The Adams National Historical Park in Quincy is blessed with a treasure trove of historical artifacts, including a wet-pressed copy of the Declaration of Independence presented to John Adams in the 1820s, but many visitors don't get to see them.
The Adams National Historical Park in Quincy is blessed with a treasure trove of historical artifacts, including a wet-pressed copy of the Declaration of Independence presented to John Adams in the 1820s, but many visitors don't get to see them.
In Boston, the National Park Service has cut guided tours of Boston's Freedom Trail by 70 percent between 1990 and 2003. And vast portions of the Cape Cod National Seashore are vulnerable to looters because there aren't enough park rangers to protect it.
Today, a congressional subcommittee meeting in Faneuil Hall will hear testimony about financial problems facing national parks in Massachusetts and the Northeast. Across the country, national parks face an annual operating budget shortfall of $600 million, and a maintenance backlog that was pegged at $5 billion in 2001. Now, it may be nearly twice that figure.
The problem is acute in the region: Of the 45 national park facilities in the Northeast, 39 received a budget increase this year that wasn't enough to keep up with inflation. Adams park, the Freedom Trail, and the Cape Cod seashore were among them.
In written testimony prepared for today's hearing and obtained by the Globe, Roger Kennedy of the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit advocacy group, asserts that "significant funding shortfalls make it increasingly difficult for the men and women of the Park Service to serve as guardians of the nation's heritage." Kennedy headed the National Park Service in the mid-1990s.
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"Successive years of insufficient budgets have eroded the actual spending power of parks in the Northeast and contributed to the slow but steady decline in the ability to manage the day-to-day core function of parks in an effective manner," according to Kennedy's 22-page testimony. "The stresses of coping with inadequate funding are beginning to manifest themselves in many parks in increasingly visible ways."
Kennedy cites "closed facilities, reduced public access, less interpretive and educational programming, management by crisis, diminished law enforcement capabilities, and compromises to visitor safety and enjoyment." He called those problems "symptoms of a larger disease."
Other witnesses scheduled to testify include representatives of the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the superintendent of the Lowell National Historical Park.
The Adams park, the Freedom Trail, and the Cape Cod seashore aren't the only national parks in Massachusetts and New England that are desperate for additional dollars.
At the Longfellow House in Cambridge, a Georgian-style mansion that was headquarters to George Washington and home to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a lack of money has forced the Park Service to close the site to tourists and school groups for eight months out of the year.
The Minute Man National Historical Park in Lexington, Concord, and Lincoln cut its workforce from 39 to 26 between 2000 and 2005. And in 2001, Acadia National Park in Maine identified a $7.3 million budget deficit and a shortfall of 109 full-time employees.
US Representative Mark E. Souder, an Indiana Republican who chairs one of the congressional subcommittees with jurisdiction over national parks, organized the Boston hearing and will hold about a dozen others across the country in the next two years to examine the parks' financial state. Souder wants to create a National Park Centennial Fund to eliminate the maintenance backlog and close the operational shortfall by the park system's 100th birthday, in 2016.
Under legislation he proposed earlier this year, the money for the fund would come from a voluntary checkoff on federal income tax returns and the general treasury.
"National parks are a unique American idea that we've exported around the world," Souder said in a phone interview yesterday. "People will be willing to put additional dollars in if they know they're going to the parks. They want to preserve it for their kids and grandkids, too. It's our natural history and our human history, our cultural history."
Souder pointed out that since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, historical sites in Boston and other cities have had to beef up security, ratcheting up the financial pressures even further.
The National Park System includes 388 national parks and monuments, recreation areas, historic sites, battlefields, and reserves. About 300 million people visited them last year.
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Source: Knight Riddder/Tribune Business News
