subject to you pass it. If
you want to pass a heritage area on the floor and fund it,
basically you waive the rule and you don't require the study.
If you waive the rule, then the law doesn't apply.
Furthermore, the appropriators on the Appropriations
Committee often will fund their heritage area whether or not it
has been waived on the authorizing side or in the Park Service.
I can assure you because I thought I was going to get my head
chopped off because it was one I was questioning in Atlanta
that had a series of things that were of local and State
significance but I didn't see a national significance but I got
caught up in, well, we did a trade.
To get this one we did this one and this is supposed to
move. It moved through and then the funding moved through. What
I am trying to figure out is how do we get control or, at
least, some kind of a substantive input into saying, if we say,
``We are short of sites that relate to Africa American
heritage. We are short of sites that relate to Asian heritage,
Hispanic heritage, religious heritage. Oh, here are five sites
in the United States that are coming up that are critical to
our understanding of this period of American Revolution that
may be lost forever.''
Is there any kind of that discussion in the National Park
Service here? You are at the cradle of the American revolution
in discussing what sites may be--these groups are floundering
economically and they wind up saying that the national system
may be lost. I am just wondering whether at least there is--I
am sure Friends groups are doing that to some degree. For
example, in Civil War battlefields there are really strong
lobby groups.
Mr. McIntosh. I would in summary answer that right now
there is not that type of discussion. The focus and priority is
to take care of what we have and there are certainly
significant needs there. There have been in the past attempts
to try to undertake a comprehensive review and make a statement
as to what it would take to complete the National Park System.
I think that, too, is challenged in the sense that if we
did that study in the 1970's things that we were thinking of
then have elapsed and other equally important but overlooked
sites, particularly in the Historic Preservation and culture
resource side of the shop.
Mr. Souder. Especially since we all know history stopped
in, what, 1958? Now, let us move more specifically into how the
budget is impacting your region. You said you had an increase
in Homeland Security funds. Did that cover all the additional
cost on Homeland Security?
Mr. McIntosh. If I understand the question, that money was
dedicated to the ``icon parks'' which in this region is
Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Statue
of Liberty in New York, and the Charleston Navy Yard which is
the host port for the U.S.S. Constitution which is actually an
active ship in the Navy.
Mr. Souder. And did the money that came in, did you have to
move rangers that were doing other things into Homeland
Security protection, bring people from other parks, certain
icon parks in your region, or did the additional funding
increase cover those costs of Homeland Security?
Mr. McIntosh. The initial response was we begged, borrowed,
and stole rangers from all over the service to go to the icon
parks. Since then with this amount of funding we have been
basically able to level the playing field and provide through
the three parks the operational needs.
Mr. Souder. So the rangers providing other protection have
not been dramatically impacted?
Mr. McIntosh. Certainly less. Now if you go to Independence
you will see that the law enforcement rangers are at the
minimum and security guards, contract guards, are providing the
lion's share of the surveillance of people processing through
to see the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall.
Mr. Souder. You said contract people are providing it?
Mr. McIntosh. That is correct.
Mr. Souder. And where did that money come from?
Mr. McIntosh. That came out of this fund source.
Mr. Souder. I think you said you were getting--it can be
New England specific but if it is easier to do it by region. If
you get, let us say, a 3 percent increase, as a practical
matter roughly on an annual basis what is your fundamental
payroll pressure increase?
In other words, payroll pressure isn't just salary. Payroll
pressure would be pension obligations, healthcare, when you
have a given employee. My presumption is if you are getting a 3
percent increase, you are having a declining payroll, absolute
number of people because the fundamental costs are increasing
faster than 3 percent.
Mr. McIntosh. It all depends on what the legislative pay
raise is and what the appropriated amounts for the park are.
But if those two aren't equal, then you are looking at an
immediate decline. As I said, also there are other fixed cost
impacts in the budget that don't decline, or can't decline and,
therefore, if the increase only takes care of the payroll, then
your other fixed-cost increases are impinging on the park
operating budget as well.
Mr. Souder. Because we are trying to sort through, to the
degree we can do the regional hearings, and kind of get some of
the basic information at some point, we will be asking for
systematic information out of the National Park Service
headquarters. But if you are devoting funds to reducing the
backlog and you have 3 percent increase, which just assuming
you didn't get any new parks or any new facilities, but if you
get a 3 percent increase and you are trying to increase your
backlog reduction, 3 percent increase almost covers inflation.
Some years it would and some years it wouldn't. Nobody's
healthcare cost are going up at 3 percent and part of the
solution has been contracting out or using part-time people.
Would you agree you are less likely to add full-time employees
right now?
Mr. McIntosh. Well, yes. I mean, our ability to hire new
staff is certainly curtailed--permanent staff. Our ability to
hire seasonal staff is curtailed. I think as you look at the
budget framework as the administration presents it, you can see
that the emphasis is on this backlog issue, the ongoing
maintenance at the expense of parks having the benefit of the
capacity of their budgets in the decades past.
Mr. Souder. Do you see in these budget operations as you
look at the Government pension obligations, the healthcare
cost? Let me ask this question. When somebody retires in your
region, do you have the ability to replace them if they are a
full-time employee?
Mr. McIntosh. Not one for one, no.
Mr. Souder. Would you say you are doing two-thirds to one?
I am asking a really broad question.
Mr. McIntosh. I don't have a real good framework to answer
that with so I can't.
Mr. Souder. When we get the individual data that is exactly
what we will be looking at to see is how much, in fact, we are
reducing. The Park Service is probably the most contracted out
agency already in the United States. We can probably contract
out a little bit more but pretty soon you lose your ability to
have a system-wide control or system-wide definition if
everything is contracted out. Going to part-time has pros and
cons, particularly when you are in a place where it hasn't
snowed in 6 months. That may make more sense but I doubt if--
while your visitation, I am sure, in this region is higher in
the summer, it isn't the dramatic changes you see out west. How
much would you say is seasonable in the Boston region?
Mr. McIntosh. Can you answer that for Lowell?
Mr. Creasey. Well, it is very seasonable for most of us, I
would suggest, but it levels out if you include the educational
institutions coming to the national parks throughout New
England. I think many of us are very aggressive in working with
the local school systems to make sure that we service that
population as well. It is seasonable, yes.
Mr. Souder. So sites like here in the Boston area, Man of
Defiance. Clearly Katie would be more seasonable but in the
immediate area here you would have a summer-driven tourist
traffic but then education groups would pick up the difference.
What about conventions? Is there much of a spin-off from that?
Mr. Creasey. I think many of the parks work very closely
with the tourism industry and the conventioneers, I think,
contribute throughout the season. I am not sure it is limited
to just one particular season but my sense is that we work
closely with the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism as
well as the Boston Area for tourism development. Obviously the
national parks are a major thrust in terms of their marketing
campaign so I would say we get quite a bit of tourists.
Mr. Souder. Some of these type of things will be dealt with
by using seasonable as well as contracted out. But in one area
if you are dealing with backlog and you are dealing with
potentially replacing retired full-time employees with
seasonals or contracted out people, would you say
interpretation was hardest hit?
Mr. McIntosh. The traditional seasonality of that effort
tends to be limited in terms of the permanent staff and
expanded in the high seasons. Therefore, that is where the
flexibility is in your budget. Therefore, seasonable
maintenance, seasonable interpretation are the areas where you
would have the opportunity to make your adjustment.
Mr. Souder. What would the other hardest hit areas be?
Would it be historic and archeological research, biological
research other than interpretation?
Mr. McIntosh. We have benefited significantly almost in the
order of $100 million over the last several years with the
Natural Resource Challenge Program. That is put in place a
system-wide effort with inventory and monitoring of the
resources in the park. There is a good head of steam in that
area.
I think in this region we have with the amount of historic
resources that we have, the structures, the collections, and
archeological sites and so on, that we are challenged to keep
abreast in terms of the research mode in terms of understanding
the resources in the park, even though they have been in the
system considerable periods of time.
Mr. Souder. When you get funds from this Resources
Challenge Program and from Saving America's Treasures, I should
know the answer to this question but I don't off the top of my
head but I believe on some of these they are still within the
Park Service's regular budget. Isn't that correct? They are
just reshuffled?
Mr. McIntosh. Both of them. That is correct, yes.
Mr. Souder. Then what I am trying to sort through because
when we lay this over the top of each other, if you are getting
$100 million in the resources challenge program and the Save
America's Treasures Program, where did that money come from
because the total net to the Park Service is only up 3 percent
and the payroll pressures are far--I have seen some tentative
collapsed numbers that suggest if you go out 10 years just the
payroll drowns the system given the current budget.
Mr. McIntosh. Given past trends and current projections,
the out years are very, very challenging. If I may just circle
back a bit on the seasonability question. I think what is
important to understand also, and we have observed this, and
probably caused by many different sectors but what sort of
traditionally was the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, is
nowhere close to what the season is now. With the mobility and
the retirement population being so active enjoying our national
parks from the break of ice in the north until after Columbus
Day in the fall the pressure is on the parks. In a sense what
used to be that 3-month window of pressure is now expanded
maybe to 6 or more months depending on where the park is in the
region. Certainly in the south in the Civil War parks in
Virginia, parks in West Virginia and so on, the pressure is
largely year round.
Mr. Souder. Let me pursue a slightly different angle. Let
me ask you do you believe that reducing--you referred in the
backlog to also cyclical maintenance. Do you believe that in
concentrating on the backlog other things aren't being done? I
mean, when you look at this money, if you see this pressure on
payroll and you see this attempt, which I believe support
trying to address a backlog, what I believe is nobody has tried
to reconcile these different pressures.
We are trying to put in some of these special funds. We are
trying to address the backlog and we have this pressure on
payroll. Where did the funds come from especially if we have
added, like in this area, two major additions to the system,
where did the money come out of and is that leaving, for lack
of a better word, a new frontlong or something of things that
are developing underneath that haven't been taken care of.
Then are we really reducing the backlog or reducing a
static backlog which is not getting the normal cyclical
maintenance things and other things have been added to the park
are they then being added--maybe one of the questions is what
defines backlog? Is it a static list that we picked a year or
whenever you get behind add it to the backlog and do we, in
effect, ever get that addressed?
Mr. McIntosh. I would hate to count the hours that people
have talked about that. Not even debated it, just talked about
how to define the backlog. Obviously a backlog project today
that gets funding tomorrow and that work is completed, then
that comes off the backlog list so you are going to see this
cycle of projects in any given park go on and off for the same
thing such as the example I gave earlier of the work here at
Faneuil Hall.
The day after that project was completed in the early
1990's it wasn't on the backlog list. Now 15 years later, or
however long it was on there before that, I am not sure but it
comes back on as the needs become apparent. The new facility
management system will better enable us to be able to track
exactly what is in the system and what the needs are.
What we have never really had before in that system that
this system will provide is a way to evaluate the project
against the importance of the structure if it is a historic
structure. Some historic structures in the mission of that
particular park are more important than others and having to
make those tradeoffs is an important--this will give us the
important tools to do that.
Mr. Souder. But you don't have that yet where you could
tell me where we reduced our A backlog by 30 percent or our B
backlog by 20 percent and our C backlog by 10?
Mr. McIntosh. Well, I think you could do it on an
individual park on an individual moment in time but the numbers
continuously roll. The only way to work that system in terms of
making statements of what the condition is, the conditions
change constantly. It has to be a snapshot as of that day.
Mr. Souder. Not that the Department of Interior is known
for wonderful computers but in this day and age if it is
available by individual park, it seems like a very short
software program to be able to----
Mr. McIntosh. Roll it up. Yes.
Mr. Souder. Let me move to a slightly--I was interested a
number of years ago, I believe it was the National Trust, talk
about a problem at the Adams site. I believe it was there. It
has been a while since I have dealt with this.
I believe their china collection or silver service was
going to be split off or auctioned off by the private group
that was managing the site because that led to a discussion
after whether we should have some sort of seed fund like we
have for properties for collection items like that could be
leveraged with the private sector to try to purchase things
before they get up in market and then we would spend the next
30 years trying to put the collection back together. What has
happened with the Adams site and how do you look at critical
collections that are often in private foundation hands that
could all of a sudden have financial pressures or whatever?
Mr. McIntosh. Well, again, there is no one answer.
Individual parks have authority to purchase collections or not.
In the Adams situation, and my memory doesn't recall what the
final resolution was but in the Adams situation the silver
collection I think you are referring to belonged to the Adams'
Church, the Parish Church.
Mr. Souder. They donated it to them. The Adams family, I
think, had donated it to the church.
Mr. McIntosh. Right. And the question at the time was the
church was in serious financial straights and was trying to
figure out a way to raise money. There was an effort made to
purchase that collection from the church but I cannot answer.
We can provide you the answer but I don't have off the top of
my head the ultimate resolution.
Mr. Souder. How much of your collections are in storage, do
you know, of historic collections in this region?
Mr. McIntosh. I don't know that answer specifically but I
think it is a general standard in the museum industry that
maybe 3 to 5 percent of your collections are an exhibit and the
rest are in curation or in storage. I think that generally is
true of any of our parks.
Mr. Souder. From what I have seen I have not looked at this
issue in northeast. I know a number of years ago we dealt with
it in Gettysburg because clearly we had inadequate and safe
storage of the old muskets. Then we paid $1 million to rehab
and then they go back down in a musky cellar and then we paid
to rehab them again. Just a rather short-term budget strategy.
How is it here in the New England area as far as storage
capability of only 3 to 5 percent is available for public
display? Are these things safe? At Valley Forge I know the
Benninghoff collection had all this--I mean, one time they
showed me original journals that had never been preserved or
copied that were down in this basement. How are you going to
get a Valley Forge journal back? What is the status of the
collection preservation?
Mr. McIntosh. The service started in either the late 1980's
or early 1990's, the museum collection program, which provided
a significant chunk of money across the country to do the
cataloging. And parallel to that as we grew to understand what
was in our collections, unfortunately because they were in many
cases heirlooms of the family that donated the home or sold the
home to the National Park Service, they weren't kept then under
professional standards and we didn't immediately have the
resources or the wherewithal to provide that.
Many of these collections stayed in the Park Service's
facilities, historic homes or otherwise, for many years before
we got around to collecting or curating them. Since then we
have made significant strides, but to say that the issues are
all resolved and we don't have significant issues in front of
us would not be true.
At Longfellow we made a significant investment there. We
provided over the last 4 or 5 years better temperature and
humidity controls within the building. That takes care of the
collection pieces that are on exhibit in the house itself as
well as those that are in the storage. Again, we are limited by
the capabilities of the site as well.
I mean, there is the Longfellow House and carriage house.
No other significant built structures are on that site and no
wherewithal to go elsewhere. We now have in the basement
provided professional quality storage facilities, albeit still
in the basement. Several of the sites now are starting to use
offsite storage in professional storage facilities in pay the
fee, the rent, so to speak, to do that.
Mr. Souder. Is there any program inside the National Park
Service that looks at historical documents and museum
collections like you are doing on buildings where you are going
to be able to--or on backlog where you say, ``Here is an A, B,
C, D priority,'' or is it almost purely random at this point?
Mr. McIntosh. No. I think when the park has the good
fortune to benefit from the collections management program,
objects and archival material are treated equally and there is
an assessment made. We develop what is called a statement of
collection which defines what should be in the park's
collection or what should not deaccession many of those things
that should be not so that we don't have to have the
responsibility for that.
At Olmsted over the last--it has just been completed over
the last 15 years all the original drawings and archival
material from the Olmsted site which were in deplorable
conditions in the storage vaults that the family and the
business had for that purpose we were able to set up a paper
conservation lab in some space in Springfield 90 miles away. We
transported all of that collection, various pieces at various
times, to Springfield.
We had a staff of two or three people, professional
curators, archival curators, conservationist working on that
collection who have now fully conserved that collection and
brought it back to the site. Given the fact that the site is
closed and under major renovation, those are now being stored
offsite.
Mr. Souder. In something like the Olmsted collection is the
information accessible or shared such that if you make a
decision, if these things are relevant to teaching this site,
that you have these materials which may be priority D but may
actually be the biggest single original document on a park you
designed in some other city who may have an interest in not
having it be buried in a museum somewhere where it may or may
not be protected or may or may not be seen as critical to that
site that it could be transferred?
I remember just working on the Northwest Territory stuff
and I was trying to get the Library of Congress to do a thing
on the Northwest Territory and I said I thought because I had
been to a number of sites, Ft. Megs and others, and I had seen
things like property of the U.S. Congress on a copy of a map
that you must have a fair amount of documents. They said, ``We
have never analyzed anything that we have had on the Northwest
Territory.''
One guy piped up and said, ``We have William Henry Harrison
papers. Would that be a help?'' ``Yeah, that would be a good
start.'' ``We have Anthony Wayne's papers. Would that be a
help?'' ``Yeah, that would be a start.'' If they had a couple
of those papers in the critical areas of the midwest, it would
be a huge thing and it would be a major preservation project
but it would be low tier.
The Library of Congress, of course, has the world's biggest
attic along with the Smithsonian. The National Park Service has
these incredible collections of art, of original documents.
Often you interpret a site at a given year or era as it should
be. I am wondering do we have any way of systematically looking
at this and sharing because if you catalog and it is on a
computer, then people can access and say, ``Hey, what about
that piece?''
If we don't have any dollars for cataloging or doing the
research or identifying and getting the stuff more than in a
person who may be retiring as head, but into a systematic
analysis we can't cross fertilize.
Mr. McIntosh. Well, the museum collection program addresses
that need. We are far from complete in the service-wide efforts
there. In places like Longfellow and places like Olmsted where
that project, as I said, in terms of the cataloging as well as
the conservation of the documents took maybe 15 years, that
information is available now and is used extensively by
professional as well as academic researchers who are studying
Olmsted or, in many cases, a private firm so we have been
commissioned to rehabilitate an Olmsted landscape at some
private facility that the firm designed to come and use that
resource.
Mr. Souder. I need to go to the second panel but let me
followup a little bit on that with Lowell specifically, the
superintendent. I am looking forward to going there tomorrow
because I have not been there before. It is unusual in the
sense that it is an old industrial community and in trying to
interpret some of our economic history, how do you define what
you have there? Do you also look at what you don't have that
you might need to add? This is a whole other--it is kind of
interesting because we don't do a lot of interpretation of our
economic history in the United States.
Mr. Creasey. That is a good question. We have about 700,000
objects of which we have cataloged about 95 percent of our
collection of which it is all online, as Mac said. I think the
cataloging system and what we have got with the museum services
when fully loaded will be a tremendous asset for the American
people and for researchers and scholars. I feel we are in
pretty good shape at Lowell in terms of our collections and our
cataloging.
Five percent, to be quite honest, are materials that are
not of higher value than things like the locks and canal
papers, engineer drawings, architectural drawings, which are
quite wonderful of how Lowell came about in terms of this
economic engine for New England and the country.
I have been at Lowell for 6 months so I am still a study on
this but my sense was that when Lowell was established in the
1970's we did have a collections strategy of which we went and
collected items such as the 100 some looms that came from the
Draper Corp. in Hopedale, MA that powered the mills. We now
have them currently in our working collection you will see
tomorrow if you come visit 80 some working looms in the mill
itself.
Those kinds of items were collected. We are also fortunate
to have a strong partner in the American textile museum which
has a much larger collection, something like five stories of
industrial artifacts that range from preindustrial all the way
through modern day technology.
Mr. Souder. If I can ask, Mr. McIntosh, just because you
have been involved in the Park Service for some time your
reaction to this. The temporary fee charges are the longest
temporary fees of probably about anything we have had in the
system and it is one of the interesting things because we are
trying to make them permanent.
It is amazing. It shows the support of the National Park
System. It shows why people would probably support some form of
a check off where they can give donations and that sort of
thing because we have had almost no resistance in spite of all
the people who said we were going to have resistance to these
different fees because, as you know, they are going to the park
and they see how they are being used.
People generally speaking support the fees. One of the
challenges as these fees go up is how to deal and a concern
about how it is going to impact access to the parks by lower-
income groups. I have had sign-off support from the
appropriations and the authorizers if we could figure out how
to do it.
In an earlier parks trip this summer a gentleman who had
worked as a concessionaire in the Park Service suggested to me
that one possibility would be to have it be on the IRS form
that, ``If your income falls under a fixed amount, whether it
is $30,000 or $35,000, and you want a national parks' pass,
check the box and we will send it to you.'' The question is how
do we identify? You can't check and you can't ask them to show
their IRS return at the gate or the building.
You don't want to say, ``Are you kids on reduced lunch?''
It would be pretty tough to commit fraud with the IRS because
they have your income there. The question is how many people
would actually request that pass or may never use it. In
Government terms it is a cipher in the budget to print the
cards. Mailing costs are a little bit higher.
We could say there may be a way to send a sheet of paper as
opposed to the pass. I wonder what your reaction is because we
have been trying to figure this out. I have the support to do
that. It is a clear challenge as we tackle this issue. Now with
a constructive suggestion, then I am trying to figure out what
does that do to your substructure if a whole bunch of people
are showing up with passes. On the other hand, they may be
people that wouldn't have visited the park otherwise.
Mr. McIntosh. That is a very important and complex issue.
My personal belief is that the IRS and the tax form is for that
purpose and to complicate it with a lot of things is probably
not in the best interest of anybody. If that happens, I am sure
it can be accommodated.
The ability to provide access to various aspects of the
population are permissible within our system. There is
flexibility. The superintendent can have, as museums do, a free
day or the mornings or various things like that. I think there
is flexibility on the part of the superintendents that may not
be always exercised.
Then there is the question of not just access to the gate,
it is access to the park, to get to the park, which is also, I
think, an important and complicated issue. Generally one of the
reasons--I mean, how to collect fees at places like Gateway
where you can come in off city streets and so on. I think it is
one of the reasons why the superintendents in those situations
don't even think about it because it is so--the park itself is
so accessible to such a diverse community that those
populations and other populations are accommodated that way as
well.
Mr. Souder. They are doing building fees.
Mr. McIntosh. Say again?
Mr. Souder. Often there is a fee then to get in the
different homes. At Independence Park, for example, you have a
$2 fee for this house. Even though you can get a Parks pass to
get in, you do it by building.
Mr. McIntosh. That is true. That is a double-edged sword
for us because we want to make it as successful as we can to
everybody. On the other hand, as the numbers show, the
contributions to the fee program are significant in terms of
our ability to maintain our resources to operate the parks.
Mr. Souder. I have a consistent position and that is I
believe in simplifying the tax form except when I want to
complicate it. Thank you for your testimony.
If the second panel could come forth. If you want to submit
anything else for the record, please do so.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Souder. Let the record show that each of the witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
I thank you each for coming and we will start with Mr.
Roger Kennedy, former head of the National Park Service,
National Council chairman for the National Parks Conservation
Association. You have been tremendous in helping coordinate all
these hearings. We thank you for your years of leadership and
authorship and stewardship.
STATEMENTS OF ROGER KENNEDY, NATIONAL COUNCIL CHAIRMAN,
NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION; MARILYN FENOLLOSA,
NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION; KEN OLSON, PRESIDENT,
FRIENDS OF ACADIA NATIONAL PARK; AND LT. JOHN McCAULEY, MUSEUM
CURATOR, ANCIENT AND HONORABLE ARTILLERY COMPANY OF
MASSACHUSETTS
STATEMENT OF ROGER KENNEDY
Mr. Kennedy. Thank you, sir. I am Roger Kennedy. I have
been around the parks for nearly 80 years. I have watched the
Congress work with the parks for more than 60. Mr. Souder, I
want to say for the record that no one since the immortal
Chairman Sidney R. Yeats has given the national parks your kind
of sustained, intelligent, and informed attention grounded in a
moral fervor for the national patrimony and for our common
obligations to our decedents.
We have to reach back to the progressive era to the
founding generation nearly a century ago to observe such a
fortuitous confluence of a national conservation necessity and
your kind of straightforward, candid, and honest stewardship. I
want to begin by saying thank you.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Mr. Kennedy. I would like to file my formal testimony for
the record and proceed on my own if I may.
As these hearings have already shown across the Nation the
accumulated rot in the National Park System, more politely
known as the maintenance backlog, would by now cost at least
$4\1/2\ billion to make right. Two-thirds of park roads are
listed as either poor or fair condition. More than half of the
bridges on those roads in the parks are classified
intelligently as deficient.
The capacity of superintendents to do the job that the
Congress and the people expect is steadily eroded in the face
of unfunded mandates and service cost inflation as you have
already reviewed this morning. Here is how the New England
parks in particular manifest an unfulfilled need for
stewardship. This is accumulated over the years. This is
nothing new but its flagrancy grows. When you deduct, as you
have noted already this morning, the loss of purchasing power
for the last 3 years alone in the Acadia's superintendent's
budget it is down about 10 percent.
For last year alone unfunded mandates required by Congress
or pay increases alone were twice as big as the increase in the
nominal Park budget. I can give you the numbers but that is
what it amounts to. If you add the general inflation rate to
the parks' other cost, not just those salary cost and return
cost, you would add another couple of hundred thousand dollars
in lost purchasing power to provide service to the public.
Since the superintendent doesn't have the money to do his
job, he has to leave important jobs undone, as you have already
indicated. I want to congratulate my Park Service colleagues
for reading their scripts with enormous skill. I have had to
read scripts myself. The glory of being retired is you don't
have to read anybody's script.
That superintendent can't fill nine traditionally permanent
jobs because he can't pay for them. The requirement that law
enforcement trumps everything else means that everything else
suffers even more, the education function, conservation. You
call attention to these functions and you are absolutely right
in doing so because even they and waste disposals suffer.
Let me point out that in Acadia last winter the park had to
close all but 3 of its 12 restrooms during the cross-country
skiing season. The cross-country skiers were there and the
restrooms weren't open. Springtime in Acadia. The park has
staff to cut the grass along its famous hiking and biking road
only once a year. The grass grows very fast in Acadia. It is
desperate to grow up there where it is cold and it covers a lot
of sharp rocks. If you can't cut it more than once a year,
people are going to suffer.
At Cape Cod most of the park goes unpatrolled for lack of
rangers. The park needs at least 10 more seasonal law
enforcement personnel to do its job which it used to have but
it needs that to do its job.
At the Longfellow House in Cambridge a $400,000 annual
funding shortfall prevents the park from filling the key
maintenance and curatorial position. We could talk for a long
time. I was a museum director for nearly 15 years at the
Smithsonian. The problems that you have pointed out this
morning, my colleagues in the Park Service have done their very
best not to complain too loudly about are real. You are right
and so is the problem of congressional enthusiasm for nifty new
parks and new ribbon cuttings not coupled to the sustaining of
the budgets required to do the job. You are absolutely right on
the money on that.
Longfellow like Cape Cod has a Friends group but even
Friends get tired of bailing out the Congress. Friends groups
are partners. They are not receivers in bankruptcy. The truth
is that parks are in trouble. The Park Service is in trouble
and the Congress has for years failed in its trusteeship to the
American people to take care of our national treasures.
This is not this administration's and this Congress' only
problem. They have lots of other problems and they are not
responsible for the long accumulation. That long accumulation
is papered over by the kinds of reports you get from the system
as it is currently operating. You are right in pushing hard.
Thank you for doing that.
These kinds of problems that have accumulated over time are
going to have to be dealt with in this generation or they will
be impossible for the next generations to deal with. Rot is
rot. It doesn't go away. You can fuzz the figures but you can't
pretend that the rot doesn't get worse. That is something that
directors can't say when they are in office or if they hope for
further office, but it is true. The problems you are going
after are there.
God bless you, Mr. Souder, for trying to be a good trustee.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kennedy follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Next is Marilyn Fenollosa, National Trust for Historic
Preservation. Thank you for coming today.
STATEMENT OF MARILYN FENOLLOSA
Ms. Fenollosa. Good morning. My name is Marilyn Fenollosa
and I am senior program officer and regional attorney for the
Northeast Office of the National Trust for Historic
Preservation. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a
private nonprofit membership organization dedicated to saving
historic places and revitalizing America's communities.
Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National
Trust was founded in 1949 and provides leadership, education,
advocacy, and resources to protect the irreplaceable places
that tell America's stories. Staff at our Washington, DC,
headquarters, six regional offices, and 26 historic sites work
with 270,000 members and thousands of preservation groups in
all 50 States.
The act of Congress that created the national trust had as
its purpose to facilitate public participation in the
preservation of historic American sites, buildings, and objects
of national significance or interest and it is with that
purpose that I come before you today.
The National Park Service has its roots in New England.
Writing from his home in Brookline, MA, now the Olmsted
National Historic Site, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., crafted the
words that served as the foundation for legislation
establishing the Park Service in 1916. That is, ``To conserve
the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild
life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in
such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for
the enjoyment of future generations.''
Our two organizations have worked hand in hand as a public-
private partnership to preserve the cultural and natural
resources that are the heritage of our country. Yet, we have
become increasingly alarmed at the declining capacity of the
National Park Service to care for the parks in its stewardship
in New England and, indeed, across the Nation.
Even as the administrative burdens have increased, Park
Service staff has decreased due to the erosion of base funding.
The National Park Service has not had the resources it needs to
maintain its side of the partnership.
The fiscal year 2006 budget justifications for the Park
Service, available on the Service's Web site, notes that the
cultural resources within its stewardship are threatened by
inadequate attention to stabilization, maintenance, and repair
of structures, landscapes, and museum collections; by the
failure to monitor changes in the resources; by the failure to
correct improper uses; and by the lack of documentation and
determination of appropriate treatment strategies.
Indeed, that report notes that in 2004, and again likely in
this year, only 45\1/2\ percent of the Park Service's historic
structures are in good condition. That is less than half. The
National Trust has assumed a watchdog role in recent years, by
naming the most compromised national parks to our annual list
of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
This list is intended to bring public attention to
significant buildings, sites and landscapes that are threatened
with demolition, deferred maintenance, lack of funding or the
will to preserve them. In recent years we have listed the
following sites in the Northeast alone: Independence National
Park--due to years of inadequate funding and deferred
maintenance; Ellis Island--due to proposed inappropriate
development and structural deterioration that threatened dozens
of the island's historic buildings; Gettysburg National
Military Park--due to encroaching development on privately held
acres surrounding the park that threatened to destroy its
historic character; Governor's Island--due to the uncertainty
facing this Coast Guard facility, America's oldest continuously
occupied military post that is now a national park; Valley
Forge National Historical Park--due to untreated water damage,
mold and failing roofs at the officers' quarters for
Washington's army; and, most recently, Minuteman National
Historical Park--due to lack of planning to alleviate the
noise, visual intrusions, and vehicular traffic generated by
commuters flying out of the civilian airport at next-door
Hanscom field.
Minuteman is a case in point: this park, the site of the
first battle of the Revolutionary War and the march and retreat
of the British soldiers, is arguably one of the most important
sites of our history and one of the most heavily visited in the
Northeast. The park serves over 1.2 million visitors every year
from all parts of the country and indeed the world. Visitors
come to understand what ordinary citizens did so long ago to
secure their liberty. Yet, the park has lacked the funding to
maintain itself as a premier park.
The park was faced with canceling its seasonal program in
fiscal year 2005 due to lack of funds but was able to open, at
a reduced level, due to a last minute congressional
appropriation. The park's principal visitor center is now
closed during most of the winter. The hours and programs at the
Wayside, Nathaniel Hawthorne's house that is within the park
limits, have been severely reduced. The park's budget only
permits three full-time interpretive rangers for those 1.3
million visitors and this will be reduced to two in fiscal year
2006.
Park management has rehabilitated many of its historic
structures for lease to raise operating funds, but lacks the
funding to run a leasing program. Over the past several years
there has been a multi-million dollar public investment to
restore the historic structures and landscapes within the park
and provide facilities for its visitors, but it has no
resources to maintain them.
It is unconscionable that these properties, under the
stewardship of the U.S. Government, should have to operate
under these challenges. New England abounds with historic parks
and sites, and the tourists that come to see them are a
critical component of our economy. But more important than the
dollars they leave are the experiences that these visitors take
back home.
They learn about the events of our shared history,
especially the Revolutionary War. They learn of the values that
were shaped by those events, and they are enriched by their
memories of what they have seen and heard.
It is our, and your, responsibility to ensure that our
national parks continue to exceed their expectations. We cannot
let our parks fail for lack of adequate funding. As Olmsted
wrote in 1916, ``We must keep the national parks unimpaired for
the enjoyment of all future generations.'' It is our moral
obligation to do so. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Fenollosa:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Our next witness is Ken Olson, president of the Friends of
Acadia National Park in Maine.
STATEMENT OF KEN OLSON
Mr. Olson. Thank you, Congressman Souder, for both holding
these hearings and for inviting me to speak. I am, as you said,
Ken Olson and I am president of Friends of Acadia which is a
3,000 member nonprofit philanthropy that was founded in 1986.
We raise private funds for Acadia National Park. I also serve
on the Executive Committee of the National Park Friends
Alliance which consist of chief executives of about 40 leading
park philanthropies.
You have asked me to comment specifically on Park budget
issues and citizen philanthropy. Friends of Acadia is
completely independent from Acadia National Park and the
National Park Service. From 1995 alone we have donated $5.1
million to the park or to community entities for projects that
complement Park values.
Our charitable funding makes possible the employment of
about 115 seasonable workers, that is about 50 MTEs, in Acadia
National Park or in the towns. For example, Explorer Bus System
is a community and Park project and our funding, thanks to L.L.
Bean, helps run that very successful system.
Friends of Acadia has also raised $16 million in endowments
and other invested funds. Each year we grant the interest,
about 4 percent, to the park. For example, Friends created the
only endowed trail system in national park history. Same for
our carriage road endowment and the endowment for the park's
wheelchair-accessible horse carriages. In all cases the funds
flow to maintenance forever.
Without our private dollars these projects could not have
been initiated. If Friends should for some reason go out of
business, our remaining assets must be transferred to another
entity and used for the original purposes.
Several Acadia summer positions were cut for budget reasons
in 2004. As Roger Kennedy noted, many restrooms, and most of
them built quite recently, were closed in winter which is a
real inconvenience, of course, and does cause sanitation
problems as well.
Eleven permanent jobs are vacant now. That number is rising
from last year. It was about eight and they won't be filled.
The reason is that the funds that would support those jobs have
to go to seasonable positions that would otherwise disappear.
In other words, there is a long-term tradeoff for a very
profound short-term need.
Also, about the interpreter programs, within Acadia
National Park approximately 30 percent of the interpreter
programs have been cut in recent years and that means that
about 65,000 people are not getting educational offerings at
Acadia National Park.
The President's 2006 budget contains an increase for Park
Service operations nationwide and we thank him. However, in
many cases the money won't reach the parks themselves. The
President and Congress may be unaware of this business snag. I
would like to say this is not a problem of too much overhead in
the regional offices. It is not a problem with that.
Take the 2005 park budget increase for which Congress
deserves considerable credit. Mandated employee raises, agency
internal assessments, retirement system changes, terrorism
alerts and emergency expenditures are consuming the new money
and that is what is producing the shortfalls.
It is not clear whether the full Congress understands the
paradox which is this: it is well intentioned and welcome
funding increases are nonetheless resulting in service
reductions at the park level. Pressure is mounting on
philanthropies to fund operating shortfalls.
A recent Park Service review in a western national park
stated that its supporting nonprofit, a group like ours
``should first and foremost raise funds for the [park]
superintendent's priorities (which we agree with 100 percent)
be they a capital improvement project or for operations.''
It is the operations part that is quite concerning. That is
because the role of philanthropy is to supplement and not
replace Federal funds. Our purpose is to add value to national
parks including for select improvements and programs to bring a
margin of excellence beyond what Park Service budgets can
accomplish by themselves. Donors have to be recognized as
volunteers of money.
Charities must never subsidize government operating losses.
Doing so would undermine donor motivation. In other words,
there would be nonprofit investment going on. At the same time
there is actual government disinvestment going on. That is a
real motive killer for people who like to support the national
parks. It would be like taxing people twice for national parks,
once on April 15th when we all pay, and then once by the
charity to offset the lost appropriations.
Federal operations are a government duty, period.
Fortunately, Park Service Director Mainella, whose tenure has
emphasized nonprofit partnerships, vigorously supports that
philosophy. I have spoken with her at great length about it and
I know that is how she feels and she has written about it as
well.
All agency employees need to understand it. I am happy to
tell you that our superintendent of Acadia National Park,
Sheridan Steele, his staff and the Northeast Regional Office do
understand it and partnering with them is a great professional
experience.
David Rockefeller, Jr., whose family's gifts helped
establish Acadia, and you may recall that this is the first
national park created east of the Mississippi and is the first
to have grown full blown from private philanthropy. That family
is responsible not just for places like Acadia but Grand Teton,
Virgin Islands. They have a tremendous record of generosity.
David Rockefeller, Jr., said this when he was chairman of
the National Park Foundation which you can think of as the
granddaddy of the Friends organizations and is responsible, in
a sense, for the whole Park System. He said that Americans
``need to have assurances that their private dollars will not
be used to offset public responsibilities . . . I refer to this
distinction as the `bright line.' ''
Friends of Acadia urges Congress to apply the proper
management fix to the cash delivery malfunction. I want to
emphasize again that this is not a problem of too much overhead
sitting in the Park System somewhere. To do so, to fix this
malfunction, would honor the bright line that David
Rockefeller, Jr., talks about. It would expand charitable
giving, we believe, and ultimately would reverse park-level
deficits. Congress can accomplish this by appropriating an
annual funding margin that exceeds the exactions that will
otherwise eliminate it.
Thanks very much and I would be happy to answer questions
later.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Olson follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Our final witness in this panel is Lt. John McCauley,
museum curator of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company
of Massachusetts. Thank you for coming today.
STATEMENT OF LT. JOHN F. McCAULEY
Lt. McCauley. Good morning, Congressman. My name is John
McCauley. May I introduce you to the Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company of Massachusetts. It is the oldest chartered
military organization in the western hemisphere.
Founded in 1637, its mission was to train officers for the
existing militia. We no longer train officers, and our mission
today is to preserve the patriotic traditions of America. We
read the Declaration of Independence from the balcony of the
Old State House every 4th of July, as it was read by an Ancient
in 1776.
On April 19th we march to celebrate the beginning of the
American Revolution in Lexington. Before we march in Lexington,
we take time to decorate the graves of those signers of the
Declaration, buried in the old Granary Burial ground. Every
year we travel to some country of the world to show the
American flag and take part in ceremonies with military units
of other nations. We feel that these programs help to preserve
the historical culture of this area.
Our relationship with Faneuil Hall began in 1746, 4 years
after the opening of the building when we were transferred from
the Old State House. The Company was allotted space in the
building, actually it was in the attic, to hold its meetings.
They did their training on the Boston Common.
Faneuil Hall has changed many times in its 263 years. It
went from a small two-story structure with a ground floor
market place to a building four times its original size. In
1805 when the building was enlarged, a fourth floor was added
to accommodate the militia units of Boston. It is on this floor
that the Company maintains its armory, museum, and
headquarters.
In the old building the Company contributed to the
preservation of it by improving their headquarters, the attic,
at their own expense. In the new building the Company
contributed their share of improvements with other militia
units to improve the fourth floor. By 1880 the Company was the
sole tenant of the fourth floor and has maintained it ever
since.
All funding for the activities, maintenance and
improvements for the company is derived from the members. An
annual assessment creates the budgetary needs. No moneys from
the city of Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the
National Park System are given for the support of the Company.
Monies for demonstration fees, in this case the maintenance of
the museum and library, come from the Company's budget.
The only time I can remember when funding from the outside
came from the national park reimbursement program, it came for
the expenses incurred when the Company moved from the fourth
floor to the Coast Guard Base from 1990 to 1992. Total moving
expenses were $140,000. We were reimbursed $129,000.
Internal security for the fourth floor was installed in
1991 during the restoration of the building. It consists of
four non-recording cameras, three were installed then, the
Company added a fourth. Two monitors installed, the Company
added a third. Motion and fire/smoke detectors were put in at
that time.
Two employees, the curator and secretary, are there during
operating hours and no police patrol the fourth floor. Other
testimony may speak of the rest of the building. We feel that
the present system is basic and does not fill the needs of
securing the floor and its contents. At the present time we
have engaged security analysts to create a better system. The
present system operates independent of the rest of the
building. To my knowledge at no time have we been approached by
the Homeland Security Agency nor any exercises up there at all
on security.
The fourth floor, although occupied by the Company, is used
for many other functions during the year. The city of Boston
uses it for some of their functions, while other military units
use it for ceremonies. This multi use creates a need of
constant upkeep. While employees take care of everyday cleanup,
the Company hires outside cleaners after many functions. Last
week we closed for a week to have the floors refurbished. You
can probably still smell it. All was paid for by the Company.
The ceiling of the Armory has been a problem since the
restoration of 1991. The paint peels off. As the present time
it is under study by the Boston National Park System. With the
exception of the ceiling all costs for maintenance are absorbed
by the Company. While this report so far seems to assume we
operate on an independent basis, our interaction with others
makes us take an interest in the well being and preservation of
several sites in the Boston and New england area.
During the years we have used the streets of Boston, the
Old State House, the cemeteries in Boston and the churches.
President John F. Kennedy was a member of our organization,
therefore, the site of his birth in Brookline holds an interest
to the Company.
Every day I meet people from many countries. They marvel at
the historic sites in Boston and are excited with the idea that
this area is the place where the American Revolution began. Not
many places in the world can show the birthplace of liberty.
Sites such as Bunker Hill, U.S.S. Constitution, Paul Revere are
a continued source of conversation with the visitors.
The interest is there. We need both private organizations,
private citizens and government agencies to pay attention to
these historical sites and encourage their preservation.
May I digress for a moment, please, to tell you I have
served 33 years as a volunteer in the National Park System,
primarily at Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord,
and also at Saratoga, Morristown, Moore's Creek and Harper's
Ferry. Every time I visit a park I learn something. I have also
noticed the intensity and the dedication of the park employees.
They take pride in their work but they need the necessary
tools.
I have a daughter who is a curator at a historic house and
a son-in-law who is a preservation specialist within the
national parks. My whole family was involved. A new danger
seems to have appeared recently with the decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court that allows property to be taken for commercial
purposes. What happens when a historic site is in the way?
I thank you for the opportunity to speak before this panel
on behalf of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company for
the preservation of historic sites, not only here in New
England but all over this great land of ours. Thank you very
much, sir.
[The prepared statement of Lt. McCauley follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you all for your testimony. I would like
to start with Mr. Kennedy on some broader questions because
this is starting broad and then we will get narrower as we are
launching into this kind of parks oversight and behind it
highlighting the general needs of the Park Service and the
shortfall of the budget.
I will ask a couple of technical bureaucratic questions
first. Do you believe inside the Department of Interior--in my
experience, formerly as a staffer and now as a Member, that OMB
tends to drive statements of almost every administration. Do
you sense that there has been without commenting on
individuals, it is more systemic? How much is this happening
everywhere? Is the Park Service less independent inside the
Department of Interior and Interior more or less independent? I
don't have a strong sense of how this is working right now.
Mr. Kennedy. The Park Service as it is currently being
managed is exceedingly dependent upon the management and the
objectives of the Department of the Interior. It is not
functioning as an independent agency that ebbs and flows with
the degree to which the relationship between the Secretary and
the Director functions. But at the moment there is a very
intense interaction downward from the Secretary toward the
Director.
That changes over time. There is no question in my view
that the Congress historically has lacked the kind of precise
understanding of the Park Service's budgetary functions that
you are seeking. It needs to re-register the inadequacy of its
understanding of what the actual consequences on the ground are
of the money it thinks it is appropriating.
Mr. Souder. In a broad question again because my experience
started more from Parks up and now I am trying to figure out
how the system works. How do you see how the regional directors
and their flexibility are fitting in the system?
Mr. Kennedy. Mr. McIntosh's testimony this morning tells
you quite a lot about that. Here is somebody who really knows
the system. He has been in the system a long time and the
missing element in our discussion so far this morning has been
the importance of the service as well as the system. You have
to have people who know what they are doing, have accumulated
that understanding over time, and have a professional skill
adequate to respond to you.
The problem, the primary problem of the moment is not, in
my view, the physical condition of the park. It is the actual
morale condition and the competency condition of the Service.
What rewards are there for people to do good, candid work? What
really is happening to archeology, to history, to natural
resource protection? How good are the people and how long are
they staying? What are the incentives to them to stay to learn
to do their work properly?
Now, some of those people are necessarily situated in
regional offices. Some of them, for example, can be deployed
from time to time to do intensive visitations in parks. But
many parks, I think particularly of Bandolier, for example,
their conditions are so--Acadia is another. Their conditions
are so specific to them, to their ecosystems and to their
particular kind of archeology and history that they need some
continuity in those parks of people with those competencies.
Can't all be done at the regional office however good the
regional offices may be.
So there is a combination here of a deplorable task force
of competent people working in regional offices and, to some
extent, in the national offices. There needs to be a park
historian. There needs to be a national park archeologist. But
there has to be continuity of service in the parks themselves
because they all are complicated systems naturally, and
historic. That is what managers are for. Congress is to write
the checks and to understand what the checks go for. Competent
managers are what you grow in a system like the Park Service or
the Marine Corps.
Mr. Souder. I know this is more system-wide than specific
here but having a former director who has worked with us for so
many years gives me a chance to probe some other types of
questions here. They have a number of training systems to train
in advance superintendents.
Clearly, at least historically, there has been both
movement between parks so that people learn parks sometimes
within. There has been almost stovepiping between historical
and natural but anymore there are so many natural features and
historical parks and many of them with natural features and
vice versa.
That has been a little less true and a little less kind of
looking down the nose at the historical people by the natural
people. I have seen some parks where superintendents have
stayed a decade or more. More likely it is somebody who goes up
and kind of, ``I am a cultural resource person and I am going
to stay 15 years because I want to be here at this park.''
There is some of that.
One of the dilemmas we have in government, and I am going
to lay a premise and I want to hear you react to this, that no
matter how successful we are in pulling out the shortfalls in
the Park Service, the fact is what I see as a Congressman is
this isn't just in the Park Service. We have this problem
everywhere. We have taxpayers who don't even want to have their
local township tax increased or their library tax increased.
They don't want to have the State. They don't want to have the
Federal.
The bulk of the budget is now under entitlement programs
that have exceeded 60 percent, the military for all the
discussion about it, and the supplemental has dropped from what
used to be in the Kennedy days more like 30 percent down to
about 8 percent of our budget.
I met with mental health people earlier this week in my
home district and they are dying. The juvenile justice people
are dying. How we deal with Medicaid, with the health cost
pressures. We can't even begin to meet the--take what is
happening in Northwest Airlines and Delta and everything in the
airlines right now trying to do field cost and healthcare cost
in the private sector and the government has promised more to
the citizens than the private sector has and we don't have any
money to do that.
Clearly we are going to have cost pressures. Every year we
start out arguing the Parks budget ought to be increased by
$100 million and we have been able to increase it. In fact,
there is a lot of jealousy in the system and for all our
struggles it shows how strongly--I mean, our leadership pleads
with me not to offer floor amendments on the Park Service
because everybody will do more.
Fish and Wildlife is absolutely panicked that in Interior
there is no top to the Park Service as long as I keep inside
Interior. They pretty well wipe out the Fish and Wildlife
Service inside moving over the Park Service. Yet, you have to
say it has a function, too. We are going to have to do some
things differently and try to get more money.
The best way to get more money is to focus like we are
doing on the centennial, to have a vision that grabs people and
have people talking about it, to make people aware of the
shortfalls. Even that said, I see some fundamental things that
are there. Mr. Olson has raised one on what is going to be the
role of Friends groups and support groups. Can they do the
traditional or are they going to have to step in and fill in on
operational?
As we contract out and move more toward seasonal and follow
what the private sector is doing which is a fear of having
full-time employees because it doesn't give you the flexibility
and the healthcare and the pension cost. What is the career
track? Maybe we can have a senior corps but where does the
junior corps start to get to the senior corps?
Clearly we are going to have to figure out creative ways
for interpretation that other museums are adjusting to and how
in the Park Service--I mean, do you start to convert an agent
system dependent on mostly human interaction to better computer
utilization. My lands, we heard about Lowell a minute ago and
finally getting some things online.
My daughter was doing in third grade a bat project for
third graders in Indiana. Carlsbad Caverns has the most bats.
Got her in touch with the superintendent there to get her some
bat materials. Now, if you are in New Mexico you might know
about Carlsbad Caverns and get hooked in. But this is a
different era here.
It isn't just trying to have the local school kids walk
through. We have the most science, the most history. All these
things are in the Park Service if we can figure out how to get
it out. How do we do a transition here and should that be part
of our vision, too? I threw out a bunch of concepts there. We
need more money but it is not going to be like the old days and
how do we best get hold of this?
Mr. Kennedy. To the extent that I can remember, let me see
if I can run through them in sequence. First of all, with
respect to the budgetary pressures, what we are doing today is
to register the importance of the National Park System to you
and to this audience and to everybody else because the National
Park System does not have a well-paid body of profiteers
working in Congress in the corridors because they are making
money on it.
This is very different from the defense establishment. It
is different from the agriculture subsidies. It is different
from the steel subsidies. It is different from almost every
other major domestic pressure on the Congress. What we are
doing is to compensate through citizen involvement for the
absence of very well-paid lobbying that go after you guys every
day of the week. That is what we are doing here.
This is Kenneth Galbraith compensating factors. We are
providing in a democracy citizen participation. We are trying
to register with the Congress that there are a lot of people
who care a lot about this and they will vote. Do they write big
checks at campaign time? No, they don't. Not in competition
with the other special interest that are going after you guys.
That is the first point. This is important what we are doing
here. This is the life of democracy in a real system where
money counts.
Second, with respect to a senior corps we have a--we got
terribly enthusiastic about the importance of redeployable
senior citizens--not senior citizens but senior staffers. It
wouldn't be terrible if some of them were a little older but,
in any case, senior staffers that you could redeploy as needs
occurred.
The problem with that is that they are politically
vulnerable and they get redeployed to serve the partisan or
specific purposes of an administration whether it is Republican
or Democrat. Those people are more vulnerable to redeployment
for political purposes or exile. If they are a little bit too
candid those folks can get exiled by an administration as they
currently are and have been before. That is the problem with
the redeployable corps that doesn't have a grounding in a
system that is strong enough to support them.
Now, the beauty of the National Park System is that it is
place specific. You can't computerize Independence Hall. You
can computerize Yellow Stone. It isn't just mountains and water
falls. It is the specific gritty under-your-feet experience
that our kids have had and we have with having been at the
bridge in Concord, having actually been in Yosemite when the
sun comes up and it plays upon that water fall. That immediacy.
And the Boston Harbor islands, no, they are not glamorous but,
by golly, the experience of being there is a powerful
experience.
If you have any sense of the history of the evolution of
the American city, being at the Olmsted site helps you
understand why the cities that we live in are struggling to be
better places for people to live in because that is where he
put his work. Sure, he helped found the National Park System
but at the end of the day he is about a city that is livable.
That is what you get at the Olmsted site.
If you go to Lowell, it is a place in which the evolution
of the American system in all its grit, in all its tension, in
all of its antiphonies that are there. It is real. This is a
slave traders' hall. Faneuil was a slave trader. Is that
important? You bet it is important. These are places where we
learn real truths. They are specific places. We can't just do
that on the Web. They have to be served to provide that
tactile, that under-the-feet, that immediate sense.
A lot of Maine has been, and will be, trashed but Acadia is
magic because it won't be trashed. My argument is there is no
replacement for a National Park System. If it is not the best
idea America ever had, it is a real good idea and we are the
trustees so we have to struggle for it. Every day that you hold
a hearing 10,000 lobbyists, well paid in a $3,000 suit, are
working on some other Congressman for something else so thank
you again.
Mr. Souder. One of the things it does, too, this hearing,
basically this date was relatively fixed because of my schedule
but also I know I talked to Congressman Capuano who wanted to
be here but he couldn't be here this particular day and
Congressman Lynch who we have worked with on the steroids as
well as well as oxycontin and other issues became more aware of
what we are doing here. He is on the actual full committee that
this subcommittee is part of.
And my friend Bill Delahunt, who I have worked with on the
Adams site, was trying to get me to do this over in Cape Cod.
You have a process even in the course of doing a hearing to
talk to the other members in the region and get them aware of
the things even if they are not here.
Ms. Fenollosa, you talked about in the national trust a
very effective program of identifying at-risk sites which is
emulated. I know Indiana's landworks board, of which I am a
part, although I haven't been as active as I would like to be,
I have certainly been supportive and on their board, does a
similar thing in Indiana.
My hometown of Fort Wayne does a similar thing. In Fort
Wayne it is a much emulated approach. One thing your
organization could do is even expand this more intensely inside
the Park Service as opposed to just necessarily identifying the
different parks. Then identify, as you did in your testimony,
certain specific sites or types of things.
Do you see any expansion of this because it is a great way
to capture people's attention. Congressmen like short lists.
The media likes short lists. I think that program that you
started has just proliferated and is one of the most effective
things. I picked up a ``National Geographic Traveller''
magazine yesterday at the airport. They did the 55 parks and
analysis of the deterioration. That is one way to get people's
attention and rate as well.
Ms. Fenollosa. In response I would say that the problem is
one of space and size. As you said, Congressmen like short
lists. We have decided that we are only going to pick 11 sites
every year from 50 competing States, all of whom rightly
believe that their places are the most important ones so we
have to make choices. I suppose we could list the National Park
Service as an endangered site which might focus attention.
Mr. Souder. I was thinking more on the lines of not putting
it on the national list, but as you work through the regional,
I don't think national parks because they are national are
usually thought of in the State and local list.
If there was an interaction, for example, as a sublist of,
OK, let us say you have these bigger parks that you have
mentioned and you had some sub things inside of them, but as
you look at the top 10 endangered sites in the midwest region,
then in the national parks in the State of Indiana what are the
three most endangered historic preservationsites in those parks
so for Indiana Dunes boyhood site if there are any original
sites there, and the Vincent site in Indiana, are there a
couple things in there that your organization would highlight.
Not that you would expand your national list but that there
would be sublists that, in effect, could supplement because
often those things are viewed as, ``Oh, that is national. We
are focused on our State and local.'' It is an interesting way
to kind of highlight and supplement what we are trying to do in
highlighting the problems of the National Park Service.
Then the other thing is not just the buildings but some of
these collections inside. In historic preservation do you view
your organization, primarily it is buildings, but do you focus
on collections as well?
Ms. Fenollosa. Yes, I would say that we do and we have in
the past. In terms of your earlier question, as a national
organization we try very hard to work very closely with our
statewide and local partners. No one at the State or local
level wants to be told by an organization in Washington, DC,
what should be important to them.
Your former colleague and our great representative Tip
O'Neill used to say that, ``All politics is local but all
preservation is local.'' Therefore, for the National Trust to
do this might imply a right to those places that we don't have,
a right to the prioritization of those places that we don't
have.
What we do is we work with the organization such as the
Indiana Landmark Preservation group to ensure that we support
them in what they do so that if they identified the Indiana
Dunes as being a significant place, we will work with them to
our regional office to focus whatever attention we can as a
national organization on that place.
We have identified places like prairie churches throughout
the midwest where there is a unified theme, where there is some
sort of resource that has impacted a great number of people
that is suffering the same kinds of problems such as deferred
maintenance or lack of funding to focus on these things as a
unified whole, as a systemic problem that perhaps is
transferrable to other parts of the country.
Could we do something such as you suggest? Absolutely. To
focus on a subset of national parks or a subset of issues of
national parks, yes, I believe we could. In fact we have tried
to expand the partnership with the National Park Service
through our regional offices and through our headquarters, the
Park Service headquarters in Washington and our headquarters in
Washington to try to find places where we can work together to
try to save these places, to use the various assets that each
group has, the avenues that we have and the politics that we
have or don't have.
Mr. Souder. For example, it wouldn't even have to be done
nationally but as national organizer you could have Indiana
suggest which things in the national park sites or government
sites in the State should be included in that list. Another
model of this is the ``U.S. News and World Report'' has done
such a great job by however they arbitrarily rate the best
colleges and universities in the country but everybody has
gotten used to that and your endangered list is very similar to
that but they break it down.
The front page of the Fort Wayne newspaper the other day
had three local colleges ranked in the top 25 of the private
universities under 1,000 in this three-State area. It still
helps you focus, particularly those of us in public policy who
are looking to say which is the panic thing because planning
ahead is like this far. It helps us identify priorities. I am
not meaning to be critical. I am just looking for innovative
ways that this might help.
I am also very interested because I believe it was in your
magazine that I saw this about the Adams collection and how we
don't lose these pieces. The land trust organizations have done
a better job, I think, with land. It is like we are anymore
getting multiple tiers of how adjacent lands are held together
but we haven't really figured out how to do it with objects as
much.
Ms. Fenollosa. We haven't. That is absolutely true. I would
say that the consciousness of the American people isn't as
raised for matters of historic preservation, the preservation
of objects and sites, as it is for landscapes. I think the
environmental community sets the standard of how we should all
organize ourselves to promote an agenda.
As to where the appropriate place for that kind of
organizing is I would hope the National Trust would take the
lead. But I also believe that Mr. Kennedy's organization does
precisely that.
Mr. Souder. The NPCA does a great job.
Ms. Fenollosa. They have that broad perspective.
Mr. Kennedy. The American Museum Association--the next time
you have the Smithsonian before you inquire as to its national
role under its original endowment as acting as a national
clearinghouse, not just the proprietor of its own property. You
might want to ask them to look again at James Smithson's gift
and the initial hearings, John Quincy Adams and Jefferson Davis
among those present, as to what its job is to help precisely
with the curatorial function which is different from the land
conservation function. The Park Service has both and the NPCA
does what it can. Essentially this is a curatorial function you
are talking about and there are people who do that for a
living.
Mr. Souder. It is not a very active caucus. It is a small
caucus and ironically yesterday we were trying to get the
national parks caucus going but Congressman Turner, who was in
yesterday, is a co-chair of the preservation caucus to try to
protect the trust. As former mayor of Dayton he was interested
in how to preserve older buildings. Which, by the way, also
illustrates one of the other things that we need to figure out
how to capitalize on.
It has been very interesting as I have worked through this
hearing process. Individual Members will get on the bill or
come up and talk to me but Congressman Turner just completed
2\1/2\ weeks where he flew back to his district three times
abandoning his wife and kids a couple times on this tour as we
politicians sometimes do.
But they did like 10 different parks and he was recreating
something that his dad had done with him when he was 12 and his
children are 11 and 13 and he is all fired up to help with the
Parks things. Congressman Platts, who has had our Gettysburg
hearing, has been the last, I think, 3 years taking his kids on
a parks tour. When I was out west Heather Wilson has now done
it the second summer with her family on a parks tour.
Well, when they start to get out there if we can have them
meet the different people and see that, it is a great way to
communicate values. As we get people interested, they want to
know, ``What can we do specifically?'' Sometimes if I have a
criticism of landmarks and the trust is when we hear preserve
all prairie schools, preserve all bridges, preserve all
churches.
In political terms you look at that and say can't do it.
Where is the priority in my given area? How do I deal with this
in this town and this county. I am not an expert and I'll never
be an expert. My staff will never be experts in it. The people
who are in this need to give us some prioritization so we know
how to focus and work.
Ms. Fenollosa. Unfortunately most preservation
organizations, most grassroots efforts get their impetus, get
their energy from the potential loss or the actual loss of a
beloved place and that is what prompts the process. Suddenly it
is too late because the property they love, the property that
they always expected would be there, their local landmarks are
gone.
It is then when they turn around and say, ``Oh, my
goodness. What could we have done about this?'' We tend to
expect that our important buildings will always be here. We
just expect it so that when a building, a place, a historic
landscape is compromised, is endangered, we haven't been good
at figuring out how to save it because we just expect that it
would always be there.
I think the opportunities working through the National
Trust, through the National Park Service, through the National
Park Conservation Association, these groups have an obligation
to educate people that these places are not always going to be
there. You are right, the list is a good way of doing that but
the list has to start locally and build. It has to build State-
wide but it has to go national-wide and then it has to build
interagency-wide because these places are just too precious and
we can't afford to lose them.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Olson, did I understand in your testimony
you stated that you were funding seasonal rangers through your
organization? Is that what you said?
Mr. Olson. We are not funding seasonal rangers.
Mr. Souder. It makes possible the employment of about 115
seasonal workers.
Mr. Olson. 115 seasonal workers inside the park and outside
the park who are directly serving it. For example, bus drivers
who are not on a national park payroll. A good amount of our
money is funding people who work for Acadia National Park or
people that we detail to work for Acadia National Park.
We try to do it in a way that is add on. As I said before,
it is ad valorem philanthropy in the sense that the Park
Service capacity to do a project doesn't exist unless we step
in. An example being our trails endowment. The trails of Acadia
National Park of which there are 130 miles would never have
received any kind of priority or private funding not
interjected into the picture. We did that and, as a
consequence, the park's trail crew for doing that work has
grown and so we make possible things that couldn't have
happened without private money.
Mr. Souder. In looking at the role of private money in
developing things like that, do you believe if the private
money developed something inside of a park they should also
have a sustainability for what they developed as opposed to--in
other words, this is a philosophical question partly.
If the representatives of the taxpayers have said this is a
prioritization of funding and a Friends group set something up
that then needs to be maintained and wasn't part of the elected
group. I am not saying it is a very pure election because we
are talking about a tier, a tier, a tier, a tier but,
nevertheless, are still responsible inside an elective system.
I am very supportive of Friends. I am just trying to work
through mentally how this works should a gift come with a
support endowment with it or a way to maintain that because a
second unstated part of this is a zero sum game like the Park
Administration is more or less in. Whenever there is an
addition, there is a subtraction. In effect, strong Friends
groups and groups like Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and so on that
just do additive things that then have to be maintained by the
park budget in effect take it from poorer parks without Friends
groups.
Mr. Olson. Yes, I understand that problem. I can tell you
how Friends of Acadia does it. We have helped rehabilitate the
44-mile carriage road system which was gifted to the American
public through John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s will and those roads
had fallen into disrepair. We had a meeting with our then
representatives who included Senior Mitchell and then
Congresswoman Olympia Snow, the superintendent of Acadia
National Park, a representative of the Friends of Acadia, and
some others.
The agreement that we came to was that the responsibility
would be divvied up in a public/private effort where the public
sector through Senator Mitchell and others would seek a $4
million appropriation to reconstruct the carriage roads. In
other words, to do the capital work. Friends of Acadia was
asked to raise $4 million to endow the roads and perpetuities.
That became a good model. That generates now about $260,000
a year for the Park Service to actually have seven people on
those roads who weren't able to work on those roads before. We
intend it to be forever. We are subject to market influences.
The 3-year down market didn't help us very much in our
grantmaking ability but we still managed to find the funds to
do this so what we are trying to promise as a model is
elimination of some of the vicissitudes of congressional
funding but not all of it. We are looking at the maintenance
question and that is just one of several endowments that we
have.
Why this is not used in other national parks among their
Friends groups I don't know. They have chosen to emphasize
capital projects and then to, I think, convince the
policymakers that the private sector has now done its share and
it is now a legitimate responsibility of the National Park
Service to maintain them and please have the funds available.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Kennedy, do you have any comment on that?
Have you seen it Park System wide?
Mr. Kennedy. Yeah. That was such a polite exchange that the
implications, I guess, we could leave in the polite stage but
there is no question that the Friends of Acadia understand what
endowing means. You do something and then you pay to keep it
going.
This reinforces an earlier point which we were very polite
about also but needs maybe to be emphasized. Private giving is
private giving. Each of us make a choice whether we are going
to give or not. We don't want to be bludgeoned into giving
because the Congress didn't do its job. It isn't true that if
you say, ``Well, too bad. We, the Congress, aren't going to do
our job. It is up to you.''
That doesn't produce in a lot of us a deep sense that it is
up to us to come forward to make up for it. It is a big mistake
for the Congress to think that it just ought to throw the
responsibility over to the private sector because the private
sector being private may decide it wants to give its money to
something else. Congress has to do its job. Almost every 10
years somebody has the bright idea, ``Oh, well. The people who
use it ought to pay for it,'' which ignores the notion that may
be unborn so far, posterity isn't there to represent itself.
Mr. Souder. Let me throw out a variation. I would be
interested in your response and Mr. Olson's in particular, and
that is part of what happens is that different things are added
to our Park System whether you want to call it park barreling
or temporary phenomena that we say it is a personal interest to
somebody if we add this. It may or may not have public support.
That is one class.
A second may have public support because it seemed like a
bright idea at the time. It often is a function of how much a
particular Congressman will trade or end his career or whether
he thinks something is going to be named after him or it
defines him and helps cover another type of a problem.
All those kinds of things are in the Park Service basically
in the first four parks so it is not like a new phenomena. The
one in Oklahoma and Mackinaw Island was in and out and Hot
Springs were all there very early so it is not something new.
But to some degree by having individuals pay, by seeing how
strong your Friends group is, is that not somewhat of a
winnowing process that the people are, in effect, determining
which ones had longevity and where the support was as opposed
to being a short-term?
Mr. Kennedy. Yeah. As you point out, though, it could be
just a rich person's personal pressure on the particular
Congressman at the particular time. I think your earlier
discourse leads us back to the phenomenon of the early 1990's
in which there was a real effort on the part of Congressmen on
both sides of the isle to find some way to make it harder for
there to be a whimsical entry into the National Park System.
The flaw in that process was that it got loaded up with the
notion that we should spend a lot of time and money unloading
parks. You spend vastly more time studying what you are going
to unload than you would save having unloaded. That is the
simple truth of the matter. It cost a lot more to the taxpayers
to figure out what you can get rid of. It could take you 10
years and you fiddle with it.
That is a dumb idea. The not dumb idea is for the Congress
to establish very, very high hurdles for new entries and really
require the Park Service to commit itself with a view on any
new entries before they can make it. If it were me playing the
archangel, I would say two-thirds majority for any new park.
Just make it tough.
Mr. Souder. One of the wrinkles with that is and what I was
kind of suggesting is one of the ways we actually deal with
this is that--because I don't know that we will ever change a
political--we can make it tougher but we will never make it so
tough that it can't be varied with a waive of the rules. To
some degree we determine whether it was a whimsical addition by
the fact does it have broad popular support to subsidize the
funding.
Mr. Kennedy. On the other hand, sometimes the Nation isn't
quite ready for Manzanar. The Nation may be ready for the
Arizona but it may take some people with real courage to know
that we had better remember what we did to our fellow citizens
from time to time. After all, Manzanar is like Gettysburg. It
is not a happy story but it is part of our story. You need to
have some room for this. We have to make it tough to get in but
you shouldn't have to have the built in constituency. There may
just be a wise persuasive person who says----
Mr. Souder. We waited almost too long on Angel Island as an
example.
Mr. Kennedy. Yeah.
Mr. Souder. Another variation that is interesting--this is
my first time this summer to Lassen Volcanic National Park
which was interesting because right around the time the Park
Service was being created, they have this volcano and so it
gets added to the system. It might not have been added had that
not been the case.
On the other hand, now that it is in there, what it gives
us the ability to see is what Mount St. Helens is likely to
look like in 70 years so it might have been a somewhat
historical fluke that it was there but now it is interesting to
compare it to the other systems. It is a hard thing to predict
but I was wanting to create a proxy.
I would ask if you would elaborate a little bit more on
Acadia, too, as far as how you see some of that relationship of
people are, in effect, and I believe Acadia will always
probably be pretty broadly supported. I have three questions
for you. That is one.
Second, Acadia scored really low in this rating of parks in
qualitative area rounded and the pressure is on the Park
System. Have you seen the ``National Geographic Traveller?''
Mr. Olson. I am sorry. I couldn't hear you.
Mr. Souder. There was like a group of experts that went in
and evaluated based on the community pressures around it how
the park was sustained and Acadia was one of the lowest of the
major parts.
Mr. Olson. Yes, I did see that.
Mr. Souder. Then the third question is part of the thing
there was that it said the neighboring community is feeling the
kind of social--Bar Harbor has always been a wealthy retreat
but whether it was going to change the community around it.
That also leads into this question on the fees and how to make
sure people can have access to the park as we get more charges.
Mr. Olson. Yes. Let me take the last one first about the
fees. At Acadia National Park the fee is now $20. It recently
went up from $10 and it includes a transit fee. If you are a
family of four, for example, you pay that fee or if you have
six in the car or one person you pay that number. For a family
of four to attend a movie in Ellsworth, the nearby community
that has a year-round movie operation, I am guessing it is $28
for four people for 2 years. It may be more than that now.
As a market matter, the fees are very low. As an equity
issue I think you raise a very good one when you talk about
people who don't go to national parks. I think Bob McIntosh
made a good point that it is probably less the fee at the park
than it is the access, the habits of travel, the ability to
take time, cohesive family, whatever it may be.
But that doesn't, I think, negate the need for something
like a people's pass, for lack of a better term, at this point
in which, as you point out, there is a confidential exchange of
financial information that is automatic through the IRS form
and the choice of the person to receive a national park pass is
done very quietly. It sounds like a great thing to do.
Otherwise, the fees are held hostage to this question of
equity over time and I don't think there is a real disequity in
those fees and they should be allowed to float in a reasonable
way because they do empower the park to do an incredible amount
of work which is very visible to people. It is a popular
program, as was stated earlier, because people can see the
money going back into the ground. The Park Service does a
really good job of explaining what it is doing with the money.
On the question of the elite nature of the community, there
is no question that the history of Acadia National Park is one
of the first founded from private property and founded in a
resort community which rivaled Newport, RI at the time. Sort of
a Gatsby kind of community. There is that element of Mt. Desert
Island that is always going to be there but there is also a
Yankee tradition in Maine.
There have been surveys done by the Park Service by
visiting the local dump, the local post office, and places that
are not frequented by visitors to find out how much use of the
park is by local people. It turns out the carriage road system
alone at Acadia National Park services 75 percent of the public
who live on the island year round. I was so surprised at that
number.
There is still some residual resentment about the
establishment of the park. We see it but it is not very much
and it is usually a cranky individual or so. I think also any
kind of conservation activity today, the white noise is that it
is an elitist kind of activity when it is really an opening
kind of activity. If you really believe in national parks you
believe in the second part of the mission as much as you do the
first part.
The first part being conservation of resources and wildlife
therein, and the second part being for the enjoyment of
generations unimpaired. The generations part is a real thing
and we want people to be able to use Acadia National Park
whatever the social strata, economic strata may be. I think the
elite question will always be there but it is insignificant
really in the long run.
As to community pressures, Acadia National Park is used by
about 2\1/2\ million visitors in a year. A visit is one person
going to the park for 1 day and coming back the next day would
be a second visit so it is not unique individuals. Maybe there
are 700,000 or 800,000 people that descend upon that island.
There are definitely pressures, especially in the form of
transportation on this granite pluton that is Acadia National
Park and Mt. Desert Island. The physical limits are basically
there as far as transportation goes. The community has mixed
reactions about it because some merchants believe that people
shop from automobiles and the more people in cars on the
island, the happier they are.
Whereas other people feel that the kind of irreversible
thing that is happening socially about the living and visiting
experience at Acadia National Park is a form of endangerment
for what we all treasure. I would say if you consider the
Census Bureau's moderate figures projecting to the year 2050,
it expects that there will be 400 million Americans. We are
about 300 million right now so 100 million Americans are going
to be seeking rarities like Acadia National Park in numbers
that we really don't appreciate yet and that will be tremendous
pressure beyond what we have now on our national park and on
our communities.
Unlike in the American west where a rectangle of land is
superimposed upon a piece of public domain, this national park
is mixed private and public property so the National Park
Service has a tremendous negotiating job every step of the way
about community life and park life.
And, finally, on broad support it is very frustrating, I
think, for a Friends organization like us, or probably any
Friends organization, to have to report that we have only 3,000
members when maybe 700,000, 800,000 unique individuals use
Acadia National Park in the course of a year. Or that our
community has 5,000 year-round residents, 15,000 when you add
the summer residents, and we still have only 3,000 people
supporting national parks.
We don't have the broad support that I believe is there and
this is a conundrum for anybody who is in the nonprofit world
because these parks are so available to so many kinds of
people. Creating the alliances and the allegiances is a long-
term effort.
When we talk about the problems that Roger raised about
lobbying and where the constituencies are, I don't believe we
have helped you very much. Although some excellent work is
being done nationally by the National Parks Conservation
Association, the Trust, and others, we still haven't been able
to help you the way that you are asking us to do so. I think
you should continue to ask us how to do this.
I just want to make a comment, if I might about the--you
mentioned the outsourcing question. This is an interesting one
because Acadia National Park about 38 percent of the jobs that
are in the park are held by people wearing the gray uniform and
the flat hat. And 62 percent of the functions in Acadia
National Park belong to nonprofits, for profit concessioners,
motor tour buses, volunteers, etc.
The question, I think, is to what extent do we consider the
park already privatized or amply privatized? Have we perhaps
exceeded something at Acadia National Park. Will people who
volunteer or give money through private means wish to volunteer
to work for a contractor? I don't know. Would they give to us
if we are paying contractors? I don't know. There is something
magic about the Park Service uniform and the dedication of
employees that means a lot to how we try to sell, if you will,
giving money to government.
Mr. Souder. Lt. McCauley, in your organization you have
worked with volunteers for years. You yourself have been a
volunteer. Could you pick up on the last point a little bit?
What motivated you to get involved? What motivates other people
to get involved. Do you see younger people coming in as well
with a passion and what do you think we might be able to do to
get people like yourself to continue to do this?
Lt. McCauley. In 1966 when I started to volunteer at the
national park we were involved at that particular time with the
Minute Man organizations locally here. I happened to have been
the head of them. We volunteered our services to do
demonstrations at Minute Man and became more involved in the
Living History Program on our own.
My wife became involved and started making clothing. We
became so involved we went to Williamsburg to learn how to make
it. We went to England to learn how to make clothes and
involved our whole family and it became a tradition that we
would attend the National Park System.
In return the national park offered me their services of
doing some training at other national parks. This I accepted
but I must say that my profession at that time allowed me the
time to do it. I am not sure that somebody in a paid regular
day-by-day job would be able to take the time to do these
things but it was a unique experience.
I enjoyed it. I learned and I still pass it on to the point
where I retired as an optometrist and went back to school and
got my BA and MA in history with a certificate in Museum
Studies and I continue this same idea of living history or
using history right above us upstairs here.
One of the most oppressing things I find on an everyday
basis is the lack of knowledge of history. I am talking basic
history. What does the 4th of July mean or things like that.
People do not know. If you don't know, you won't take part.
Somewhere along the line not necessarily the national park, in
a school, or somehow we have to reeducate the people that we
have a past and without that past being known to everybody our
future isn't going to go any place.
Mr. Souder. It is fascinating. We have legislation where we
are trying to even just make sure history is covered in our
schools anymore. In the same time as when you see young kids at
the different places there is this fascination, even in the
Civil War reinactments. On one hand, it is harder to get young
people involved in the organization. On the other hand we have
this proliferating use of the national battle fields in a way
that none of us ever foresaw but it is a huge challenge.
If, in fact, funds get tighter and we need volunteers,
where are the volunteers going to come from and how do we get
people? Particularly in historic preservationsites, you know,
McCullogh and the late Stephen Ambrose could sell lots of
books. We need more people like that who can keep the books up
at the front.
Let me mention one other thing that Mr. Olson kind of
alluded to which I believe is one of the most amazing
transformations in the National Park Service, and that is
partly our big parks anymore aren't the traditional what people
think of the big parks. It is Gateway, Golden Gate, Santa
Monica, the ones by the big cities. It is a whole different
challenge because we are talking 12 million, not 3 million at
those parks.
Brian O'Neil, who is kind of the apostle of this movement,
has hit me with a statistic that just turned my head around and
it related to what you said about Acadia and that is I think
150 mile radius of the Yosemite National Park. A higher
percentage of the people who visit Yosemite are from within 150
miles and visit Golden Gate. That is counterintuitive because
the whole thought of the national recreation areas where these
are in the big cities they will function like city parks. Why
aren't the cities doing these things?
In the old days Olmsted would have done this as a city
park. How come this is a national park? Why did that get into
our system? But when you think about it, it is the conventions
that people go to San Francisco and in their studies.
The Japanese groups that come through, the people from the
midwest who go to San Francisco convention, they don't have
time to get in the car and go out to Yosemite. They go to the
local Golden Gate Park so he is running like 20 percent higher
than Yosemite beyond 150 miles which is totally
counterintuitive, particularly given the numbers at that.
I don't think Santa Monica is quite that way but Los
Angeles had similar things. New York has certainly got a lot of
that. Jones Beach stoics the whole thing but outside that you
are approximate to a big city with lots of conventions, lots of
tourism coming in and they can hit something in a couple of
hours. I would assume Boston benefits from this to a degree,
too, in the historic sites because every time there is a
convention here, every time schools come into the city it is a
different concept.
In the Park Service it is a different challenge because
historically we have been defined by big natural parks, the
crown jewels and a few of the major historic parks. In reality
this whole system has changed. Then in trying to look at
funding and the conflicting things that we are doing here. To
name one of my favorites is San Antonio Mission Park. How do
you count attendance there?
When I went there, there were, I think, maybe you might
have seen as many as 30 people at the Mission and you might
have seen as many as 2,000 people picnicking on the grounds
from the Hispanic community in San Antonio. Great Falls is a
similar thing. This wasn't meant as a picnic park but with so
little green space and we say, well, the Hispanics aren't
coming to our national parks.
Well, they are going to that one or they are going to
others but they are using them more like recreation areas. Then
maybe they will wander over and see the Mission and be exposed
to it. We have to think there are parking challenges. There are
different use challenges. At Sequoia you see these people going
down where they are not supposed to be going down in plastic
bags sliding like it is for sledding but it is not the
designated sledding area but we wanted to get them into the
park.
How are we going to accommodate kind of the different
usages? The fundamental question by just focusing on backlog
which we tried to work through. We want to get the backlog. We
want to get the overhead but the truth is if we are going to go
from 300 million to 400 million, you are right.
The pressure on the existing space and the existing green
spaces is people want to see those. They want to share it with
their family. They want to get out. This is not just a Federal
problem, although I am a Congressman and we are doing it. Where
in the world are our State parks and our city and county parks
because it is putting extra pressure on the Federal system
because many of the States haven't updated their State park
system for so long.
Mr. Olson. I just wanted to respond to that. I really
appreciate what you're saying. I think one of the things that
is going on is that as different user groups historically have
used parks, they weren't really sure they were in a national
park or a national forest back when those were just relatively
natural areas.
Mr. Souder. Now they know it because they have a fee at
each one as they go through like BLM. That is a joke.
Mr. Olson. I thought we could do a survey, even at Acadia
National Park, of our fairly homogeneous users, although there
is a lot of increasing international use. Many of them would
answer to a question of who runs this facility, ``Whose land
are you on?''
I really wonder whether we get a national park as an answer
on its own by them or in trust by the government, or whether
they think it is a State operation, or they think it is a
private operation and if you look at that from the standpoint
that it has probably always been that case, the Department of
Interior, people don't know the difference between that and the
Department of Agriculture. If you add in a lot of new users who
are putting the pressures on the place, they don't understand
that maybe there is a single really estimable agency out there
that is doing this and there is a lot of private that is doing
it.
You can be part of it now that you know about it. That is
the education job that has to occur in national parks. I bet we
could do that survey and prove that hypothesis that a lot of
people don't know they are in a national park, especially in an
urban setting.
Mr. Souder. At Redwood when you get in the national park
there is no such thing like a system. Everything is kind of a
variation. At Redwood it is the Redwood National and State
Parks because the State parks preserve the land. The Federal
was slow. Now the Federal has kind of this connective between
the State parks.
What is interesting to watch some of the chaos that occurs
from this and we are going to have to figure out how to deal
with. The State now with, I think, 120 Federal employees in 40
States but the State has been declining and the Federal has
been increasing even though almost all the land is State which
then raises questions like the national park boundary that goes
around the State parks. It isn't national park land anyway.
There is an area that the State has added that is critical
water shed that the State hasn't added employees to cover that
water shed and the Federal employees aren't allowed to go into
that watershed because it is not part of the boundary. It is
just this fascinating mosaic of individual cases brought under
a system. I know you, having presided over that share, that
this is some of what becomes big challenges because the State
and local have to be partners in this as well if we are going
to be partnered in the parks.
Mr. Kennedy. One of the things that is striking to me is
that your attention to this subject is remarkable. I said
earlier that it was remarkable. It also represents a further
argument for the importance of the National Park Service as a
group of professionals who are around all the time competent
and growing in competency in balancing precisely these complex
questions because that is what they get paid to do every day.
That is their job.
Now, you are wonderful and extraordinary. No irony, but you
are also exceptional. The Congress doesn't give this kind of
oversight, doesn't pay this kind of attention, doesn't bore in
very often. While we are grateful for that, that really means
that most Congressmen attend to it very, very occasionally.
You have to have a professional service that does its job,
that understands the evolutions and complexities and cares a
whole lot about resolving precisely these kinds of ambiguities
because you can't do that full-time. You have a few other
things to do with your life. The necessity for a qualified
compensated honestly advanced high morale public service
professional group, that is the core of the ambiguities that
you have been addressing simply because it is so extraordinary
that you are paying attention.
Let us hear it for the State Park System's evoling
professional skills. Let us hear it for the National Park
Service and let us be real careful in the Congress that we make
it as easy as possible for people to make good careers in that
service and be thanked for it so we don't outsource the system
and lose those continuities.
Mr. Souder. I thank you for your passion and everybody's
passion with this. Would anybody like to add anything before we
conclude? Any additional comments? If you want to add anything
after we adjourn in the record, we will be doing, in addition,
each hearing comes out as a published book after a number of
months. We are going to be putting this together as a national
report which hopefully will supplement what NPCA has been doing
but inside Congress and that is where we are headed.
In the first hearing it was kind of defining and taking
subgroups. Today was a little more focus on the history angle.
Our next one in Seattle will be more natural parks with a
couple variations there of some of the State and local
cooperations, Lewis and Clark being a new park and a classic
example of State and local. Grand Canyon and the Arizona parks
in that area will be a whole other type of thing.
We know what our constant is, there isn't enough money if
we are going to maintain this system. We need to have a frank
analysis inside Congress that there isn't enough money. But
underneath that what does that mean? What does it mean for
local parks? What does it mean for the quality of the
personnel?
What does it mean for historic preservation? What tradeoffs
are we making because every day we are making tradeoffs but we
don't know we are making them, and to try to articulate the
tradeoffs inside to the degree we can simplify this incredibly
complex thing.
I will finish with this. My dad thought this was just
hilarious and I thought it was the stupidest thing when I was
in high school. I was in band and he got this plaque when we
were on vacation and he gave it to the band director. The band
director put it up and we had to watch every day in band. It
said, ``Why can't all of life's problems come when I am young
and know all the answers?''
It is kind of like when you get into the Park Service you
come in with a couple of ``Why don't we do this and this and
this?'' Then you realize this is exceptional. They have
snowmobiles here for 3 months of the year and it was
grandfathered in and every park has these unique things. We are
trying to figure out what commonalities are there.
How can we simplify this enough and yet show the incredible
complexity of this system which most Americans don't even
understand the complexity? They see a brown sign and assume
that the same rules apply everywhere and they don't. Now
national monuments are in BLM and Forest Service, too, which
further confused matters. We are trying to work this through.
I believe we are getting a group of members who are paying
attention and I thank all of you for your passion because that
is what is going to make the difference because the National
Park System is our contribution to the world and we are going
to do our best that, at least, while we can make noise we will
continue to make noise. I hope I continue to do it at age 80
like Mr. Kennedy.
Thank you very much. Thank you all those who attended. The
subcommittee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:02 p.m. the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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