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THE NATIONAL PARKS: PRESERVATION OF

HISTORIC SITES AND THE NORTHEAST REGION

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,

DRUG POLICY, AND HUMAN RESOURCES

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

AUGUST 24, 2005

Serial No. 109–109

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

——— ———

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

MELISSA WOJCIAK, Staff Director

DAVID MARIN, Deputy Staff Director/Communications Director

ROB BORDEN, Parliamentarian/Senior Counsel

TERESA AUSTIN, Chief Clerk

PHIL BARNETT, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE, DRUG POLICY, AND HUMAN RESOURCES

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

DIANE E. WATSON, California

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

EX OFFICIO

TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

J. MARC WHEAT, Staff Director

BRANDON LERCH, Professional Staff Member

MARK PFUNDSTEIN, Professional Staff Member

MALIA HOLST, Clerk

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on August 24, 2005 ........................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Kennedy, Roger, National Council chairman, National Parks Conservation Association; Marilyn Fenollosa, National Trust for Historic Preservation; Ken Olson, president, Friends of Acadia National Park; and

Lt. John McCauley, museum curator, Ancient and Honorable Artillery

Company of Massachusetts .......................................................................... 29

Fenollosa, Marilyn ..................................................................................... 46

Kennedy, Roger ......................................................................................... 29

McCauley, Lt. John ................................................................................... 57

Olson, Ken .................................................................................................. 52

McIntosh, Robert W., Associate Regional Director for Planning and Partnerships, Northeast Region, National Park Service .................................. 6

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Fenollosa, Marilyn, National Trust for Historic Preservation, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 49

Kennedy, Roger, National Council chairman, National Parks Conservation Association, prepared statement of ...................................................... 31

McCauley, Lt. John, museum curator, Ancient and Honorable Artillery

Company of Massachusetts, prepared statement of ................................... 60

McIntosh, Robert W., Associate Regional Director for Planning and Partnerships, Northeast Region, National Park Service, prepared statement

of ..................................................................................................................... 12

Olson, Ken, president, Friends of Acadia National Park, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 55

Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Indiana, prepared statement of ............................................................... 4

(1)

THE NATIONAL PARKS: PRESERVATION OF

HISTORIC SITES AND THE NORTHEAST REGION

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE, DRUG POLICY,

AND HUMAN RESOURCES,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Boston, MA.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m., in Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA, Hon. Mark E. Souder (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representative Souder.

Staff present: Brandon Lerch and Mark Pfundstein, professional

staff members.

Mr. SOUDER. Good morning and thank you all for joining us. This

hearing is the third in a series of hearings about the critical issues

facing the National Park Service.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the national parks is

aware of the continuing pressures the National Park Service is facing. The National Park Service manages a diverse number of

parks, seashores, historic sites, and lake shores. The Northeast region is a perfect example of this diversity. Acadia National Park,

Cape Code National Seashore, and Minute Man National Historical

Park are just a few of the NPS units in the region.

This hearing will examine northeast regional sites. The natural

parks of the region provide recreational opportunities for millions

of people. They preserve open spaces, and sustain a variety of wildlife, natural formations, and picturesque landscapes.

The northeast region is also home to a variety of cultural landmarks and historical sites. Just as natural parks provide benefits

and inspiration to millions, historical sites offer a window to the

past and help us relate to those who have come before us. Given

Boston’s role in our country’s history, it is appropriate that we examine historical preservation in this most historic of cities.

The preservation of our historical and cultural heritage is one of

the most important and challenging missions of the National Park

Service. These sites represent our history and the story of our Nation. Preserving them is vital if we are going to pass our history

to our children, grandchildren, and future generations.

Preservation, restoration, and maintenance of these sites is not

cheap. It takes much time and money to keep them in operating

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order, to make sure that they are safe, and to ensure that they can

adequately convey their story and context in history.

All too often important artifacts are lost through neglect or purposeful destruction. When this occurs there is not much we can do

to recover the site. Creating replicas of sites is possible, but they

do not convey the same experience. It is imperative that we not let

these sites be destroyed.

Acquiring and keeping these sites in good repair is a central mission of the National Park Service. Unfortunately, maintaining historical sites, particularly those acquired in poor condition, is expensive, and the National Park Service budget is tight. This hearing

will examine how the National Park Service makes the decisions

regarding these treasures.

Furthermore, no assessment of the Park Service can be complete

without also speaking to outside groups. The groups represented

here today are passionate about the national parks and historical

preservation. They have been able to mobilize the public and keep

them interested in these issues, sometimes for generations. They

have unique perspectives and can inform us how to raise awareness among the public.

Today I am joined on the first panel by Robert W. McIntosh, the

Associate Regional Director for Planning and Partnerships for the

Northeast Region of the National Park Service and a veteran of

these hearings who was at our first one in Gettysburg, and Michael

Creasey, the Superintendent of the Lowell National Historical Park

and Chair of the Granite Subcluster.

On the second panel I would also like to welcome my friend,

Roger Kennedy, the National Council chairman of National Parks

Conservation Association, and former director of the National Park

Service, and famous author. Also, welcome to Marilyn Fenollosa of

the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Ken Olson, the

president of Friends of Acadia National Park. Our final witness on

the second panel is Lt. John McCauley who is the museum curator

for the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts.

Before I proceed with the process of this committee, a lot of times

when we are doing field hearings I try to explain what the Government Reform Committee is and what this subcommittee is just

briefly so those in attendance kind of understand what our role is.

In Congress we will have an authorizing committee that will do

legislation so, for example, Parks legislation comes to the Resources Committee. The Appropriations Committee funds the actual budget. The Government Reform Committee then is to look at

whether the funds that are appropriated and authorized are both

being spent the way Congress intended them to be spent and

whether or not there are things that either need to be changed

through regulations, through laws, or through adequate funding

questions.

Historically whenever we plunge into an issue, whether it be

oversight of problems ranging from in the last administration our

committee was most famous from everything from the Travel Office

to Whitewater to China investigations. Most recently most people

know us as asking Mark McGuire whether he had ever done

steroids and him not being able to remember.

3

Whenever we do these different types of hearings, the authorizing committees somewhat have some concerns. The fact is the oversight committee existed in the early days of Congress before the

authorizing committees. What we have been doing here systematically because though my Subcommittee is Criminal Justice, Drug

Policy, and Human Resources and we have oversight over Justice

Department, HHS, Department of Education, as well as Department of HUD, and any drug policy in any agency, also because of

my personal interest in negotiating with other subcommittee chairmen was able to have national parks come under oversight of my

subcommittee as well as a number of other issues.

One of the things we are doing is a systematic look at our entire

National Park System and looking at it as we move toward our

centennial, as we look at the various problems and pressures on

the park system. This is the third of what will likely be a minimum

of eight hearings around the country moving toward a 2-year report.

We did this a few years ago on Border and that became the fundamental report that we used as we created the Homeland Security

Committee and the Border Subcommittee there and we want to do

a strong analysis working with all the different groups as well that

we can then try to discuss as we try to figure out what in Congress

we need to do working with the administration on how best to preserve our national parks.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]

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5

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Mr. SOUDER. With that background, first let me do two procedural matters. I ask for unanimous consent that all Members have

5 legislative days to submit written statements and questions for

the hearing record and that any answers to written questions provided by the witnesses also be included in the record. Without objection it is so ordered.

I would also ask unanimous consent that all exhibits, documents,

and other materials referred to by Members may be included in the

hearing record, that all Members be permitted to revise and extend

their remarks. Without objection it is so ordered. Those are procedural things we do with our field hearings.

Let me make one other comment. These hearings are very bipartisan. Mr. Cummings, ranking member and Democrat of this committee, couldn’t be here with me today. He was with me yesterday

at a field hearing on Meth in the Midwest.

The mere fact that we are holding this hearing without him

present indicates this is a bipartisan effort and we are doing this

in a pretty much completely unanimous way in our subcommittee

and look forward to continuing to involve him and the other members of the subcommittee. That is not typical of the way Congress

is working right now. On this subcommittee we have been able to

do that both on narcotics and in the parks area.

One of the things we do as an oversight committee is ask all our

witnesses to testify under oath. Rafael Palmiero is going through

this with his attorneys right now learning why we do this. We don’t

expect to have that problem today and Mr. McIntosh has already

shown that he has made it through the first round fine.

If you could rise and, Mr. Creasey, if you could as well, raise

your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that both witnesses responded

in the affirmative.

Now I would like to yield and we are going to have a—for those

of you who don’t know me, I am a very conservative Republican so

this is hard to say. We are going to have a very liberal clock today.

We have a 5-minute rule. We have asked everybody’s testimony to

be at 5 minutes but if you want to go over, that is fine. We will

put the clock on so you know when the yellow comes on with 1

minute to go.

STATEMENT OF ROBERT W. McINTOSH, ASSOCIATE REGIONAL

DIRECTOR FOR PLANNING AND PARTNERSHIPS, NORTHEAST REGION, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Mr. MCINTOSH. Thank you, Congressman. As was the case at

Gettysburg, I did have a little more extended remarks so the clock

expired but if you really want me to stop, just point the finger and

I will do that.

Mr. SOUDER. If you see me doze off, that would be an early warning sign.

Mr. MCINTOSH. I am certainly pleased to have the opportunity

once again to participate in these hearings and welcome you. Mr.

Creasey and I welcome you to Boston and to the Northeast Region

of the National Park Service. We hope that our comments today

will be helpful in the committee’s work and deliberations.

7

Before I continue, I would like to also, on behalf of the National

Park Service, welcome to this session the distinguished former director Roger Kennedy. Roger is a colleague and a friend of, I think,

all of the Park Service employees that were in service at the time

of his leadership and we deeply and truly appreciate his commitment and dedication to us at that time.

The extent of my testimony will focus primarily on the parks in

northern New England. I think we have tried to limit the scope to

Maine and Massachusetts and we have one park in Vermont and

one park in New Hampshire.

As my testimony indicates, the region itself is 238 square miles

with a population of about 68 million people. We are home to about

24 percent of the Nation’s population with a population density of

288 people per square mile.

That is against the national average of about 80. We have a lot

of folks who are busy in their education and in their work, as well

as in their recreational pursuits. We play in the northeast a large

role in providing close-to-home recreation as well as destination

visits to our great national parks in the northeast.

We service about 51 million people a year. That is about 18 percent of the national total. Region-wide the 13 northeast States contain about 75 congressionally designated units of the National Park

System. We have 25 affiliated or related areas including 14 national heritage areas. Within this region in these parks we have

about a quarter of the system’s museum collections, a quarter of

the historic structures, and almost half of the Nation’s National

Historic Landmarks.

I noted with some pride this morning in the business section of

the Boston paper, the Globe, that the owners of Fenway Park are

seeking National Historic Landmark status so that they might

qualify for the Historic Preservation tax credits which provide developers of commercial development, commercial use business properties up to 20 percent credit for the rehabilitation work that they

do. It is aside from the operation of the parks, but it has been a

major contribution in this country to historic preservation over the

last almost 30 years at this point.

In addition to administering the parks in this region, we provide

strong assistance, significant assistance to these heritage areas. We

have a very effective Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance

program that works with local States and local communities. We

administer the Land and Water Conservation Fund which provides

money for Federal land acquisition as well as allocations to the

State for 50 percent cost sharing for acquisition and development

of recreation and open space lands.

Most recently we are active in working with the General Services

Administration [GSA] and the Coast Guard in the transfer of historic lighthouse properties. That is done through a Request for Proposals [RFP] process and it makes the property available to nonprofit organizations free of cost as long as they provide for the historic preservation of those properties and for public access.

The region has approximately 4,000 employees that are working

across the region in the central offices as well as in the parks. We

benefited, at least in 2004, from 825,000 volunteer hours. If you do

the math, that is equal to about 496 work-years of effort. In a

8

sense, our work force has increased by that amount. These people,

Volunteers in the Park, have a long tradition and a long list of

dedicated individuals who provide assistance to the service across

the system.

The region’s budget, $261 million in fiscal year 2005, $230 million of those $261 are dedicated in the parks to the operation of the

parks. The remainder of that amount is made up of $8.3 million

for cyclic maintenance; $10.2 million for repair/rehab; $2.1 million

for cultural resource preservation; $1.4 million for natural resources; $1.5 million for collections management; and $7.7 million

in other project funds.

These are annual funds that are provided to the service and the

projects move from park to park through various priority rating

systems as to what parks get what projects in what year. In fiscal

year 2006 the appropriations bill will increase the park’s financial

capabilities in meeting the President’s goal to address the maintenance backlog. The amount of $230 million includes the congressionally authorized base increases of 4 percent in 2005.

The 2006 act provides for about a 3.1 percent increase across the

board in the Park Service. Those numbers are very telling because

while they are increasing it is basically enabling us to stay afloat

given the fixed cost of operating the business. Most recently obviously the energy costs that all of us suffer personally and in our

businesses and certainly in the Park Service.

One simple factor in that equation is that the benefits of the Federal employees that almost without missing a year we received a

pay increase but not every year do we receive the amount of dollars

equal to that increase to sustain those costs.

We rely obviously on other funding sources. Namely one of the

most important ones is the recreation fee authorization that was

reauthorized in 2005 giving the Park Service a 10-year window to

use the fee program. At Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation

Area, $120,000 went to trails, campsites, and building rehabilitation in the Harbor Islands.

I think it is significant to note in this particular case most of

that money went to supplies, materials and supervision of a youth

project within the city or from the city that committed the labor for

that effort.

At Cape Cod National Seashore $1.7 million went for beach and

park improvements and visitor safety. At Lowell National Historic

Park, Mr. Creasey’s park, almost $419 million for rehabilitating

and upgrading the radio system—yes, you keep track of that, don’t

you? $418,000 for the radio system, visitor and employee safety

measures, and conservation of the historic walkways and landscape

along the canals and the Merrimack River.

At Acadia National Park the fees since 1997 were $10 million,

which have been committed to some very important and very visible projects providing visitor services, resource protection, and

maintenance. A notable accomplishment includes the development

and operation of the Island Explorer which is a transportation system that responsibilities are shared with the Park Service, the

local communities, and the State of Maine as well as Friends of

Acadia, the nonprofit Friends group that ably supports us.

9

Historic preservation, obviously given the statistics of this region

and given the history of this region, is a core mission for us. Obviously within this region, in Boston and Philadelphia and New York

various activities that constituted the debate that this room itself

is significant in American history for the striving for independence

from colonial powers and so on.

Boston National Historical Park is made up of a series of historic

sites that were significant at that time. Paul Revere’s home, the

Old North Church. Just south of town in Quincy the Adams Homestead. That along with the John F. Kennedy Birthplace are the two

Presidential sites within the National Park System in New England.

Then a little further to the west and certainly significant in the

strive for independence was Minute Man National Historical Park

in Concord. Minute Man just completed, or is completing a major

project, the rehabilitation of the Old North Bridge and the landscape surrounding that and the two monuments that are at that

location. That is a park which is significant in visitation and the

tourism industry in Massachusetts and receives about 1.2 million

visitors a year.

Most recently as well at Minute Man a significant effort was undertaken to bring the battle road unit to life. That is the largest

unit in the park and its significance is the route of Paul Revere’s

ride as well as the line of retreat for the British after the battle

at the bridge. In addition to that, the landscapes along that route

as well as several historic properties that were extant at the time

of Paul Revere’s ride and the battle have been restored.

At Lowell most recently the park has joined forces with the

Friends of Longfellow to recover the rich and historic landscape of

the formal garden properties to its former glory. A capital campaign completed by the Friends in 2005 raised $800,000 in public

and private donations for that effort.

Longfellow as well was one of the first projects of Save America’s

Treasures and in the late 1990’s received a combination of funding

sources but received about $2 million to rehabilitate the historic

structure and provide for fire suppression and air conditioning and

other necessary things for a historic structure like that. In this

building, and just down the street at the old State House, in 2004

they received significant meticulous renovations that took care of

the many aspects of deterioration and maintenance needs of these

two buildings.

I think one story that is important to tell here is that it is only

15 years ago that we spent a significant amount of money in these

two buildings as well but not because of overuse and not because

of anything but historic structures or any structure that requires

ongoing maintenance so 15 years later we are touching up and fixing many of the things that were fixed 15 years ago.

Once we provide funds for a project, it is not that we need to be

thinking in that time line and that is the importance of those cyclic

programs and the repair rehab programs to provide that type of

funding.

At the Boston Navy Yard, funds are provided for the Historic

Paint House and the Commandante’s House. This year just reVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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cently the Boston Historical Park broke ground for the restoration

of the Bunker Hill monument and the parkland surrounding it.

In Acadia, again, Federal funding and partner funding for the rehabilitation of the historic campgrounds built in the 1930’s by the

Civilian Conservation Corps and rehabilitation of the trails which

were laid out originally prior to the establishment of the National

Park System and prior to the establishment of Acadia National

Park. The Friends of Acadia once again provided significant help

and leadership in making those projects real.

In the maintenance backlog realm the region in the new system

of quantifying our resources, we have 6,814 assets which are made

up of structures, roads, water, waste water systems, and the like.

That is about 10 percent of the total assets of the National Park

System. Interestingly enough the actual square footage of our

buildings is about a third, or 33 percent, of the total in the system.

While the west can brag about its acres, we can brag about our

structures.

The region has completed a comprehensive condition assessment

of 64 of those 75 parts. We can’t go on without noting that many

of these resources like this building, like buildings at all of our historic parks, as well as the natural resource parks, are priceless and

irreplaceable. Ongoing maintenance is critical to their preservation.

Between 2002 and 2005 in the various fund sources we dedicated

about $120 million toward the backlog maintenance in this region.

I would just add parenthetically that the system that we were

working with adds up about $756 million backlog or ongoing maintenance projects in this region. It is a very fluid system with numbers being added and adjusted on a daily basis. In a snapshot

taken a couple of weeks ago, it looked like about $756 million and

that looked like about 13 percent of the services total.

Maintenance projects are also preservation projects and the testimony lists various projects, at Marsh-Billings, at New Bedford

Whaling National Historic Park, at Frederick Law Olmsted, a new

project just underway and the park is closed for this purpose, to

rehabilitate the building and provide necessary HVAC and other

critical needs in that park. Again, back to Acadia more than $22

million have been dedicated to park maintenance projects over the

last 5 years.

In your instructions on this hearing you mentioned Homeland

Security. I would point out that since 2001 the service has been

provided $11 million in operating base and line item construction

projects directed toward enhancing the security and the protection

of the resources of the icon parks as well as the visitors. In 2003

Boston Historical Park received a permanent base operating price

of $1.2 million for enhanced security and $3.7 million for emergency preparedness as well.

I would note also that Federal Hall in New York received $16

million in the aftermath of September 11th itself. Federal Hall on

Wall Street is just a few short blocks away from the World Trade

Center site and it received extensive damage at that time.

The region is also a very successful participant in the Federal

Lands Highway Program and the Alternate Transportation Program. We received approximately $10 million annually. Again, our

11

premiere example of that is the Island Explorer at Acadia but other

parks are benefiting from that program as well.

In the sense of our initiatives and management and just general

park management we have been developing over the years various

tools to try to get us more informed and increase our ability to

make better decisions. One is the budget cost project tool. Actually,

that is a projection tool. It is a system that is based on past averages and trends, and the current situation in terms of appropriations, so we can model various scenarios into the future.

What is critical here obviously is the percent of our park base

that is dedicated to payroll versus other costs. When you have a

park that has a high percentage of payroll, which many, if not all,

of our parks do, and you increase the payroll cost against a moreor-less fixed budget bottom line, you quickly put the park in peril

and you quickly provide money for salaries but you have a few dollars left to maintain the bathrooms, let alone buy the paper towels.

This new facility management software system is the system

that is allowing us to collect information about all our assets. We

rank those assets in terms of priority, in terms of park mission,

and we rank those assets in terms of their condition so that allows

us in a very park-wide, region-wide, and service-wide way to get a

picture of what the condition of our parks are across the board on

a relatively even playing field, which has been very important.

In the past it has been the art of the author in terms of the funding proposals that has dictated some decisions. This still has not

opportunity but it does allow us to level the playing field quite a

bit.

And this CORE Operations Analysis which is just getting underway in the Service is parallel to the Facility Management System,

an attempt to try to get on an even playing field with what the

operational requirements of each of the individual parks are.

In line with OMB Circular A–76 we are also working toward the

Preliminary Planning Efforts at the national parks of New York

Harbor which is Gateway National Recreation Area, Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, Manhattan Sites, and Governor’s Island National Monument. These parks have completed the work performance statement for facility and maintenance functions and are currently developing their most efficient organization. As you know,

under that direction we then look at comparables in the private

sector as to what the most efficient way to do our business is. Just

now beginning in Boston National Historical Park is the Preliminary Planning Effort as well.

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my formal comments. Again, I

want to express our appreciation for your leadership in undertaking this effort and having these hearings across the country. We

look forward to answering your questions and we look forward to

your deliberations as they go forward through the summer and fall.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. McIntosh follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you very much for your comprehensive testimony. Let me start with a couple of medium broad budget questions. So Boston Harbor Island is now a national recreation area?

I think when I was here it was a national park area.

Mr. MCINTOSH. The legislative title is national recreation area.

We have locally adopted the formal but unofficial legislative title

as a national park area.

Mr. SOUDER. When that was added to this system, did you get

an increase in regional funds?

Mr. MCINTOSH. The park got a modest increase in their establishment funds for the park base operations. The region itself did

not get an increase because this park or any other park is added

to the system.

Mr. SOUDER. So, for example, when the Charleston Harbor gets

added—what I am trying to figure out is because we certainly having spent a number of years on the Park Subcommittee and on the

Resources Committee watching the budget process, when the bills

go through usually by the time they get there under suspension

with minimal amendments we never have a discussion of is this

going to add to the 3 percent increase that the national parks are

getting. But I am wondering internally how you handle that then.

Do you get a regional budget with occasional earmarks coming out

of Congress and do funds get shifted between regions or do you

have to manage this within your region?

Mr. MCINTOSH. There is no one answer for all situations but generally speaking we manage within the region. There is no contract

between the Authorizing Committee and the Appropriations Committee with respect to a new park and the guaranteed allocation

of funds, line item of funds for that particular park.

Sometimes it comes simultaneously. Sometimes it comes a year

or 2 years later. In the meantime the mobilization, the implementation of that park, the activation of that park, is begged, borrowed,

and stolen from either the regional office or neighboring parks that

might support with staff.

Governor’s Island in New York is a good example. That monument was declared. No funds were provided. It was declared by

Presidential proclamation and no funds were provided. For the first

couple of years within the New York area the regional office provided staff as well as the parks loaned staff to get that park mobilized.

Mr. SOUDER. Having been around this for some time, and possibly answering this question somewhat at your own peril, this is

not a new debate but sitting on my side and being very interested,

I don’t even know how you get information to make an intelligent

decision because under the current administration every time there

is a new park they oppose it.

Under the previous administration I don’t think they ever opposed one. We never get told when the park is coming up. It usually divides on whether you favor spending more money or less

money. There is no kind of nuance answer. Boston Harbor Park

area is beautiful. We don’t own land there at the Federal Government but it has several different State parks and local things in

it, the first lighthouse and all sorts of great sites.

18

But there is no question there was a political motivation in developing that would be the classic of Mr. Ridenour’s park barreling

to some degree. And Charleston Naval Harbor openly says it. While

we were worried the Naval Yard was going to be closed, it doesn’t

mean it is not an important part of history but I am trying to figure out the value process.

Now, what we are not doing in the tradeoff process here because

I basically believe that if a historic site falls down, you will never

get it back. Therefore, I am not against new additions but we are

not knowing what tradeoffs we are making when we do new additions.

Do they ask you as regional director and say, because, one thing,

if a Congressman was told in that area or in a region, ‘‘If we are

going to get a new park in our area, here is what we have been

looking at,’’ do you do any forward thinking in the sense of here

are sites that would be nice to have in the system?

We do analysis and, finally, we are doing much better analysis

of here are the sites that are most critical to keep from falling

down. Here is where we need to do the investment. We are doing

analysis internally. I know there are risks of doing external analysis because then you could get speculation on the property, other

groups thinking, ‘‘The Federal Government is going to take it over.

I don’t have to take care of it anymore.’’ That type of risk, but do

you do that kind of analysis that would ever come up and say,

‘‘Well, look, if you are going to do this, here is what we really need

here.’’

Mr. MCINTOSH. We do part of what you are suggesting. There is

no analysis currently where the Park Service looks at the landscape and for whatever the values and for whatever the reason

says we should be considering this area or that area for potential

inclusion.

As you know, the Thomas Bill of the mid 1990’s, the Omnibus

Parks Management Act provided that all studies or all inclusions

in the National Park System are subject to what is called a special

resource study and that study is aimed to do several things. One

is to determine the national significance of the area. Second, determine the feasibility of that.

Basically that is an examination of the potential of that site in

terms of the resource. Is there integrity there? Is there the capability to provide public programs. And the suitability in the sense of

is it necessary or appropriate for the National Park Service to take

over the administration of this site.

Many sites that we are asked to consider are already State properties or owned by nonprofits and some obviously are private properties. In doing that we are also required to provide budget information as to what the land acquisition, if necessary, would cost,

and also what the operating cost over the first 5 years, let us say,

what impact that would have in terms of the Park Service budget.

That information is done with NEPA compliance. Therefore,

those reports are provided to the public for public comment prior

to the finalization. The Thomas Bill provides that the director must

make a professional finding of the service’s professional determination of the significance suitability, and feasibility of that site and

19

the Secretary would make a recommendation when she transmits

that report to the Congress.

Mr. SOUDER. So what you are basically saying is that it is a reactive process primarily to some degree designed——

Mr. MCINTOSH. To provide a very general summary, yes. I would

say it is a reactive process.

Mr. SOUDER [continuing]. Designed pretty much by my party to

say, ‘‘Look, we have concerns about whether there has been a systematic review of the process.’’ It was an attempt to get at what

I was saying but it is still a reactive process. In other words, a

Member of Congress thinks of something he wants in his district

which may be motivated by everything from environmental to economic shutdown to a variety of different questions which may not

be related to its historic significance, national significance, risk of

being lost.

Presumably a good politician is going to listen to some of those

interests in his area, too, but often the kind of national and systematic interest aren’t the same as local driving issues such as this

is good for business, for jobs, or other types of things which means

it would be pretty cheap to criticize pork barreling if there is no

other alternative to pork barreling.

In other words, its the only way to add things to the system. Furthermore, we have spent at least a year trying to get from the National Park Service the list of how many of these studies for national heritage areas that were actually out there. We were passing

heritage areas through the Resources Committee like crazy.

Finally, when we got the data, it was, I believe, 32. This is a couple of years old. Something like 30 or 32 studies of which they

could do eight a year with the complicated process you were doing,

particularly under the budget crunch which means we are already

backlogged 4 to 5 years.

Well, since congressional terms are 2 years, the whole process

you just said is, of course, subject to you pass it. If you want to

pass a heritage area on the floor and fund it, basically you waive

the rule and you don’t require the study. If you waive the rule,

then the law doesn’t apply.

Furthermore, the appropriators on the Appropriations Committee

often will fund their heritage area whether or not it has been

waived on the authorizing side or in the Park Service. I can assure

you because I thought I was going to get my head chopped off because it was one I was questioning in Atlanta that had a series of

things that were of local and State significance but I didn’t see a

national significance but I got caught up in, well, we did a trade.

To get this one we did this one and this is supposed to move. It

moved through and then the funding moved through. What I am

trying to figure out is how do we get control or, at least, some kind

of a substantive input into saying, if we say, ‘‘We are short of sites

that relate to Africa American heritage. We are short of sites that

relate to Asian heritage, Hispanic heritage, religious heritage. Oh,

here are five sites in the United States that are coming up that are

critical to our understanding of this period of American Revolution

that may be lost forever.’’

Is there any kind of that discussion in the National Park Service

here? You are at the cradle of the American revolution in discussVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00023 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ing what sites may be—these groups are floundering economically

and they wind up saying that the national system may be lost. I

am just wondering whether at least there is—I am sure Friends

groups are doing that to some degree. For example, in Civil War

battlefields there are really strong lobby groups.

Mr. MCINTOSH. I would in summary answer that right now there

is not that type of discussion. The focus and priority is to take care

of what we have and there are certainly significant needs there.

There have been in the past attempts to try to undertake a comprehensive review and make a statement as to what it would take

to complete the National Park System.

I think that, too, is challenged in the sense that if we did that

study in the 1970’s things that we were thinking of then have

elapsed and other equally important but overlooked sites, particularly in the Historic Preservation and culture resource side of the

shop.

Mr. SOUDER. Especially since we all know history stopped in,

what, 1958? Now, let us move more specifically into how the budget

is impacting your region. You said you had an increase in Homeland Security funds. Did that cover all the additional cost on

Homeland Security?

Mr. MCINTOSH. If I understand the question, that money was

dedicated to the ‘‘icon parks’’ which in this region is Independence

Hall, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Statue of Liberty in New

York, and the Charleston Navy Yard which is the host port for the

U.S.S. Constitution which is actually an active ship in the Navy.

Mr. SOUDER. And did the money that came in, did you have to

move rangers that were doing other things into Homeland Security

protection, bring people from other parks, certain icon parks in

your region, or did the additional funding increase cover those costs

of Homeland Security?

Mr. MCINTOSH. The initial response was we begged, borrowed,

and stole rangers from all over the service to go to the icon parks.

Since then with this amount of funding we have been basically able

to level the playing field and provide through the three parks the

operational needs.

Mr. SOUDER. So the rangers providing other protection have not

been dramatically impacted?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Certainly less. Now if you go to Independence

you will see that the law enforcement rangers are at the minimum

and security guards, contract guards, are providing the lion’s share

of the surveillance of people processing through to see the Liberty

Bell and Constitution Hall.

Mr. SOUDER. You said contract people are providing it?

Mr. MCINTOSH. That is correct.

Mr. SOUDER. And where did that money come from?

Mr. MCINTOSH. That came out of this fund source.

Mr. SOUDER. I think you said you were getting—it can be New

England specific but if it is easier to do it by region. If you get, let

us say, a 3 percent increase, as a practical matter roughly on an

annual basis what is your fundamental payroll pressure increase?

In other words, payroll pressure isn’t just salary. Payroll pressure would be pension obligations, healthcare, when you have a

given employee. My presumption is if you are getting a 3 percent

21

increase, you are having a declining payroll, absolute number of

people because the fundamental costs are increasing faster than 3

percent.

Mr. MCINTOSH. It all depends on what the legislative pay raise

is and what the appropriated amounts for the park are. But if

those two aren’t equal, then you are looking at an immediate decline. As I said, also there are other fixed cost impacts in the budget that don’t decline, or can’t decline and, therefore, if the increase

only takes care of the payroll, then your other fixed-cost increases

are impinging on the park operating budget as well.

Mr. SOUDER. Because we are trying to sort through, to the degree

we can do the regional hearings, and kind of get some of the basic

information at some point, we will be asking for systematic information out of the National Park Service headquarters. But if you

are devoting funds to reducing the backlog and you have 3 percent

increase, which just assuming you didn’t get any new parks or any

new facilities, but if you get a 3 percent increase and you are trying to increase your backlog reduction, 3 percent increase almost

covers inflation.

Some years it would and some years it wouldn’t. Nobody’s

healthcare cost are going up at 3 percent and part of the solution

has been contracting out or using part-time people. Would you

agree you are less likely to add full-time employees right now?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Well, yes. I mean, our ability to hire new staff

is certainly curtailed—permanent staff. Our ability to hire seasonal

staff is curtailed. I think as you look at the budget framework as

the administration presents it, you can see that the emphasis is on

this backlog issue, the ongoing maintenance at the expense of

parks having the benefit of the capacity of their budgets in the decades past.

Mr. SOUDER. Do you see in these budget operations as you look

at the Government pension obligations, the healthcare cost? Let me

ask this question. When somebody retires in your region, do you

have the ability to replace them if they are a full-time employee?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Not one for one, no.

Mr. SOUDER. Would you say you are doing two-thirds to one? I

am asking a really broad question.

Mr. MCINTOSH. I don’t have a real good framework to answer

that with so I can’t.

Mr. SOUDER. When we get the individual data that is exactly

what we will be looking at to see is how much, in fact, we are reducing. The Park Service is probably the most contracted out agency already in the United States. We can probably contract out a little bit more but pretty soon you lose your ability to have a systemwide control or system-wide definition if everything is contracted

out. Going to part-time has pros and cons, particularly when you

are in a place where it hasn’t snowed in 6 months. That may make

more sense but I doubt if—while your visitation, I am sure, in this

region is higher in the summer, it isn’t the dramatic changes you

see out west. How much would you say is seasonable in the Boston

region?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Can you answer that for Lowell?

Mr. CREASEY. Well, it is very seasonable for most of us, I would

suggest, but it levels out if you include the educational institutions

22

coming to the national parks throughout New England. I think

many of us are very aggressive in working with the local school

systems to make sure that we service that population as well. It

is seasonable, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. So sites like here in the Boston area, Man of Defiance. Clearly Katie would be more seasonable but in the immediate

area here you would have a summer-driven tourist traffic but then

education groups would pick up the difference. What about conventions? Is there much of a spin-off from that?

Mr. CREASEY. I think many of the parks work very closely with

the tourism industry and the conventioneers, I think, contribute

throughout the season. I am not sure it is limited to just one particular season but my sense is that we work closely with the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism as well as the Boston Area

for tourism development. Obviously the national parks are a major

thrust in terms of their marketing campaign so I would say we get

quite a bit of tourists.

Mr. SOUDER. Some of these type of things will be dealt with by

using seasonable as well as contracted out. But in one area if you

are dealing with backlog and you are dealing with potentially replacing retired full-time employees with seasonals or contracted out

people, would you say interpretation was hardest hit?

Mr. MCINTOSH. The traditional seasonality of that effort tends to

be limited in terms of the permanent staff and expanded in the

high seasons. Therefore, that is where the flexibility is in your

budget. Therefore, seasonable maintenance, seasonable interpretation are the areas where you would have the opportunity to make

your adjustment.

Mr. SOUDER. What would the other hardest hit areas be? Would

it be historic and archeological research, biological research other

than interpretation?

Mr. MCINTOSH. We have benefited significantly almost in the

order of $100 million over the last several years with the Natural

Resource Challenge Program. That is put in place a system-wide

effort with inventory and monitoring of the resources in the park.

There is a good head of steam in that area.

I think in this region we have with the amount of historic resources that we have, the structures, the collections, and archeological sites and so on, that we are challenged to keep abreast in

terms of the research mode in terms of understanding the resources in the park, even though they have been in the system considerable periods of time.

Mr. SOUDER. When you get funds from this Resources Challenge

Program and from Saving America’s Treasures, I should know the

answer to this question but I don’t off the top of my head but I believe on some of these they are still within the Park Service’s regular budget. Isn’t that correct? They are just reshuffled?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Both of them. That is correct, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. Then what I am trying to sort through because when we lay this over the top of each other, if you are getting $100

million in the resources challenge program and the Save America’s

Treasures Program, where did that money come from because the

total net to the Park Service is only up 3 percent and the payroll

pressures are far—I have seen some tentative collapsed numbers

23

that suggest if you go out 10 years just the payroll drowns the system given the current budget.

Mr. MCINTOSH. Given past trends and current projections, the

out years are very, very challenging. If I may just circle back a bit

on the seasonability question. I think what is important to understand also, and we have observed this, and probably caused by

many different sectors but what sort of traditionally was the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, is nowhere close to what the season is now. With the mobility and the retirement population being

so active enjoying our national parks from the break of ice in the

north until after Columbus Day in the fall the pressure is on the

parks. In a sense what used to be that 3-month window of pressure

is now expanded maybe to 6 or more months depending on where

the park is in the region. Certainly in the south in the Civil War

parks in Virginia, parks in West Virginia and so on, the pressure

is largely year round.

Mr. SOUDER. Let me pursue a slightly different angle. Let me ask

you do you believe that reducing—you referred in the backlog to

also cyclical maintenance. Do you believe that in concentrating on

the backlog other things aren’t being done? I mean, when you look

at this money, if you see this pressure on payroll and you see this

attempt, which I believe support trying to address a backlog, what

I believe is nobody has tried to reconcile these different pressures.

We are trying to put in some of these special funds. We are trying to address the backlog and we have this pressure on payroll.

Where did the funds come from especially if we have added, like

in this area, two major additions to the system, where did the

money come out of and is that leaving, for lack of a better word,

a new frontlong or something of things that are developing underneath that haven’t been taken care of.

Then are we really reducing the backlog or reducing a static

backlog which is not getting the normal cyclical maintenance

things and other things have been added to the park are they then

being added—maybe one of the questions is what defines backlog?

Is it a static list that we picked a year or whenever you get behind

add it to the backlog and do we, in effect, ever get that addressed?

Mr. MCINTOSH. I would hate to count the hours that people have

talked about that. Not even debated it, just talked about how to define the backlog. Obviously a backlog project today that gets funding tomorrow and that work is completed, then that comes off the

backlog list so you are going to see this cycle of projects in any

given park go on and off for the same thing such as the example

I gave earlier of the work here at Faneuil Hall.

The day after that project was completed in the early 1990’s it

wasn’t on the backlog list. Now 15 years later, or however long it

was on there before that, I am not sure but it comes back on as

the needs become apparent. The new facility management system

will better enable us to be able to track exactly what is in the system and what the needs are.

What we have never really had before in that system that this

system will provide is a way to evaluate the project against the importance of the structure if it is a historic structure. Some historic

structures in the mission of that particular park are more imporVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00027 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
24

tant than others and having to make those tradeoffs is an important—this will give us the important tools to do that.

Mr. SOUDER. But you don’t have that yet where you could tell me

where we reduced our A backlog by 30 percent or our B backlog

by 20 percent and our C backlog by 10?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Well, I think you could do it on an individual

park on an individual moment in time but the numbers continuously roll. The only way to work that system in terms of making

statements of what the condition is, the conditions change constantly. It has to be a snapshot as of that day.

Mr. SOUDER. Not that the Department of Interior is known for

wonderful computers but in this day and age if it is available by

individual park, it seems like a very short software program to be

able to——

Mr. MCINTOSH. Roll it up. Yes.

Mr. SOUDER. Let me move to a slightly—I was interested a number of years ago, I believe it was the National Trust, talk about a

problem at the Adams site. I believe it was there. It has been a

while since I have dealt with this.

I believe their china collection or silver service was going to be

split off or auctioned off by the private group that was managing

the site because that led to a discussion after whether we should

have some sort of seed fund like we have for properties for collection items like that could be leveraged with the private sector to

try to purchase things before they get up in market and then we

would spend the next 30 years trying to put the collection back together. What has happened with the Adams site and how do you

look at critical collections that are often in private foundation

hands that could all of a sudden have financial pressures or whatever?

Mr. MCINTOSH. Well, again, there is no one answer. Individual

parks have authority to purchase collections or not. In the Adams

situation, and my memory doesn’t recall what the final resolution

was but in the Adams situation the silver collection I think you are

referring to belonged to the Adams’ Church, the Parish Church.

Mr. SOUDER. They donated it to them. The Adams family, I

think, had donated it to the church.

Mr. MCINTOSH. Right. And the question at the time was the

church was in serious financial straights and was trying to figure

out a way to raise money. There was an effort made to purchase

that collection from the church but I cannot answer. We can provide you the answer but I don’t have off the top of my head the

ultimate resolution.

Mr. SOUDER. How much of your collections are in storage, do you

know, of historic collections in this region?

Mr. MCINTOSH. I don’t know that answer specifically but I think

it is a general standard in the museum industry that maybe 3 to

5 percent of your collections are an exhibit and the rest are in

curation or in storage. I think that generally is true of any of our

parks.

Mr. SOUDER. From what I have seen I have not looked at this

issue in northeast. I know a number of years ago we dealt with it

in Gettysburg because clearly we had inadequate and safe storage

of the old muskets. Then we paid $1 million to rehab and then they

25

go back down in a musky cellar and then we paid to rehab them

again. Just a rather short-term budget strategy.

How is it here in the New England area as far as storage capability of only 3 to 5 percent is available for public display? Are

these things safe? At Valley Forge I know the Benninghoff collection had all this—I mean, one time they showed me original journals that had never been preserved or copied that were down in

this basement. How are you going to get a Valley Forge journal

back? What is the status of the collection preservation?

Mr. MCINTOSH. The service started in either the late 1980’s or

early 1990’s, the museum collection program, which provided a significant chunk of money across the country to do the cataloging.

And parallel to that as we grew to understand what was in our collections, unfortunately because they were in many cases heirlooms

of the family that donated the home or sold the home to the National Park Service, they weren’t kept then under professional

standards and we didn’t immediately have the resources or the

wherewithal to provide that.

Many of these collections stayed in the Park Service’s facilities,

historic homes or otherwise, for many years before we got around

to collecting or curating them. Since then we have made significant

strides, but to say that the issues are all resolved and we don’t

have significant issues in front of us would not be true.

At Longfellow we made a significant investment there. We provided over the last 4 or 5 years better temperature and humidity

controls within the building. That takes care of the collection pieces

that are on exhibit in the house itself as well as those that are in

the storage. Again, we are limited by the capabilities of the site as

well.

I mean, there is the Longfellow House and carriage house. No

other significant built structures are on that site and no wherewithal to go elsewhere. We now have in the basement provided professional quality storage facilities, albeit still in the basement. Several of the sites now are starting to use offsite storage in professional storage facilities in pay the fee, the rent, so to speak, to do

that.

Mr. SOUDER. Is there any program inside the National Park

Service that looks at historical documents and museum collections

like you are doing on buildings where you are going to be able to—

or on backlog where you say, ‘‘Here is an A, B, C, D priority,’’ or

is it almost purely random at this point?

Mr. MCINTOSH. No. I think when the park has the good fortune

to benefit from the collections management program, objects and

archival material are treated equally and there is an assessment

made. We develop what is called a statement of collection which defines what should be in the park’s collection or what should not

deaccession many of those things that should be not so that we

don’t have to have the responsibility for that.

At Olmsted over the last—it has just been completed over the

last 15 years all the original drawings and archival material from

the Olmsted site which were in deplorable conditions in the storage

vaults that the family and the business had for that purpose we

were able to set up a paper conservation lab in some space in

26

Springfield 90 miles away. We transported all of that collection,

various pieces at various times, to Springfield.

We had a staff of two or three people, professional curators, archival curators, conservationist working on that collection who

have now fully conserved that collection and brought it back to the

site. Given the fact that the site is closed and under major renovation, those are now being stored offsite.

Mr. SOUDER. In something like the Olmsted collection is the information accessible or shared such that if you make a decision, if

these things are relevant to teaching this site, that you have these

materials which may be priority D but may actually be the biggest

single original document on a park you designed in some other city

who may have an interest in not having it be buried in a museum

somewhere where it may or may not be protected or may or may

not be seen as critical to that site that it could be transferred?

I remember just working on the Northwest Territory stuff and I

was trying to get the Library of Congress to do a thing on the

Northwest Territory and I said I thought because I had been to a

number of sites, Ft. Megs and others, and I had seen things like

property of the U.S. Congress on a copy of a map that you must

have a fair amount of documents. They said, ‘‘We have never analyzed anything that we have had on the Northwest Territory.’’

One guy piped up and said, ‘‘We have William Henry Harrison

papers. Would that be a help?’’ ‘‘Yeah, that would be a good start.’’

‘‘We have Anthony Wayne’s papers. Would that be a help?’’ ‘‘Yeah,

that would be a start.’’ If they had a couple of those papers in the

critical areas of the midwest, it would be a huge thing and it would

be a major preservation project but it would be low tier.

The Library of Congress, of course, has the world’s biggest attic

along with the Smithsonian. The National Park Service has these

incredible collections of art, of original documents. Often you interpret a site at a given year or era as it should be. I am wondering

do we have any way of systematically looking at this and sharing

because if you catalog and it is on a computer, then people can access and say, ‘‘Hey, what about that piece?’’

If we don’t have any dollars for cataloging or doing the research

or identifying and getting the stuff more than in a person who may

be retiring as head, but into a systematic analysis we can’t cross

fertilize.

Mr. MCINTOSH. Well, the museum collection program addresses

that need. We are far from complete in the service-wide efforts

there. In places like Longfellow and places like Olmsted where that

project, as I said, in terms of the cataloging as well as the conservation of the documents took maybe 15 years, that information

is available now and is used extensively by professional as well as

academic researchers who are studying Olmsted or, in many cases,

a private firm so we have been commissioned to rehabilitate an

Olmsted landscape at some private facility that the firm designed

to come and use that resource.

Mr. SOUDER. I need to go to the second panel but let me followup

a little bit on that with Lowell specifically, the superintendent. I

am looking forward to going there tomorrow because I have not

been there before. It is unusual in the sense that it is an old industrial community and in trying to interpret some of our economic

27

history, how do you define what you have there? Do you also look

at what you don’t have that you might need to add? This is a whole

other—it is kind of interesting because we don’t do a lot of interpretation of our economic history in the United States.

Mr. CREASEY. That is a good question. We have about 700,000

objects of which we have cataloged about 95 percent of our collection of which it is all online, as Mac said. I think the cataloging

system and what we have got with the museum services when fully

loaded will be a tremendous asset for the American people and for

researchers and scholars. I feel we are in pretty good shape at Lowell in terms of our collections and our cataloging.

Five percent, to be quite honest, are materials that are not of

higher value than things like the locks and canal papers, engineer

drawings, architectural drawings, which are quite wonderful of how

Lowell came about in terms of this economic engine for New England and the country.

I have been at Lowell for 6 months so I am still a study on this

but my sense was that when Lowell was established in the 1970’s

we did have a collections strategy of which we went and collected

items such as the 100 some looms that came from the Draper Corp.

in Hopedale, MA that powered the mills. We now have them currently in our working collection you will see tomorrow if you come

visit 80 some working looms in the mill itself.

Those kinds of items were collected. We are also fortunate to

have a strong partner in the American textile museum which has

a much larger collection, something like five stories of industrial

artifacts that range from preindustrial all the way through modern

day technology.

Mr. SOUDER. If I can ask, Mr. McIntosh, just because you have

been involved in the Park Service for some time your reaction to

this. The temporary fee charges are the longest temporary fees of

probably about anything we have had in the system and it is one

of the interesting things because we are trying to make them permanent.

It is amazing. It shows the support of the National Park System.

It shows why people would probably support some form of a check

off where they can give donations and that sort of thing because

we have had almost no resistance in spite of all the people who

said we were going to have resistance to these different fees because, as you know, they are going to the park and they see how

they are being used.

People generally speaking support the fees. One of the challenges

as these fees go up is how to deal and a concern about how it is

going to impact access to the parks by lower-income groups. I have

had sign-off support from the appropriations and the authorizers if

we could figure out how to do it.

In an earlier parks trip this summer a gentleman who had

worked as a concessionaire in the Park Service suggested to me

that one possibility would be to have it be on the IRS form that,

‘‘If your income falls under a fixed amount, whether it is $30,000

or $35,000, and you want a national parks’ pass, check the box and

we will send it to you.’’ The question is how do we identify? You

can’t check and you can’t ask them to show their IRS return at the

gate or the building.

28

You don’t want to say, ‘‘Are you kids on reduced lunch?’’ It would

be pretty tough to commit fraud with the IRS because they have

your income there. The question is how many people would actually request that pass or may never use it. In Government terms

it is a cipher in the budget to print the cards. Mailing costs are a

little bit higher.

We could say there may be a way to send a sheet of paper as

opposed to the pass. I wonder what your reaction is because we

have been trying to figure this out. I have the support to do that.

It is a clear challenge as we tackle this issue. Now with a constructive suggestion, then I am trying to figure out what does that do

to your substructure if a whole bunch of people are showing up

with passes. On the other hand, they may be people that wouldn’t

have visited the park otherwise.

Mr. MCINTOSH. That is a very important and complex issue. My

personal belief is that the IRS and the tax form is for that purpose

and to complicate it with a lot of things is probably not in the best

interest of anybody. If that happens, I am sure it can be accommodated.

The ability to provide access to various aspects of the population

are permissible within our system. There is flexibility. The superintendent can have, as museums do, a free day or the mornings or

various things like that. I think there is flexibility on the part of

the superintendents that may not be always exercised.

Then there is the question of not just access to the gate, it is access to the park, to get to the park, which is also, I think, an important and complicated issue. Generally one of the reasons—I

mean, how to collect fees at places like Gateway where you can

come in off city streets and so on. I think it is one of the reasons

why the superintendents in those situations don’t even think about

it because it is so—the park itself is so accessible to such a diverse

community that those populations and other populations are accommodated that way as well.

Mr. SOUDER. They are doing building fees.

Mr. MCINTOSH. Say again?

Mr. SOUDER. Often there is a fee then to get in the different homes. At Independence Park, for example, you have a $2 fee for

this house. Even though you can get a Parks pass to get in, you

do it by building.

Mr. MCINTOSH. That is true. That is a double-edged sword for us

because we want to make it as successful as we can to everybody.

On the other hand, as the numbers show, the contributions to the

fee program are significant in terms of our ability to maintain our

resources to operate the parks.

Mr. SOUDER. I have a consistent position and that is I believe in

simplifying the tax form except when I want to complicate it.

Thank you for your testimony.

If the second panel could come forth. If you want to submit anything else for the record, please do so.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that each of the witnesses responded in the affirmative.

I thank you each for coming and we will start with Mr. Roger

Kennedy, former head of the National Park Service, National

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Council chairman for the National Parks Conservation Association.

You have been tremendous in helping coordinate all these hearings. We thank you for your years of leadership and authorship

and stewardship.

STATEMENTS OF ROGER KENNEDY, NATIONAL COUNCIL

CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION; MARILYN FENOLLOSA, NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION; KEN OLSON, PRESIDENT, FRIENDS

OF ACADIA NATIONAL PARK; AND LT. JOHN McCAULEY, MUSEUM CURATOR, ANCIENT AND HONORABLE ARTILLERY

COMPANY OF MASSACHUSETTS

STATEMENT OF ROGER KENNEDY

Mr. KENNEDY. Thank you, sir. I am Roger Kennedy. I have been

around the parks for nearly 80 years. I have watched the Congress

work with the parks for more than 60. Mr. Souder, I want to say

for the record that no one since the immortal Chairman Sidney R.

Yeats has given the national parks your kind of sustained, intelligent, and informed attention grounded in a moral fervor for the

national patrimony and for our common obligations to our decedents.

We have to reach back to the progressive era to the founding

generation nearly a century ago to observe such a fortuitous confluence of a national conservation necessity and your kind of

straightforward, candid, and honest stewardship. I want to begin

by saying thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Mr. KENNEDY. I would like to file my formal testimony for the

record and proceed on my own if I may.

As these hearings have already shown across the Nation the accumulated rot in the National Park System, more politely known

as the maintenance backlog, would by now cost at least $41⁄2 billion

to make right. Two-thirds of park roads are listed as either poor

or fair condition. More than half of the bridges on those roads in

the parks are classified intelligently as deficient.

The capacity of superintendents to do the job that the Congress

and the people expect is steadily eroded in the face of unfunded

mandates and service cost inflation as you have already reviewed

this morning. Here is how the New England parks in particular

manifest an unfulfilled need for stewardship. This is accumulated

over the years. This is nothing new but its flagrancy grows. When

you deduct, as you have noted already this morning, the loss of

purchasing power for the last 3 years alone in the Acadia’s superintendent’s budget it is down about 10 percent.

For last year alone unfunded mandates required by Congress or

pay increases alone were twice as big as the increase in the nominal Park budget. I can give you the numbers but that is what it

amounts to. If you add the general inflation rate to the parks’ other

cost, not just those salary cost and return cost, you would add another couple of hundred thousand dollars in lost purchasing power

to provide service to the public.

Since the superintendent doesn’t have the money to do his job,

he has to leave important jobs undone, as you have already indiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00033 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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cated. I want to congratulate my Park Service colleagues for reading their scripts with enormous skill. I have had to read scripts

myself. The glory of being retired is you don’t have to read anybody’s script.

That superintendent can’t fill nine traditionally permanent jobs

because he can’t pay for them. The requirement that law enforcement trumps everything else means that everything else suffers

even more, the education function, conservation. You call attention

to these functions and you are absolutely right in doing so because

even they and waste disposals suffer.

Let me point out that in Acadia last winter the park had to close

all but 3 of its 12 restrooms during the cross-country skiing season.

The cross-country skiers were there and the restrooms weren’t

open. Springtime in Acadia. The park has staff to cut the grass

along its famous hiking and biking road only once a year. The

grass grows very fast in Acadia. It is desperate to grow up there

where it is cold and it covers a lot of sharp rocks. If you can’t cut

it more than once a year, people are going to suffer.

At Cape Cod most of the park goes unpatrolled for lack of rangers. The park needs at least 10 more seasonal law enforcement personnel to do its job which it used to have but it needs that to do

its job.

At the Longfellow House in Cambridge a $400,000 annual funding shortfall prevents the park from filling the key maintenance

and curatorial position. We could talk for a long time. I was a museum director for nearly 15 years at the Smithsonian. The problems that you have pointed out this morning, my colleagues in the

Park Service have done their very best not to complain too loudly

about are real. You are right and so is the problem of congressional

enthusiasm for nifty new parks and new ribbon cuttings not coupled to the sustaining of the budgets required to do the job. You

are absolutely right on the money on that.

Longfellow like Cape Cod has a Friends group but even Friends

get tired of bailing out the Congress. Friends groups are partners.

They are not receivers in bankruptcy. The truth is that parks are

in trouble. The Park Service is in trouble and the Congress has for

years failed in its trusteeship to the American people to take care

of our national treasures.

This is not this administration’s and this Congress’ only problem.

They have lots of other problems and they are not responsible for

the long accumulation. That long accumulation is papered over by

the kinds of reports you get from the system as it is currently operating. You are right in pushing hard. Thank you for doing that.

These kinds of problems that have accumulated over time are

going to have to be dealt with in this generation or they will be

impossible for the next generations to deal with. Rot is rot. It

doesn’t go away. You can fuzz the figures but you can’t pretend

that the rot doesn’t get worse. That is something that directors

can’t say when they are in office or if they hope for further office,

but it is true. The problems you are going after are there.

God bless you, Mr. Souder, for trying to be a good trustee. Thank

you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Kennedy follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Next is Marilyn Fenollosa, National Trust for Historic Preservation. Thank you for coming today.

STATEMENT OF MARILYN FENOLLOSA

Ms. FENOLLOSA. Good morning. My name is Marilyn Fenollosa

and I am senior program officer and regional attorney for the

Northeast Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a private nonprofit

membership organization dedicated to saving historic places and

revitalizing America’s communities.

Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Trust

was founded in 1949 and provides leadership, education, advocacy,

and resources to protect the irreplaceable places that tell America’s

stories. Staff at our Washington, DC, headquarters, six regional offices, and 26 historic sites work with 270,000 members and thousands of preservation groups in all 50 States.

The act of Congress that created the national trust had as its

purpose to facilitate public participation in the preservation of historic American sites, buildings, and objects of national significance

or interest and it is with that purpose that I come before you today.

The National Park Service has its roots in New England. Writing

from his home in Brookline, MA, now the Olmsted National Historic Site, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., crafted the words that

served as the foundation for legislation establishing the Park Service in 1916. That is, ‘‘To conserve the scenery and the natural and

historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will

leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.’’

Our two organizations have worked hand in hand as a public-private partnership to preserve the cultural and natural resources

that are the heritage of our country. Yet, we have become increasingly alarmed at the declining capacity of the National Park Service to care for the parks in its stewardship in New England and,

indeed, across the Nation.

Even as the administrative burdens have increased, Park Service

staff has decreased due to the erosion of base funding. The National Park Service has not had the resources it needs to maintain

its side of the partnership.

The fiscal year 2006 budget justifications for the Park Service,

available on the Service’s Web site, notes that the cultural resources within its stewardship are threatened by inadequate attention to stabilization, maintenance, and repair of structures, landscapes, and museum collections; by the failure to monitor changes

in the resources; by the failure to correct improper uses; and by the

lack of documentation and determination of appropriate treatment

strategies.

Indeed, that report notes that in 2004, and again likely in this

year, only 451⁄2 percent of the Park Service’s historic structures are

in good condition. That is less than half. The National Trust has

assumed a watchdog role in recent years, by naming the most compromised national parks to our annual list of America’s 11 Most

Endangered Historic Places.

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This list is intended to bring public attention to significant buildings, sites and landscapes that are threatened with demolition, deferred maintenance, lack of funding or the will to preserve them.

In recent years we have listed the following sites in the Northeast

alone: Independence National Park—due to years of inadequate

funding and deferred maintenance; Ellis Island—due to proposed

inappropriate development and structural deterioration that

threatened dozens of the island’s historic buildings; Gettysburg National Military Park—due to encroaching development on privately

held acres surrounding the park that threatened to destroy its historic character; Governor’s Island—due to the uncertainty facing

this Coast Guard facility, America’s oldest continuously occupied

military post that is now a national park; Valley Forge National

Historical Park—due to untreated water damage, mold and failing

roofs at the officers’ quarters for Washington’s army; and, most recently, Minuteman National Historical Park—due to lack of planning to alleviate the noise, visual intrusions, and vehicular traffic

generated by commuters flying out of the civilian airport at nextdoor Hanscom field.

Minuteman is a case in point: this park, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War and the march and retreat of the British soldiers, is arguably one of the most important sites of our history and one of the most heavily visited in the Northeast. The park

serves over 1.2 million visitors every year from all parts of the

country and indeed the world. Visitors come to understand what

ordinary citizens did so long ago to secure their liberty. Yet, the

park has lacked the funding to maintain itself as a premier park.

The park was faced with canceling its seasonal program in fiscal

year 2005 due to lack of funds but was able to open, at a reduced

level, due to a last minute congressional appropriation. The park’s

principal visitor center is now closed during most of the winter.

The hours and programs at the Wayside, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s

house that is within the park limits, have been severely reduced.

The park’s budget only permits three full-time interpretive rangers

for those 1.3 million visitors and this will be reduced to two in fiscal year 2006.

Park management has rehabilitated many of its historic structures for lease to raise operating funds, but lacks the funding to

run a leasing program. Over the past several years there has been

a multi-million dollar public investment to restore the historic

structures and landscapes within the park and provide facilities for

its visitors, but it has no resources to maintain them.

It is unconscionable that these properties, under the stewardship

of the U.S. Government, should have to operate under these challenges. New England abounds with historic parks and sites, and

the tourists that come to see them are a critical component of our

economy. But more important than the dollars they leave are the

experiences that these visitors take back home.

They learn about the events of our shared history, especially the

Revolutionary War. They learn of the values that were shaped by

those events, and they are enriched by their memories of what they

have seen and heard.

It is our, and your, responsibility to ensure that our national

parks continue to exceed their expectations. We cannot let our

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parks fail for lack of adequate funding. As Olmsted wrote in 1916,

‘‘We must keep the national parks unimpaired for the enjoyment

of all future generations.’’ It is our moral obligation to do so. Thank

you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Fenollosa:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Our next witness is Ken Olson, president of the Friends of Acadia National Park in Maine.

STATEMENT OF KEN OLSON

Mr. OLSON. Thank you, Congressman Souder, for both holding

these hearings and for inviting me to speak. I am, as you said, Ken

Olson and I am president of Friends of Acadia which is a 3,000

member nonprofit philanthropy that was founded in 1986. We raise

private funds for Acadia National Park. I also serve on the Executive Committee of the National Park Friends Alliance which consist

of chief executives of about 40 leading park philanthropies.

You have asked me to comment specifically on Park budget

issues and citizen philanthropy. Friends of Acadia is completely

independent from Acadia National Park and the National Park

Service. From 1995 alone we have donated $5.1 million to the park

or to community entities for projects that complement Park values.

Our charitable funding makes possible the employment of about

115 seasonable workers, that is about 50 MTEs, in Acadia National

Park or in the towns. For example, Explorer Bus System is a community and Park project and our funding, thanks to L.L. Bean,

helps run that very successful system.

Friends of Acadia has also raised $16 million in endowments and

other invested funds. Each year we grant the interest, about 4 percent, to the park. For example, Friends created the only endowed

trail system in national park history. Same for our carriage road

endowment and the endowment for the park’s wheelchair-accessible horse carriages. In all cases the funds flow to maintenance

forever.

Without our private dollars these projects could not have been

initiated. If Friends should for some reason go out of business, our

remaining assets must be transferred to another entity and used

for the original purposes.

Several Acadia summer positions were cut for budget reasons in

2004. As Roger Kennedy noted, many restrooms, and most of them

built quite recently, were closed in winter which is a real inconvenience, of course, and does cause sanitation problems as well.

Eleven permanent jobs are vacant now. That number is rising

from last year. It was about eight and they won’t be filled. The reason is that the funds that would support those jobs have to go to

seasonable positions that would otherwise disappear. In other

words, there is a long-term tradeoff for a very profound short-term

need.

Also, about the interpreter programs, within Acadia National

Park approximately 30 percent of the interpreter programs have

been cut in recent years and that means that about 65,000 people

are not getting educational offerings at Acadia National Park.

The President’s 2006 budget contains an increase for Park Service operations nationwide and we thank him. However, in many

cases the money won’t reach the parks themselves. The President

and Congress may be unaware of this business snag. I would like

to say this is not a problem of too much overhead in the regional

offices. It is not a problem with that.

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Take the 2005 park budget increase for which Congress deserves

considerable credit. Mandated employee raises, agency internal assessments, retirement system changes, terrorism alerts and emergency expenditures are consuming the new money and that is what

is producing the shortfalls.

It is not clear whether the full Congress understands the paradox which is this: it is well intentioned and welcome funding increases are nonetheless resulting in service reductions at the park

level. Pressure is mounting on philanthropies to fund operating

shortfalls.

A recent Park Service review in a western national park stated

that its supporting nonprofit, a group like ours ‘‘should first and

foremost raise funds for the [park] superintendent’s priorities

(which we agree with 100 percent) be they a capital improvement

project or for operations.’’

It is the operations part that is quite concerning. That is because

the role of philanthropy is to supplement and not replace Federal

funds. Our purpose is to add value to national parks including for

select improvements and programs to bring a margin of excellence

beyond what Park Service budgets can accomplish by themselves.

Donors have to be recognized as volunteers of money.

Charities must never subsidize government operating losses.

Doing so would undermine donor motivation. In other words, there

would be nonprofit investment going on. At the same time there is

actual government disinvestment going on. That is a real motive

killer for people who like to support the national parks. It would

be like taxing people twice for national parks, once on April 15th

when we all pay, and then once by the charity to offset the lost appropriations.

Federal operations are a government duty, period. Fortunately,

Park Service Director Mainella, whose tenure has emphasized nonprofit partnerships, vigorously supports that philosophy. I have

spoken with her at great length about it and I know that is how

she feels and she has written about it as well.

All agency employees need to understand it. I am happy to tell

you that our superintendent of Acadia National Park, Sheridan

Steele, his staff and the Northeast Regional Office do understand

it and partnering with them is a great professional experience.

David Rockefeller, Jr., whose family’s gifts helped establish Acadia, and you may recall that this is the first national park created

east of the Mississippi and is the first to have grown full blown

from private philanthropy. That family is responsible not just for

places like Acadia but Grand Teton, Virgin Islands. They have a

tremendous record of generosity.

David Rockefeller, Jr., said this when he was chairman of the

National Park Foundation which you can think of as the granddaddy of the Friends organizations and is responsible, in a sense,

for the whole Park System. He said that Americans ‘‘need to have

assurances that their private dollars will not be used to offset public responsibilities . . . I refer to this distinction as the ‘bright

line.’ ’’

Friends of Acadia urges Congress to apply the proper management fix to the cash delivery malfunction. I want to emphasize

again that this is not a problem of too much overhead sitting in the

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Park System somewhere. To do so, to fix this malfunction, would

honor the bright line that David Rockefeller, Jr., talks about. It

would expand charitable giving, we believe, and ultimately would

reverse park-level deficits. Congress can accomplish this by appropriating an annual funding margin that exceeds the exactions that

will otherwise eliminate it.

Thanks very much and I would be happy to answer questions

later.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Olson follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Our final witness in this panel is Lt. John McCauley, museum

curator of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. Thank you for coming today.

STATEMENT OF LT. JOHN F. McCAULEY

Lt. MCCAULEY. Good morning, Congressman. My name is John

McCauley. May I introduce you to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. It is the oldest chartered military

organization in the western hemisphere.

Founded in 1637, its mission was to train officers for the existing

militia. We no longer train officers, and our mission today is to preserve the patriotic traditions of America. We read the Declaration

of Independence from the balcony of the Old State House every 4th

of July, as it was read by an Ancient in 1776.

On April 19th we march to celebrate the beginning of the American Revolution in Lexington. Before we march in Lexington, we

take time to decorate the graves of those signers of the Declaration,

buried in the old Granary Burial ground. Every year we travel to

some country of the world to show the American flag and take part

in ceremonies with military units of other nations. We feel that

these programs help to preserve the historical culture of this area.

Our relationship with Faneuil Hall began in 1746, 4 years after

the opening of the building when we were transferred from the Old

State House. The Company was allotted space in the building, actually it was in the attic, to hold its meetings. They did their training on the Boston Common.

Faneuil Hall has changed many times in its 263 years. It went

from a small two-story structure with a ground floor market place

to a building four times its original size. In 1805 when the building

was enlarged, a fourth floor was added to accommodate the militia

units of Boston. It is on this floor that the Company maintains its

armory, museum, and headquarters.

In the old building the Company contributed to the preservation

of it by improving their headquarters, the attic, at their own expense. In the new building the Company contributed their share of

improvements with other militia units to improve the fourth floor.

By 1880 the Company was the sole tenant of the fourth floor and

has maintained it ever since.

All funding for the activities, maintenance and improvements for

the company is derived from the members. An annual assessment

creates the budgetary needs. No moneys from the city of Boston,

Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the National Park System are

given for the support of the Company. Monies for demonstration

fees, in this case the maintenance of the museum and library, come

from the Company’s budget.

The only time I can remember when funding from the outside

came from the national park reimbursement program, it came for

the expenses incurred when the Company moved from the fourth

floor to the Coast Guard Base from 1990 to 1992. Total moving expenses were $140,000. We were reimbursed $129,000.

Internal security for the fourth floor was installed in 1991 during

the restoration of the building. It consists of four non-recording

cameras, three were installed then, the Company added a fourth.

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Two monitors installed, the Company added a third. Motion and

fire/smoke detectors were put in at that time.

Two employees, the curator and secretary, are there during operating hours and no police patrol the fourth floor. Other testimony

may speak of the rest of the building. We feel that the present system is basic and does not fill the needs of securing the floor and

its contents. At the present time we have engaged security analysts

to create a better system. The present system operates independent

of the rest of the building. To my knowledge at no time have we

been approached by the Homeland Security Agency nor any exercises up there at all on security.

The fourth floor, although occupied by the Company, is used for

many other functions during the year. The city of Boston uses it

for some of their functions, while other military units use it for

ceremonies. This multi use creates a need of constant upkeep.

While employees take care of everyday cleanup, the Company hires

outside cleaners after many functions. Last week we closed for a

week to have the floors refurbished. You can probably still smell

it. All was paid for by the Company.

The ceiling of the Armory has been a problem since the restoration of 1991. The paint peels off. As the present time it is under

study by the Boston National Park System. With the exception of

the ceiling all costs for maintenance are absorbed by the Company.

While this report so far seems to assume we operate on an independent basis, our interaction with others makes us take an interest in the well being and preservation of several sites in the Boston

and New england area.

During the years we have used the streets of Boston, the Old

State House, the cemeteries in Boston and the churches. President

John F. Kennedy was a member of our organization, therefore, the

site of his birth in Brookline holds an interest to the Company.

Every day I meet people from many countries. They marvel at

the historic sites in Boston and are excited with the idea that this

area is the place where the American Revolution began. Not many

places in the world can show the birthplace of liberty. Sites such

as Bunker Hill, U.S.S. Constitution, Paul Revere are a continued

source of conversation with the visitors.

The interest is there. We need both private organizations, private

citizens and government agencies to pay attention to these historical sites and encourage their preservation.

May I digress for a moment, please, to tell you I have served 33

years as a volunteer in the National Park System, primarily at

Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, and also at Saratoga, Morristown, Moore’s Creek and Harper’s Ferry. Every time I

visit a park I learn something. I have also noticed the intensity and

the dedication of the park employees. They take pride in their work

but they need the necessary tools.

I have a daughter who is a curator at a historic house and a sonin-law who is a preservation specialist within the national parks.

My whole family was involved. A new danger seems to have appeared recently with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that

allows property to be taken for commercial purposes. What happens when a historic site is in the way?

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I thank you for the opportunity to speak before this panel on behalf of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company for the preservation of historic sites, not only here in New England but all over

this great land of ours. Thank you very much, sir.

[The prepared statement of Lt. McCauley follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you all for your testimony. I would like to

start with Mr. Kennedy on some broader questions because this is

starting broad and then we will get narrower as we are launching

into this kind of parks oversight and behind it highlighting the

general needs of the Park Service and the shortfall of the budget.

I will ask a couple of technical bureaucratic questions first. Do

you believe inside the Department of Interior—in my experience,

formerly as a staffer and now as a Member, that OMB tends to

drive statements of almost every administration. Do you sense that

there has been without commenting on individuals, it is more systemic? How much is this happening everywhere? Is the Park Service less independent inside the Department of Interior and Interior

more or less independent? I don’t have a strong sense of how this

is working right now.

Mr. KENNEDY. The Park Service as it is currently being managed

is exceedingly dependent upon the management and the objectives

of the Department of the Interior. It is not functioning as an independent agency that ebbs and flows with the degree to which the

relationship between the Secretary and the Director functions. But

at the moment there is a very intense interaction downward from

the Secretary toward the Director.

That changes over time. There is no question in my view that the

Congress historically has lacked the kind of precise understanding

of the Park Service’s budgetary functions that you are seeking. It

needs to re-register the inadequacy of its understanding of what

the actual consequences on the ground are of the money it thinks

it is appropriating.

Mr. SOUDER. In a broad question again because my experience

started more from Parks up and now I am trying to figure out how

the system works. How do you see how the regional directors and

their flexibility are fitting in the system?

Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. McIntosh’s testimony this morning tells you

quite a lot about that. Here is somebody who really knows the system. He has been in the system a long time and the missing element in our discussion so far this morning has been the importance

of the service as well as the system. You have to have people who

know what they are doing, have accumulated that understanding

over time, and have a professional skill adequate to respond to you.

The problem, the primary problem of the moment is not, in my

view, the physical condition of the park. It is the actual morale condition and the competency condition of the Service. What rewards

are there for people to do good, candid work? What really is happening to archeology, to history, to natural resource protection?

How good are the people and how long are they staying? What are

the incentives to them to stay to learn to do their work properly?

Now, some of those people are necessarily situated in regional offices. Some of them, for example, can be deployed from time to time

to do intensive visitations in parks. But many parks, I think particularly of Bandolier, for example, their conditions are so—Acadia

is another. Their conditions are so specific to them, to their ecosystems and to their particular kind of archeology and history that

they need some continuity in those parks of people with those competencies. Can’t all be done at the regional office however good the

regional offices may be.

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So there is a combination here of a deplorable task force of competent people working in regional offices and, to some extent, in

the national offices. There needs to be a park historian. There

needs to be a national park archeologist. But there has to be continuity of service in the parks themselves because they all are complicated systems naturally, and historic. That is what managers

are for. Congress is to write the checks and to understand what the

checks go for. Competent managers are what you grow in a system

like the Park Service or the Marine Corps.

Mr. SOUDER. I know this is more system-wide than specific here

but having a former director who has worked with us for so many

years gives me a chance to probe some other types of questions

here. They have a number of training systems to train in advance

superintendents.

Clearly, at least historically, there has been both movement between parks so that people learn parks sometimes within. There

has been almost stovepiping between historical and natural but

anymore there are so many natural features and historical parks

and many of them with natural features and vice versa.

That has been a little less true and a little less kind of looking

down the nose at the historical people by the natural people. I have

seen some parks where superintendents have stayed a decade or

more. More likely it is somebody who goes up and kind of, ‘‘I am

a cultural resource person and I am going to stay 15 years because

I want to be here at this park.’’ There is some of that.

One of the dilemmas we have in government, and I am going to

lay a premise and I want to hear you react to this, that no matter

how successful we are in pulling out the shortfalls in the Park

Service, the fact is what I see as a Congressman is this isn’t just

in the Park Service. We have this problem everywhere. We have

taxpayers who don’t even want to have their local township tax increased or their library tax increased. They don’t want to have the

State. They don’t want to have the Federal.

The bulk of the budget is now under entitlement programs that

have exceeded 60 percent, the military for all the discussion about

it, and the supplemental has dropped from what used to be in the

Kennedy days more like 30 percent down to about 8 percent of our

budget.

I met with mental health people earlier this week in my home

district and they are dying. The juvenile justice people are dying.

How we deal with Medicaid, with the health cost pressures. We

can’t even begin to meet the—take what is happening in Northwest

Airlines and Delta and everything in the airlines right now trying

to do field cost and healthcare cost in the private sector and the

government has promised more to the citizens than the private sector has and we don’t have any money to do that.

Clearly we are going to have cost pressures. Every year we start

out arguing the Parks budget ought to be increased by $100 million

and we have been able to increase it. In fact, there is a lot of jealousy in the system and for all our struggles it shows how strongly—I mean, our leadership pleads with me not to offer floor amendments on the Park Service because everybody will do more.

Fish and Wildlife is absolutely panicked that in Interior there is

no top to the Park Service as long as I keep inside Interior. They

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pretty well wipe out the Fish and Wildlife Service inside moving

over the Park Service. Yet, you have to say it has a function, too.

We are going to have to do some things differently and try to get

more money.

The best way to get more money is to focus like we are doing on

the centennial, to have a vision that grabs people and have people

talking about it, to make people aware of the shortfalls. Even that

said, I see some fundamental things that are there. Mr. Olson has

raised one on what is going to be the role of Friends groups and

support groups. Can they do the traditional or are they going to

have to step in and fill in on operational?

As we contract out and move more toward seasonal and follow

what the private sector is doing which is a fear of having full-time

employees because it doesn’t give you the flexibility and the

healthcare and the pension cost. What is the career track? Maybe

we can have a senior corps but where does the junior corps start

to get to the senior corps?

Clearly we are going to have to figure out creative ways for interpretation that other museums are adjusting to and how in the Park

Service—I mean, do you start to convert an agent system dependent on mostly human interaction to better computer utilization. My

lands, we heard about Lowell a minute ago and finally getting

some things online.

My daughter was doing in third grade a bat project for third

graders in Indiana. Carlsbad Caverns has the most bats. Got her

in touch with the superintendent there to get her some bat materials. Now, if you are in New Mexico you might know about Carlsbad Caverns and get hooked in. But this is a different era here.

It isn’t just trying to have the local school kids walk through. We

have the most science, the most history. All these things are in the

Park Service if we can figure out how to get it out. How do we do

a transition here and should that be part of our vision, too? I threw

out a bunch of concepts there. We need more money but it is not

going to be like the old days and how do we best get hold of this?

Mr. KENNEDY. To the extent that I can remember, let me see if

I can run through them in sequence. First of all, with respect to

the budgetary pressures, what we are doing today is to register the

importance of the National Park System to you and to this audience and to everybody else because the National Park System does

not have a well-paid body of profiteers working in Congress in the

corridors because they are making money on it.

This is very different from the defense establishment. It is different from the agriculture subsidies. It is different from the steel

subsidies. It is different from almost every other major domestic

pressure on the Congress. What we are doing is to compensate

through citizen involvement for the absence of very well-paid lobbying that go after you guys every day of the week. That is what we

are doing here.

This is Kenneth Galbraith compensating factors. We are providing in a democracy citizen participation. We are trying to register

with the Congress that there are a lot of people who care a lot

about this and they will vote. Do they write big checks at campaign

time? No, they don’t. Not in competition with the other special interest that are going after you guys. That is the first point. This

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is important what we are doing here. This is the life of democracy

in a real system where money counts.

Second, with respect to a senior corps we have a—we got terribly

enthusiastic about the importance of redeployable senior citizens—

not senior citizens but senior staffers. It wouldn’t be terrible if

some of them were a little older but, in any case, senior staffers

that you could redeploy as needs occurred.

The problem with that is that they are politically vulnerable and

they get redeployed to serve the partisan or specific purposes of an

administration whether it is Republican or Democrat. Those people

are more vulnerable to redeployment for political purposes or exile.

If they are a little bit too candid those folks can get exiled by an

administration as they currently are and have been before. That is

the problem with the redeployable corps that doesn’t have a

grounding in a system that is strong enough to support them.

Now, the beauty of the National Park System is that it is place

specific. You can’t computerize Independence Hall. You can computerize Yellow Stone. It isn’t just mountains and water falls. It is

the specific gritty under-your-feet experience that our kids have

had and we have with having been at the bridge in Concord, having actually been in Yosemite when the sun comes up and it plays

upon that water fall. That immediacy. And the Boston Harbor islands, no, they are not glamorous but, by golly, the experience of

being there is a powerful experience.

If you have any sense of the history of the evolution of the American city, being at the Olmsted site helps you understand why the

cities that we live in are struggling to be better places for people

to live in because that is where he put his work. Sure, he helped

found the National Park System but at the end of the day he is

about a city that is livable. That is what you get at the Olmsted

site.

If you go to Lowell, it is a place in which the evolution of the

American system in all its grit, in all its tension, in all of its

antiphonies that are there. It is real. This is a slave traders’ hall.

Faneuil was a slave trader. Is that important? You bet it is important. These are places where we learn real truths. They are specific

places. We can’t just do that on the Web. They have to be served

to provide that tactile, that under-the-feet, that immediate sense.

A lot of Maine has been, and will be, trashed but Acadia is magic

because it won’t be trashed. My argument is there is no replacement for a National Park System. If it is not the best idea America

ever had, it is a real good idea and we are the trustees so we have

to struggle for it. Every day that you hold a hearing 10,000 lobbyists, well paid in a $3,000 suit, are working on some other Congressman for something else so thank you again.

Mr. SOUDER. One of the things it does, too, this hearing, basically

this date was relatively fixed because of my schedule but also I

know I talked to Congressman Capuano who wanted to be here but

he couldn’t be here this particular day and Congressman Lynch

who we have worked with on the steroids as well as well as

oxycontin and other issues became more aware of what we are

doing here. He is on the actual full committee that this subcommittee is part of.

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And my friend Bill Delahunt, who I have worked with on the

Adams site, was trying to get me to do this over in Cape Cod. You

have a process even in the course of doing a hearing to talk to the

other members in the region and get them aware of the things even

if they are not here.

Ms. Fenollosa, you talked about in the national trust a very effective program of identifying at-risk sites which is emulated. I know

Indiana’s landworks board, of which I am a part, although I

haven’t been as active as I would like to be, I have certainly been

supportive and on their board, does a similar thing in Indiana.

My hometown of Fort Wayne does a similar thing. In Fort Wayne

it is a much emulated approach. One thing your organization could

do is even expand this more intensely inside the Park Service as

opposed to just necessarily identifying the different parks. Then

identify, as you did in your testimony, certain specific sites or types

of things.

Do you see any expansion of this because it is a great way to capture people’s attention. Congressmen like short lists. The media

likes short lists. I think that program that you started has just proliferated and is one of the most effective things. I picked up a ‘‘National Geographic Traveller’’ magazine yesterday at the airport.

They did the 55 parks and analysis of the deterioration. That is one

way to get people’s attention and rate as well.

Ms. FENOLLOSA. In response I would say that the problem is one

of space and size. As you said, Congressmen like short lists. We

have decided that we are only going to pick 11 sites every year

from 50 competing States, all of whom rightly believe that their

places are the most important ones so we have to make choices. I

suppose we could list the National Park Service as an endangered

site which might focus attention.

Mr. SOUDER. I was thinking more on the lines of not putting it

on the national list, but as you work through the regional, I don’t

think national parks because they are national are usually thought

of in the State and local list.

If there was an interaction, for example, as a sublist of, OK, let

us say you have these bigger parks that you have mentioned and

you had some sub things inside of them, but as you look at the top

10 endangered sites in the midwest region, then in the national

parks in the State of Indiana what are the three most endangered

historic preservationsites in those parks so for Indiana Dunes boyhood site if there are any original sites there, and the Vincent site

in Indiana, are there a couple things in there that your organization would highlight. Not that you would expand your national list

but that there would be sublists that, in effect, could supplement

because often those things are viewed as, ‘‘Oh, that is national. We

are focused on our State and local.’’ It is an interesting way to kind

of highlight and supplement what we are trying to do in highlighting the problems of the National Park Service.

Then the other thing is not just the buildings but some of these

collections inside. In historic preservation do you view your organization, primarily it is buildings, but do you focus on collections as

well?

Ms. FENOLLOSA. Yes, I would say that we do and we have in the

past. In terms of your earlier question, as a national organization

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we try very hard to work very closely with our statewide and local

partners. No one at the State or local level wants to be told by an

organization in Washington, DC, what should be important to

them.

Your former colleague and our great representative Tip O’Neill

used to say that, ‘‘All politics is local but all preservation is local.’’

Therefore, for the National Trust to do this might imply a right to

those places that we don’t have, a right to the prioritization of

those places that we don’t have.

What we do is we work with the organization such as the Indiana Landmark Preservation group to ensure that we support them

in what they do so that if they identified the Indiana Dunes as

being a significant place, we will work with them to our regional

office to focus whatever attention we can as a national organization

on that place.

We have identified places like prairie churches throughout the

midwest where there is a unified theme, where there is some sort

of resource that has impacted a great number of people that is suffering the same kinds of problems such as deferred maintenance or

lack of funding to focus on these things as a unified whole, as a

systemic problem that perhaps is transferrable to other parts of the

country.

Could we do something such as you suggest? Absolutely. To focus

on a subset of national parks or a subset of issues of national

parks, yes, I believe we could. In fact we have tried to expand the

partnership with the National Park Service through our regional

offices and through our headquarters, the Park Service headquarters in Washington and our headquarters in Washington to try

to find places where we can work together to try to save these

places, to use the various assets that each group has, the avenues

that we have and the politics that we have or don’t have.

Mr. SOUDER. For example, it wouldn’t even have to be done nationally but as national organizer you could have Indiana suggest

which things in the national park sites or government sites in the

State should be included in that list. Another model of this is the

‘‘U.S. News and World Report’’ has done such a great job by however they arbitrarily rate the best colleges and universities in the

country but everybody has gotten used to that and your endangered list is very similar to that but they break it down.

The front page of the Fort Wayne newspaper the other day had

three local colleges ranked in the top 25 of the private universities

under 1,000 in this three-State area. It still helps you focus, particularly those of us in public policy who are looking to say which

is the panic thing because planning ahead is like this far. It helps

us identify priorities. I am not meaning to be critical. I am just

looking for innovative ways that this might help.

I am also very interested because I believe it was in your magazine that I saw this about the Adams collection and how we don’t

lose these pieces. The land trust organizations have done a better

job, I think, with land. It is like we are anymore getting multiple

tiers of how adjacent lands are held together but we haven’t really

figured out how to do it with objects as much.

Ms. FENOLLOSA. We haven’t. That is absolutely true. I would say

that the consciousness of the American people isn’t as raised for

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matters of historic preservation, the preservation of objects and

sites, as it is for landscapes. I think the environmental community

sets the standard of how we should all organize ourselves to promote an agenda.

As to where the appropriate place for that kind of organizing is

I would hope the National Trust would take the lead. But I also

believe that Mr. Kennedy’s organization does precisely that.

Mr. SOUDER. The NPCA does a great job.

Ms. FENOLLOSA. They have that broad perspective.

Mr. KENNEDY. The American Museum Association—the next

time you have the Smithsonian before you inquire as to its national

role under its original endowment as acting as a national clearinghouse, not just the proprietor of its own property. You might want

to ask them to look again at James Smithson’s gift and the initial

hearings, John Quincy Adams and Jefferson Davis among those

present, as to what its job is to help precisely with the curatorial

function which is different from the land conservation function. The

Park Service has both and the NPCA does what it can. Essentially

this is a curatorial function you are talking about and there are

people who do that for a living.

Mr. SOUDER. It is not a very active caucus. It is a small caucus

and ironically yesterday we were trying to get the national parks

caucus going but Congressman Turner, who was in yesterday, is a

co-chair of the preservation caucus to try to protect the trust. As

former mayor of Dayton he was interested in how to preserve older

buildings. Which, by the way, also illustrates one of the other

things that we need to figure out how to capitalize on.

It has been very interesting as I have worked through this hearing process. Individual Members will get on the bill or come up and

talk to me but Congressman Turner just completed 21⁄2 weeks

where he flew back to his district three times abandoning his wife

and kids a couple times on this tour as we politicians sometimes

do.

But they did like 10 different parks and he was recreating something that his dad had done with him when he was 12 and his children are 11 and 13 and he is all fired up to help with the Parks

things. Congressman Platts, who has had our Gettysburg hearing,

has been the last, I think, 3 years taking his kids on a parks tour.

When I was out west Heather Wilson has now done it the second

summer with her family on a parks tour.

Well, when they start to get out there if we can have them meet

the different people and see that, it is a great way to communicate

values. As we get people interested, they want to know, ‘‘What can

we do specifically?’’ Sometimes if I have a criticism of landmarks

and the trust is when we hear preserve all prairie schools, preserve

all bridges, preserve all churches.

In political terms you look at that and say can’t do it. Where is

the priority in my given area? How do I deal with this in this town

and this county. I am not an expert and I’ll never be an expert. My

staff will never be experts in it. The people who are in this need

to give us some prioritization so we know how to focus and work.

Ms. FENOLLOSA. Unfortunately most preservation organizations,

most grassroots efforts get their impetus, get their energy from the

potential loss or the actual loss of a beloved place and that is what

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prompts the process. Suddenly it is too late because the property

they love, the property that they always expected would be there,

their local landmarks are gone.

It is then when they turn around and say, ‘‘Oh, my goodness.

What could we have done about this?’’ We tend to expect that our

important buildings will always be here. We just expect it so that

when a building, a place, a historic landscape is compromised, is

endangered, we haven’t been good at figuring out how to save it because we just expect that it would always be there.

I think the opportunities working through the National Trust,

through the National Park Service, through the National Park

Conservation Association, these groups have an obligation to educate people that these places are not always going to be there. You

are right, the list is a good way of doing that but the list has to

start locally and build. It has to build State-wide but it has to go

national-wide and then it has to build interagency-wide because

these places are just too precious and we can’t afford to lose them.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Olson, did I understand in your testimony you

stated that you were funding seasonal rangers through your organization? Is that what you said?

Mr. OLSON. We are not funding seasonal rangers.

Mr. SOUDER. It makes possible the employment of about 115 seasonal workers.

Mr. OLSON. 115 seasonal workers inside the park and outside the

park who are directly serving it. For example, bus drivers who are

not on a national park payroll. A good amount of our money is

funding people who work for Acadia National Park or people that

we detail to work for Acadia National Park.

We try to do it in a way that is add on. As I said before, it is

ad valorem philanthropy in the sense that the Park Service capacity to do a project doesn’t exist unless we step in. An example being

our trails endowment. The trails of Acadia National Park of which

there are 130 miles would never have received any kind of priority

or private funding not interjected into the picture. We did that and,

as a consequence, the park’s trail crew for doing that work has

grown and so we make possible things that couldn’t have happened

without private money.

Mr. SOUDER. In looking at the role of private money in developing things like that, do you believe if the private money developed

something inside of a park they should also have a sustainability

for what they developed as opposed to—in other words, this is a

philosophical question partly.

If the representatives of the taxpayers have said this is a

prioritization of funding and a Friends group set something up that

then needs to be maintained and wasn’t part of the elected group.

I am not saying it is a very pure election because we are talking

about a tier, a tier, a tier, a tier but, nevertheless, are still responsible inside an elective system.

I am very supportive of Friends. I am just trying to work through

mentally how this works should a gift come with a support endowment with it or a way to maintain that because a second unstated

part of this is a zero sum game like the Park Administration is

more or less in. Whenever there is an addition, there is a subtraction. In effect, strong Friends groups and groups like Grand CanVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00074 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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yon, Yosemite, and so on that just do additive things that then

have to be maintained by the park budget in effect take it from

poorer parks without Friends groups.

Mr. OLSON. Yes, I understand that problem. I can tell you how

Friends of Acadia does it. We have helped rehabilitate the 44-mile

carriage road system which was gifted to the American public

through John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s will and those roads had fallen

into disrepair. We had a meeting with our then representatives

who included Senior Mitchell and then Congresswoman Olympia

Snow, the superintendent of Acadia National Park, a representative of the Friends of Acadia, and some others.

The agreement that we came to was that the responsibility

would be divvied up in a public/private effort where the public sector through Senator Mitchell and others would seek a $4 million

appropriation to reconstruct the carriage roads. In other words, to

do the capital work. Friends of Acadia was asked to raise $4 million to endow the roads and perpetuities. That became a good model. That generates now about $260,000

a year for the Park Service to actually have seven people on those

roads who weren’t able to work on those roads before. We intend

it to be forever. We are subject to market influences.

The 3-year down market didn’t help us very much in our

grantmaking ability but we still managed to find the funds to do

this so what we are trying to promise as a model is elimination of

some of the vicissitudes of congressional funding but not all of it.

We are looking at the maintenance question and that is just one

of several endowments that we have.

Why this is not used in other national parks among their Friends

groups I don’t know. They have chosen to emphasize capital

projects and then to, I think, convince the policymakers that the

private sector has now done its share and it is now a legitimate responsibility of the National Park Service to maintain them and

please have the funds available.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Kennedy, do you have any comment on that?

Have you seen it Park System wide?

Mr. KENNEDY. Yeah. That was such a polite exchange that the

implications, I guess, we could leave in the polite stage but there

is no question that the Friends of Acadia understand what endowing means. You do something and then you pay to keep it going.

This reinforces an earlier point which we were very polite about

also but needs maybe to be emphasized. Private giving is private

giving. Each of us make a choice whether we are going to give or

not. We don’t want to be bludgeoned into giving because the Congress didn’t do its job. It isn’t true that if you say, ‘‘Well, too bad.

We, the Congress, aren’t going to do our job. It is up to you.’’

That doesn’t produce in a lot of us a deep sense that it is up to

us to come forward to make up for it. It is a big mistake for the

Congress to think that it just ought to throw the responsibility over

to the private sector because the private sector being private may

decide it wants to give its money to something else. Congress has

to do its job. Almost every 10 years somebody has the bright idea,

‘‘Oh, well. The people who use it ought to pay for it,’’ which ignores

the notion that may be unborn so far, posterity isn’t there to represent itself.

72

Mr. SOUDER. Let me throw out a variation. I would be interested

in your response and Mr. Olson’s in particular, and that is part of

what happens is that different things are added to our Park System whether you want to call it park barreling or temporary phenomena that we say it is a personal interest to somebody if we add

this. It may or may not have public support. That is one class.

A second may have public support because it seemed like a

bright idea at the time. It often is a function of how much a particular Congressman will trade or end his career or whether he

thinks something is going to be named after him or it defines him

and helps cover another type of a problem.

All those kinds of things are in the Park Service basically in the

first four parks so it is not like a new phenomena. The one in Oklahoma and Mackinaw Island was in and out and Hot Springs were

all there very early so it is not something new. But to some degree

by having individuals pay, by seeing how strong your Friends

group is, is that not somewhat of a winnowing process that the people are, in effect, determining which ones had longevity and where

the support was as opposed to being a short-term?

Mr. KENNEDY. Yeah. As you point out, though, it could be just

a rich person’s personal pressure on the particular Congressman at

the particular time. I think your earlier discourse leads us back to

the phenomenon of the early 1990’s in which there was a real effort

on the part of Congressmen on both sides of the isle to find some

way to make it harder for there to be a whimsical entry into the

National Park System.

The flaw in that process was that it got loaded up with the notion that we should spend a lot of time and money unloading parks.

You spend vastly more time studying what you are going to unload

than you would save having unloaded. That is the simple truth of

the matter. It cost a lot more to the taxpayers to figure out what

you can get rid of. It could take you 10 years and you fiddle with

it.

That is a dumb idea. The not dumb idea is for the Congress to

establish very, very high hurdles for new entries and really require

the Park Service to commit itself with a view on any new entries

before they can make it. If it were me playing the archangel, I

would say two-thirds majority for any new park. Just make it

tough.

Mr. SOUDER. One of the wrinkles with that is and what I was

kind of suggesting is one of the ways we actually deal with this is

that—because I don’t know that we will ever change a political—

we can make it tougher but we will never make it so tough that

it can’t be varied with a waive of the rules. To some degree we determine whether it was a whimsical addition by the fact does it

have broad popular support to subsidize the funding.

Mr. KENNEDY. On the other hand, sometimes the Nation isn’t

quite ready for Manzanar. The Nation may be ready for the Arizona but it may take some people with real courage to know that

we had better remember what we did to our fellow citizens from

time to time. After all, Manzanar is like Gettysburg. It is not a

happy story but it is part of our story. You need to have some room

for this. We have to make it tough to get in but you shouldn’t have

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to have the built in constituency. There may just be a wise persuasive person who says——

Mr. SOUDER. We waited almost too long on Angel Island as an

example.

Mr. KENNEDY. Yeah.

Mr. SOUDER. Another variation that is interesting—this is my

first time this summer to Lassen Volcanic National Park which

was interesting because right around the time the Park Service

was being created, they have this volcano and so it gets added to

the system. It might not have been added had that not been the

case.

On the other hand, now that it is in there, what it gives us the

ability to see is what Mount St. Helens is likely to look like in 70

years so it might have been a somewhat historical fluke that it was

there but now it is interesting to compare it to the other systems.

It is a hard thing to predict but I was wanting to create a proxy.

I would ask if you would elaborate a little bit more on Acadia,

too, as far as how you see some of that relationship of people are,

in effect, and I believe Acadia will always probably be pretty broadly supported. I have three questions for you. That is one.

Second, Acadia scored really low in this rating of parks in qualitative area rounded and the pressure is on the Park System. Have

you seen the ‘‘National Geographic Traveller?’’

Mr. OLSON. I am sorry. I couldn’t hear you.

Mr. SOUDER. There was like a group of experts that went in and

evaluated based on the community pressures around it how the

park was sustained and Acadia was one of the lowest of the major

parts.

Mr. OLSON. Yes, I did see that.

Mr. SOUDER. Then the third question is part of the thing there

was that it said the neighboring community is feeling the kind of

social—Bar Harbor has always been a wealthy retreat but whether

it was going to change the community around it. That also leads

into this question on the fees and how to make sure people can

have access to the park as we get more charges.

Mr. OLSON. Yes. Let me take the last one first about the fees.

At Acadia National Park the fee is now $20. It recently went up

from $10 and it includes a transit fee. If you are a family of four,

for example, you pay that fee or if you have six in the car or one

person you pay that number. For a family of four to attend a movie

in Ellsworth, the nearby community that has a year-round movie

operation, I am guessing it is $28 for four people for 2 years. It

may be more than that now.

As a market matter, the fees are very low. As an equity issue I

think you raise a very good one when you talk about people who

don’t go to national parks. I think Bob McIntosh made a good point

that it is probably less the fee at the park than it is the access,

the habits of travel, the ability to take time, cohesive family, whatever it may be.

But that doesn’t, I think, negate the need for something like a

people’s pass, for lack of a better term, at this point in which, as

you point out, there is a confidential exchange of financial information that is automatic through the IRS form and the choice of the

74

person to receive a national park pass is done very quietly. It

sounds like a great thing to do.

Otherwise, the fees are held hostage to this question of equity

over time and I don’t think there is a real disequity in those fees

and they should be allowed to float in a reasonable way because

they do empower the park to do an incredible amount of work

which is very visible to people. It is a popular program, as was

stated earlier, because people can see the money going back into

the ground. The Park Service does a really good job of explaining

what it is doing with the money.

On the question of the elite nature of the community, there is no

question that the history of Acadia National Park is one of the first

founded from private property and founded in a resort community

which rivaled Newport, RI at the time. Sort of a Gatsby kind of

community. There is that element of Mt. Desert Island that is always going to be there but there is also a Yankee tradition in

Maine.

There have been surveys done by the Park Service by visiting the

local dump, the local post office, and places that are not frequented

by visitors to find out how much use of the park is by local people.

It turns out the carriage road system alone at Acadia National

Park services 75 percent of the public who live on the island year

round. I was so surprised at that number.

There is still some residual resentment about the establishment

of the park. We see it but it is not very much and it is usually a

cranky individual or so. I think also any kind of conservation activity today, the white noise is that it is an elitist kind of activity

when it is really an opening kind of activity. If you really believe

in national parks you believe in the second part of the mission as

much as you do the first part.

The first part being conservation of resources and wildlife therein, and the second part being for the enjoyment of generations

unimpaired. The generations part is a real thing and we want people to be able to use Acadia National Park whatever the social strata, economic strata may be. I think the elite question will always

be there but it is insignificant really in the long run.

As to community pressures, Acadia National Park is used by

about 21⁄2 million visitors in a year. A visit is one person going to

the park for 1 day and coming back the next day would be a second

visit so it is not unique individuals. Maybe there are 700,000 or

800,000 people that descend upon that island.

There are definitely pressures, especially in the form of transportation on this granite pluton that is Acadia National Park and Mt.

Desert Island. The physical limits are basically there as far as

transportation goes. The community has mixed reactions about it

because some merchants believe that people shop from automobiles

and the more people in cars on the island, the happier they are.

Whereas other people feel that the kind of irreversible thing that

is happening socially about the living and visiting experience at

Acadia National Park is a form of endangerment for what we all

treasure. I would say if you consider the Census Bureau’s moderate

figures projecting to the year 2050, it expects that there will be 400

million Americans. We are about 300 million right now so 100 million Americans are going to be seeking rarities like Acadia NaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:25 May 07, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00078 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\25530.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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tional Park in numbers that we really don’t appreciate yet and that

will be tremendous pressure beyond what we have now on our national park and on our communities.

Unlike in the American west where a rectangle of land is superimposed upon a piece of public domain, this national park is mixed

private and public property so the National Park Service has a tremendous negotiating job every step of the way about community

life and park life.

And, finally, on broad support it is very frustrating, I think, for

a Friends organization like us, or probably any Friends organization, to have to report that we have only 3,000 members when

maybe 700,000, 800,000 unique individuals use Acadia National

Park in the course of a year. Or that our community has 5,000

year-round residents, 15,000 when you add the summer residents,

and we still have only 3,000 people supporting national parks.

We don’t have the broad support that I believe is there and this

is a conundrum for anybody who is in the nonprofit world because

these parks are so available to so many kinds of people. Creating

the alliances and the allegiances is a long-term effort.

When we talk about the problems that Roger raised about lobbying and where the constituencies are, I don’t believe we have

helped you very much. Although some excellent work is being done

nationally by the National Parks Conservation Association, the

Trust, and others, we still haven’t been able to help you the way

that you are asking us to do so. I think you should continue to ask

us how to do this.

I just want to make a comment, if I might about the—you mentioned the outsourcing question. This is an interesting one because

Acadia National Park about 38 percent of the jobs that are in the

park are held by people wearing the gray uniform and the flat hat.

And 62 percent of the functions in Acadia National Park belong to

nonprofits, for profit concessioners, motor tour buses, volunteers,

etc.

The question, I think, is to what extent do we consider the park

already privatized or amply privatized? Have we perhaps exceeded

something at Acadia National Park. Will people who volunteer or

give money through private means wish to volunteer to work for

a contractor? I don’t know. Would they give to us if we are paying

contractors? I don’t know. There is something magic about the Park

Service uniform and the dedication of employees that means a lot

to how we try to sell, if you will, giving money to government.

Mr. SOUDER. Lt. McCauley, in your organization you have

worked with volunteers for years. You yourself have been a volunteer. Could you pick up on the last point a little bit? What motivated you to get involved? What motivates other people to get involved. Do you see younger people coming in as well with a passion

and what do you think we might be able to do to get people like

yourself to continue to do this?

Lt. MCCAULEY. In 1966 when I started to volunteer at the national park we were involved at that particular time with the

Minute Man organizations locally here. I happened to have been

the head of them. We volunteered our services to do demonstrations at Minute Man and became more involved in the Living History Program on our own.

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My wife became involved and started making clothing. We became so involved we went to Williamsburg to learn how to make

it. We went to England to learn how to make clothes and involved

our whole family and it became a tradition that we would attend

the National Park System.

In return the national park offered me their services of doing

some training at other national parks. This I accepted but I must

say that my profession at that time allowed me the time to do it.

I am not sure that somebody in a paid regular day-by-day job

would be able to take the time to do these things but it was a

unique experience.

I enjoyed it. I learned and I still pass it on to the point where

I retired as an optometrist and went back to school and got my BA

and MA in history with a certificate in Museum Studies and I continue this same idea of living history or using history right above

us upstairs here.

One of the most oppressing things I find on an everyday basis

is the lack of knowledge of history. I am talking basic history.

What does the 4th of July mean or things like that. People do not

know. If you don’t know, you won’t take part. Somewhere along the

line not necessarily the national park, in a school, or somehow we

have to reeducate the people that we have a past and without that

past being known to everybody our future isn’t going to go any

place.

Mr. SOUDER. It is fascinating. We have legislation where we are

trying to even just make sure history is covered in our schools anymore. In the same time as when you see young kids at the different

places there is this fascination, even in the Civil War reinactments.

On one hand, it is harder to get young people involved in the organization. On the other hand we have this proliferating use of the

national battle fields in a way that none of us ever foresaw but it

is a huge challenge.

If, in fact, funds get tighter and we need volunteers, where are

the volunteers going to come from and how do we get people? Particularly in historic preservationsites, you know, McCullogh and

the late Stephen Ambrose could sell lots of books. We need more

people like that who can keep the books up at the front.

Let me mention one other thing that Mr. Olson kind of alluded

to which I believe is one of the most amazing transformations in

the National Park Service, and that is partly our big parks anymore aren’t the traditional what people think of the big parks. It

is Gateway, Golden Gate, Santa Monica, the ones by the big cities.

It is a whole different challenge because we are talking 12 million,

not 3 million at those parks.

Brian O’Neil, who is kind of the apostle of this movement, has

hit me with a statistic that just turned my head around and it related to what you said about Acadia and that is I think 150 mile

radius of the Yosemite National Park. A higher percentage of the

people who visit Yosemite are from within 150 miles and visit

Golden Gate. That is counterintuitive because the whole thought of

the national recreation areas where these are in the big cities they

will function like city parks. Why aren’t the cities doing these

things?

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In the old days Olmsted would have done this as a city park.

How come this is a national park? Why did that get into our system? But when you think about it, it is the conventions that people

go to San Francisco and in their studies.

The Japanese groups that come through, the people from the

midwest who go to San Francisco convention, they don’t have time

to get in the car and go out to Yosemite. They go to the local Golden Gate Park so he is running like 20 percent higher than Yosemite beyond 150 miles which is totally counterintuitive, particularly

given the numbers at that.

I don’t think Santa Monica is quite that way but Los Angeles

had similar things. New York has certainly got a lot of that. Jones

Beach stoics the whole thing but outside that you are approximate

to a big city with lots of conventions, lots of tourism coming in and

they can hit something in a couple of hours. I would assume Boston

benefits from this to a degree, too, in the historic sites because

every time there is a convention here, every time schools come into

the city it is a different concept.

In the Park Service it is a different challenge because historically

we have been defined by big natural parks, the crown jewels and

a few of the major historic parks. In reality this whole system has

changed. Then in trying to look at funding and the conflicting

things that we are doing here. To name one of my favorites is San

Antonio Mission Park. How do you count attendance there?

When I went there, there were, I think, maybe you might have

seen as many as 30 people at the Mission and you might have seen

as many as 2,000 people picnicking on the grounds from the Hispanic community in San Antonio. Great Falls is a similar thing.

This wasn’t meant as a picnic park but with so little green space

and we say, well, the Hispanics aren’t coming to our national

parks.

Well, they are going to that one or they are going to others but

they are using them more like recreation areas. Then maybe they

will wander over and see the Mission and be exposed to it. We have

to think there are parking challenges. There are different use challenges. At Sequoia you see these people going down where they are

not supposed to be going down in plastic bags sliding like it is for

sledding but it is not the designated sledding area but we wanted

to get them into the park.

How are we going to accommodate kind of the different usages?

The fundamental question by just focusing on backlog which we

tried to work through. We want to get the backlog. We want to get

the overhead but the truth is if we are going to go from 300 million

to 400 million, you are right.

The pressure on the existing space and the existing green spaces

is people want to see those. They want to share it with their family. They want to get out. This is not just a Federal problem, although I am a Congressman and we are doing it. Where in the

world are our State parks and our city and county parks because

it is putting extra pressure on the Federal system because many

of the States haven’t updated their State park system for so long.

Mr. OLSON. I just wanted to respond to that. I really appreciate

what you’re saying. I think one of the things that is going on is

that as different user groups historically have used parks, they

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weren’t really sure they were in a national park or a national forest back when those were just relatively natural areas.

Mr. SOUDER. Now they know it because they have a fee at each

one as they go through like BLM. That is a joke.

Mr. OLSON. I thought we could do a survey, even at Acadia National Park, of our fairly homogeneous users, although there is a

lot of increasing international use. Many of them would answer to

a question of who runs this facility, ‘‘Whose land are you on?’’

I really wonder whether we get a national park as an answer on

its own by them or in trust by the government, or whether they

think it is a State operation, or they think it is a private operation

and if you look at that from the standpoint that it has probably always been that case, the Department of Interior, people don’t know

the difference between that and the Department of Agriculture. If

you add in a lot of new users who are putting the pressures on the

place, they don’t understand that maybe there is a single really estimable agency out there that is doing this and there is a lot of private that is doing it.

You can be part of it now that you know about it. That is the

education job that has to occur in national parks. I bet we could

do that survey and prove that hypothesis that a lot of people don’t

know they are in a national park, especially in an urban setting.

Mr. SOUDER. At Redwood when you get in the national park

there is no such thing like a system. Everything is kind of a variation. At Redwood it is the Redwood National and State Parks because the State parks preserve the land. The Federal was slow.

Now the Federal has kind of this connective between the State

parks.

What is interesting to watch some of the chaos that occurs from

this and we are going to have to figure out how to deal with. The

State now with, I think, 120 Federal employees in 40 States but

the State has been declining and the Federal has been increasing

even though almost all the land is State which then raises questions like the national park boundary that goes around the State

parks. It isn’t national park land anyway.

There is an area that the State has added that is critical water

shed that the State hasn’t added employees to cover that water

shed and the Federal employees aren’t allowed to go into that watershed because it is not part of the boundary. It is just this fascinating mosaic of individual cases brought under a system. I know

you, having presided over that share, that this is some of what becomes big challenges because the State and local have to be partners in this as well if we are going to be partnered in the parks.

Mr. KENNEDY. One of the things that is striking to me is that

your attention to this subject is remarkable. I said earlier that it

was remarkable. It also represents a further argument for the importance of the National Park Service as a group of professionals

who are around all the time competent and growing in competency

in balancing precisely these complex questions because that is

what they get paid to do every day. That is their job.

Now, you are wonderful and extraordinary. No irony, but you are

also exceptional. The Congress doesn’t give this kind of oversight,

doesn’t pay this kind of attention, doesn’t bore in very often. While

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we are grateful for that, that really means that most Congressmen

attend to it very, very occasionally.

You have to have a professional service that does its job, that understands the evolutions and complexities and cares a whole lot

about resolving precisely these kinds of ambiguities because you

can’t do that full-time. You have a few other things to do with your

life. The necessity for a qualified compensated honestly advanced

high morale public service professional group, that is the core of

the ambiguities that you have been addressing simply because it

is so extraordinary that you are paying attention.

Let us hear it for the State Park System’s evoling professional

skills. Let us hear it for the National Park Service and let us be

real careful in the Congress that we make it as easy as possible

for people to make good careers in that service and be thanked for

it so we don’t outsource the system and lose those continuities.

Mr. SOUDER. I thank you for your passion and everybody’s passion with this. Would anybody like to add anything before we conclude? Any additional comments? If you want to add anything after

we adjourn in the record, we will be doing, in addition, each hearing comes out as a published book after a number of months. We

are going to be putting this together as a national report which

hopefully will supplement what NPCA has been doing but inside

Congress and that is where we are headed.

In the first hearing it was kind of defining and taking subgroups.

Today was a little more focus on the history angle. Our next one

in Seattle will be more natural parks with a couple variations there

of some of the State and local cooperations, Lewis and Clark being

a new park and a classic example of State and local. Grand Canyon

and the Arizona parks in that area will be a whole other type of

thing.

We know what our constant is, there isn’t enough money if we

are going to maintain this system. We need to have a frank analysis inside Congress that there isn’t enough money. But underneath

that what does that mean? What does it mean for local parks?

What does it mean for the quality of the personnel?

What does it mean for historic preservation? What tradeoffs are

we making because every day we are making tradeoffs but we don’t

know we are making them, and to try to articulate the tradeoffs

inside to the degree we can simplify this incredibly complex thing.

I will finish with this. My dad thought this was just hilarious

and I thought it was the stupidest thing when I was in high school.

I was in band and he got this plaque when we were on vacation

and he gave it to the band director. The band director put it up

and we had to watch every day in band. It said, ‘‘Why can’t all of

life’s problems come when I am young and know all the answers?’’

It is kind of like when you get into the Park Service you come

in with a couple of ‘‘Why don’t we do this and this and this?’’ Then

you realize this is exceptional. They have snowmobiles here for 3

months of the year and it was grandfathered in and every park has

these unique things. We are trying to figure out what commonalities are there.

How can we simplify this enough and yet show the incredible

complexity of this system which most Americans don’t even understand the complexity? They see a brown sign and assume that the

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same rules apply everywhere and they don’t. Now national monuments are in BLM and Forest Service, too, which further confused

matters. We are trying to work this through.

I believe we are getting a group of members who are paying attention and I thank all of you for your passion because that is what

is going to make the difference because the National Park System

is our contribution to the world and we are going to do our best

that, at least, while we can make noise we will continue to make

noise. I hope I continue to do it at age 80 like Mr. Kennedy.

Thank you very much. Thank you all those who attended. The

subcommittee is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 1:02 p.m. the subcommittee was adjourned.]

[Additional information submitted for the hearing record follows:]

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