Miles, quite a few great points there, and I do want to be clear that my comment was direct less at you than at my frustration that the real problems of public land management are being overlooked in the manufactured debate over selling/acquiring public lands.
When it comes to "privatizing campgrounds", I hate to break it you, but a vast portion of NPS campgrounds and facilities are already operated by concessionaires. Sometimes this results in ludicrous and, at least in my eyes, morally offensive scenarios like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/21/a-private-company-trademarked-the-phrase-yosemite-national-park-should-the-u-s-pay-to-get-it-back/
However, that's the situation. Private entities already operate many, many facilities in National Park. Are there advantages? For the taxpayer, sure: the federal government isn't saddled with benefits and pension obligations for these workers. That might not be great for the workers, and it might not be good for sustaining rural economies near parks, but it does save the federal government money. Should concessionaires pay more to NPS? Sure as hell seems to me they should. I'd also agree that they should probably be responsible for maintaining their own facilities, as that article in Adventure Journal suggests.
I'd urge you to read any headline with a critical eye. The article in The Week, for example, is pretty darn breathlessly reporting something that is already the status quo (right or wrong) as a brand-new nefarious plan hatched by the Trump admin.
This is what frustrates me the most about the public lands debate. It's the fringes that want to either sell every acre, or acquire every acre. The real debate, and the effort to address real problems, starts and ends in the middle. The rest is just irresponsible noise from those who know better, and is used to drum up memberships, subscriptions, contributions, etc..
On Friday, October 27, 2017 at 1:40:30 PM UTC-4, Miles wrote:
I agree about the 'secret plot' not being real, insofar as it's not at all secret.
GAO reports don't always give you the bigger picture, and it's telling that this report barely mentions concessioners operating in the parks. Here's another piece of the picture: those concessioners pay $85 million to the NPS for use of the park, compared to $186 million in user fees and $94 million in philanthropy.
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-166What do concessioners get for their $85 million? Gross of more than a billion dollars. As for the backlog: "A closer look at the projects that make up the backlog, however, reveals that the NPS itself should not be responsible for many of these costs and that some of the projects are higher priority than others."
https://www.adventure-journal.com/2017/03/opinion-trump-privatize-national-parks/
So the problem isn't that the backlog is huge or the money isn't there to fix it - it's just not being collected from the concessioners. And the fact that it isn't being collected is being used by our government - in public, not in secret - to justify fee rate hikes and further privatization of park assets.
I had not heard of the LWCF, but I spent a little while reading up on it. Specifically, I was looking at how much money is collected and how much is spent on parks. It turns out a does not equal b:
"Although the LWCF is authorized up to $900 million annually, since 1999, appropriations for Federal land acquisition and State grants have ranged from $149 million to $573 million. Fully funding the program would comprise only 11.5% of all oil and gas revenues."
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/lwcf/congressionalacts.htm
Check me on this, but the math on that works out to 7.8 billion dollars of offshore drilling revenues. That is rough fit for the 2014 figure of 7.4 billion dollars here:
http://ocsgovernors.org/ocs101/#7 -- but last year saw only 2.78 billion in revenues. So a range of 11.5% to 33%.
And even the $900 million authorization is rarely appropriated (twice, since 1977, when the $900 million peg was set). Since the GOP took over Congress appropriations have been fairly flat, at less than $400 million - which, granted, in the face of declining revenues can be seen as a positive. Still, at most 14% of OCS gas revenues are actually making to the LWCF. Most of the money just goes into the U.S. Treasury, as far as I can tell, for Congress to do whatever.
Concerning the decline in revenues, we should be clear about why that occurred: most of it is likely due to President Obama's ban on new drilling after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. (Some portion is likely due to OPEC's push to lower crude oil prices, which is beyond our scope here.) If Congress gives the Trump administration the authority to reverse that ban, and he uses that power, there is zero guarantee that the LWCF will see any more money appropriated. And that's assuming the LWCF is reauthorized at all - it's due to expire in 2018, and some (specifically GOP) members of Congress want to get rid of it.
Again: the money is there. It's just not being collected or appropriated. We should be asking our Congressors to 1) make the LWCF permanent, 2) raise the authorization to 2.5 billion, and 3) appropriate the full amount.
Miles
On Friday, October 27, 2017, 12:01:45 PM EDT, October Caddis <
kjea...@gmail.com> wrote:
One may dislike one party or another, but these assertions that there's some secret plot to drive down attendance in order sell the system aren't rooted in reality.
The NPS is facing a $12 billion backlog of deferred maintenance across the system. At current visitation and entrance fees, the gap between revenue and need will simply never be be met. That's the problem. It's real.
Incidentally, the Land & water Conservation Fund, which is the primary means of funding federal public land acquisition, is supported entirely by offshore oil and gas leases in federal waters.
Guess what decreased under the previous administration? If you said oil and gas revenues leases in federal waters, you're right.
All that said, I do not support the proposed fee increases, and I'd rather see Congress direct more funding to NPS.
If you oppose the fee hikes, submit a comment (I did).
If you think Congress should just appropriate more funding to NPS, send your representative an email or letter (I did).
If you have a preference as to how that new funding should be made available (cut military, tax the rich, mine the Moon for lunar gold, whatever floats your boat), express that to your member of Congress (I did).
But this "Republicans are closing parks and selling our land" business just prevents people from recognizing that there's an actual problem, and it certainly doesn't help solve it.
On Friday, October 27, 2017 at 9:21:45 AM UTC-4, Miles wrote:
"A lot of people would choose not to spend that much money, so instead of SNP getting $10 (or $40 for a year pass), now they'd get zero...part of me thinks that might be the intended effect, drive people away with price hikes, starve the NPS of cash, then declare them a failure and privatize the parks system."
That would be the part of you that is... absolutely right! It's their MO in pretty much every domain: take a public asset, neglect it to ruins, then declare "Government has failed" and sell it off.
Miles
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