The following editorial appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican on July 3, 2003.
It's a tougher-than-usual summer for our national parks: Besides the usual crowds, bolstered by folks who can't afford Europe, rangers are seeing buildings and equipment deteriorate before their very eyes for lack of maintenance money. They see a Congress considering proposals for more off-road vehicles in summer, more snowmobiles in winter - and notions of new roads cutting away more park and accommodating more cars, more smog, more crowds.
Add to that the threat of privatizing - or is that profiteering? - most of our national-park operations, and the picture becomes truly grim.
All this under a president whose campaign platform had a plank promising a reversal of years of national-park neglect. Once in office, President Bush said he'd eliminate a $5 billion backlog in artifact protection, natural-resource assessment and maintenance of roads, buildings and other park infrastructure. However, his budgets have slighted the parks to the point that they operate on skeleton crews and can afford only makeshift repairs.
The National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan watchdog over our nation's natural wonders, recently awarded President Bush a D- for his stewardship.
That grade could come back to haunt him and Congress' Republican majority. Americans of both parties love the parks - so much that few of us complain about that double-taxation known as the "Golden Passport' to get into places our income tax should be paying for. What we won't put up with is skimping on upkeep and other basic operations.
Much less will we accept parks' budgets being cut - by more than a quarter in many cases - so that the Bush administration can hire "privatization consultants' who will tell Interior Secretary Gale Norton what she wants to hear: The parks will be restored to paradisiacal glory overnight with Halliburton, or its equivalent, in charge.
New Mexico's leading member of the congressional majority, Sen. Pete Domenici, should see the privatization proposal as the boondoggle it is. He should join Democratic counterpart Jeff Bingaman in an effort to give our thin-stretched parks personnel the budgetary support they need to carry out the president's park-restoration promise.