COMMENTARY: Make America’s national parks great again

When a water line broke last month at the Grand Canyon, thousands of visitors had their lodging reservations abruptly canceled. The 12.5-mile pipeline supplies water from the canyon’s north side to its South Rim, where about 90 percent of the park’s 6 million annual visitors enter. The line has broken 85 times since 2010, forcing facilities to close, upending vacations and even causing restaurants to use paper and plastic because of lack of water to wash dishes.

Rather than replacing the line, the park has regularly done expensive repairs by helicopter, costing $25,000 a pop. But now the park is finally addressing the problem for good with a $208 million investment, partly thanks to recent landmark legislation devoted to fixing national parks.

In 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act to provide $1.3 billion a year for five years to fix long-neglected park maintenance projects such as the Grand Canyon water line. The act is helping reconstruct seawalls at the capital’s Tidal Basin, renew the iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road at Glacier National Park, improve utilities at Acadia National Park, make seismic reinforcements at Yosemite and support countless other repairs from sea to sea.

Despite the historic funding for repairs and improvements, park maintenance backlogs have continued to grow rather than shrink. Clearly, Congress and the park service under the incoming administration and likely Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum need a better approach.

When the Great American Outdoors Act passed, the National Park Service estimated that it needed $15 billion to address all of its “deferred” maintenance, meaning repairs and fixes that weren’t done on time. The following year, the agency’s estimate ballooned to nearly $24 billion. This reality drew the ire of many in Congress, damping prospects that legislators will reauthorize the act before it expires next year.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, has called the surge in the backlog “disheartening,” adding that he’s concerned “we’re still deferring maintenance … instead of digging out of the hole.” In the House, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., has lamented the lack of progress. “Instead of thinking we’re more than halfway through and on pace to another five-year reauthorization to wipe out the maintenance backlog,” he said earlier this year, “we find we’re actually in worse shape” than before.

Part of the increase in maintenance estimates was because of the park service applying a blanket 35 percent markup for inflation—a blunt accounting decision that federal overseers have questioned. Part was also because of staff deciding to finally tally the amount of repairs needed, something long neglected, once they saw a huge amount of maintenance-earmarked funding was up for grabs.

Deferred maintenance is a big issue because delaying repairs can shorten the life cycle of infrastructure and make it even costlier to fix eventually.

But the root cause of the problem is neglecting routine maintenance. Infrastructure in many parks dates to the Civilian Conservation Corps era of the 1930s or the agency’s Mission 66 construction push of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of it has reached or exceeded its anticipated lifespan without being repaired or replaced, partly because of incentives.

“It’s fun and sexy to add a new unit to the park service,” former Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, was fond of pointing out. “It’s not fun or sexy to talk about fixing a sewer system.” Most park funding comes from congressional appropriations, meaning it is inherently political. And for years, politicians chose not to prioritize activities like fixing wastewater systems.

Over the past couple of decades, the maintenance backlog swelled so large that politicians finally decided to stop ignoring sewers. But in the process, “deferred maintenance” became the be-all-end-all. The Great American Outdoors Act specifically earmarks funding for “deferred” maintenance, and long-standing agency policies have required parks to prioritize overdue projects rather than giving flexibility to the on-the-ground superintendents and staff who know their sites—and needs—best. The problem with fixating on deferred projects is that it takes attention away from the routine work that prevents repairs from becoming past due in the first place.

Now that parks across the country are finally improving pipelines, visitor centers, trails and thousands of other assets, the National Park Service must address its fundamental maintenance flaws for good.

The agency should get rid of its broken approach to maintenance and reframe the challenge more logically. It’s in the process of updating its system to estimate and track maintenance using quick and inexpensive visual checks, known as “parametric condition assessments.” It should complete that overhaul and then give on-the-ground park staff the flexibility to prioritize their own needs rather than deferring to arbitrary measures of what’s overdue.

To give individual parks flexibility, Congress and the agency’s bureaucrats must get out of the way and stop tying funding to “deferred” projects. When funds can be spent only on overdue needs, the message is that things must be falling apart before they can be repaired or replaced. It’s a costly and illogical policy rendered even more foolhardy given that there’s no uniform standard for “deferred.”

The park service should also explore ways to harness visitor fees that can complement the Great American Outdoors Act, as is happening with the Grand Canyon water line. The bulk of the money to replace it is coming from visitor fees — an important revenue source at high-profile destinations given booms in visitation over recent years.

Empowering parks to be creative with fees can generate additional funds to help steward parks. One low-hanging idea is to implement a surcharge for overseas visitors, which would likely double or even triple revenue at the highest-profile parks.

The Grand Canyon water line was built in the 1960s and expected to last only 30 years. It’s finally getting the fix it deserves. It’s also time to fix the fundamental maintenance strategy and properly care for all of our national parks.

Tate Watkins is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and author of the report “Improving the Next Great American Outdoors Act: Lessons learned so far from the Legacy Restoration Fund.” He writes from Bozeman, Montana.