Parks system in peril

Friday, June 13, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

More than 400 National Park Service superintendents will travel to a Utah resort next month for a national summit that will cost taxpayers $1 million and that critics say is little more than a gathering designed to keep Bush administration policies intact after November’s election.

Some of the park officials who will attend the meeting, scheduled for July 16 and 17 at Northern Utah’s Snowbird resort, told the Associated Press that their travel, room and meal expenses are to come from their individual parks’ budgets, which already are woefully underfunded thanks to years of Bush administration cuts.

What’s more, these officials said, the meeting is occurring at the peak of the summer tourist season — poor timing for taking superintendents away from their duties.

The National Park Service says the meeting is to concentrate on such issues as getting Americans to visit the parks more often, identifying future agency leaders and planning the park system’s centennial celebration in 2016.

The centennial proposal, which also has come under fire, calls for allowing private corporations to underwrite the costs of new facilities and programs within the parks. President Bush has said such public-private partnerships could provide new sources of revenue.

Critics rightly assert that allowing corporations to sponsor national park amenities could open some of the nation’s most scenic areas to commercialism and what amounts to corporate advertising.

Bill Wade, the retired superintendent of Shenandoah National Park who now heads the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, told the AP that the Utah meeting is nothing more than a way for Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and other Bush-appointed officials to note “all of the great things they’ve done for parks and conservation, when most of us believe they’ve done more harm than good.”

The multibillion-dollar park maintenance backlog that Bush pledged to eradicate is worse than it was before he took office the first time. Bush’s deep cuts to park budgets have forced officials to halt visitor and education programs and to close some facilities.

The Park Service has not hosted such a summit in 20 years, and has more than enough challenges to fill the agenda of a two-day meeting. But if the point of this gathering is to extol the virtues of Bush’s park policies, then it ought not last two minutes, let alone two days.