National parks bracing for cuts

All this talk of the fiscal cliff has national park advocates worried about cliffs of the more scenic variety, including some within an easy day's drive of Las Vegas.

The National Park Service could face devastating cuts under either a last-minute budget deal or automatic reductions to take effect if a deal can't be struck, said Lynn Davis, the senior program manager in Nevada for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Any cuts would come on top of a roughly 15 percent reduction in National Park Service spending over the past decade, including a 6 percent drop in the park service's budget over the last two years.

The National Parks Conservation Association recently put a full-page ad in The New York Times urging President Barack Obama and Congress to reach a budget deal that protects the nation's parks.

The independent advocacy group contends that more federal budget cuts could jeopardize the service's ability to protect resources and visitors at iconic places such as the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, Death Valley and Zion National Park.

"The fiscal cliff gets checked off in the next couple weeks. This is a longer-term funding problem," Davis said.

Alan O'Neill spent his career with the National Park Service, including a stint as superintendent of Lake Mead National Recreation Area from 1987 to 2000. He now works as an advocate and consultant for trails, public lands and eco­tourism.

He said the park service and other Interior Department agencies are often seen as "low-hanging fruit" when federal spending is targeted.

But Davis said such cuts don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things, because all the money spent on the National Park system equals just one-fourteenth of one percent of the federal budget.

It's not even a drop in the bucket, she said. "It's a fourteenth of a drop."

If elected leaders fail to resolve the budget stalemate, so-called sequestration cuts of 8 to 10 percent across the National Park system will automatically take effect next year.

That's equivalent to closing the nearly 200 parks with the smallest budgets, Davis said.

The National Park Service manages almost 400 sites, from national parks covering millions of acres to small historic sites.

The park closest to Las Vegas is also one of the nation's busiest. Lake Mead saw almost 6.4 million visitors last year, the sixth highest total among park service sites.

O'Neill said the 1.5 million-acre recreation area has shed about a dozen staff positions in each of the past six years and is running out of places to cut.

"I know there's going to be less rangers and response times are going to increase," he said.

O'Neill managed the recreation area during a relatively good time for park funding. "But even then, I didn't think we had what we needed to meet minimum acceptable standards," he said.

In the past decade, Lake Mead has been hit with what he called a "triple whammy" of federal funding cuts, a drought-fueled drop in the water level requiring expensive infrastructure projects and a housing collapse that all but dried up proceeds from the sale of federal land in the Las Vegas Valley.

As for the prospect of closing parks, O'Neill acknowledged that the government can't shutter a canyon or rope off a mountain range.

But public facilities can be locked up and employees sent home.

"These parks define what's special about America," he said. "There will be no one there to protect the resource, and there will be no one there to provide for the safety of visitors."

It happened at Lake Mead one year when Congress failed to approve a budget, forcing the federal government to shut down for about a week, O'Neill said.

"I remember those gates being up. It was a terrible feeling," he said. "You never expect that a national park is going to be closed."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.