Shenandoah National Park feels the dollar drought

by Meghan O'Connell

All you have to do is coast along Skyline Drive to appreciate the beauty of Shenandoah National Park. Tunnels carved from the mountain rock, overlooks with views stretching past the valleys, sights from above the clouds on the right day. The park is a public haven, but Shenandoah, along with national parks across the country, is hurting from weak funding.

The federal budget can be divided into four chunks, according to Gordon Olson, Shenandoah’s supervisory biologist, who has worked for the National Park Service for 29 years. The three largest pieces go to entitlement programs like Social Security and veterans’ benefits, servicing the federal debt and defense spending, which includes the cost of the Iraq war and Homeland Security.

“What’s left is a very, very, very, very, very small chunk of the pie and that chunk, that piece, is referred to as domestic programs,” Olson said. The money for domestic spending includes education and health care funds as well as the budget for the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service.

An April, 2006, report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress that investigates programs and spending, highlighted problems with NPS funding. Officials at the 12 parks GAO officials visited, which included Shenandoah, cited rising utility costs that have led to reduced spending in other areas.

Because allocations for daily operations did not rise equally with costs, the parks had to absorb the higher expenses themselves. Most parks reported cutting back on visitor center hours, educational programs, basic custodial duties and law enforcement operations, yet still not having sufficient funds to address the rising cost of personnel and NPS management requirements.

When adjusted for inflation, the NPS budget has been declining since 2002 and shrank by 3.9 percent from 2005 to 2006, over $105 million in funding, according to the NPS website. And while the operations budget, which covers expenses for management, operations and maintenance of park areas and administration of the NPS, has increased $38 million since 2000, it declined by $25 million in real terms from 2005-2006.

Although Congress may not cut NPS funding for the year, the annual cost-of-living increases the government allots for employee emoluments claim a larger portion of the budget every cycle said Karen Beck-Herzog, the public affairs officer at Shenandoah. For 2006, parks had to account for a 2.1 salary increase in their budgets, Beck-Herzog said.

Even necessary maintenance projects are waiting for funding. The NPS has a $5 billion maintenance backlog, according to the GAO report. Beck-Herzog affirmed that Shenandoah is trying to catch up on its maintenance, using visitor entry fees to fund projects.

“The fixed costs are going up, the utilities costs are going up, and so that little slice of the pie that the discretionary budget is, gets smaller and smaller,” said Bill Wade, who served as the superintendent of Shenandoah from 1988-1997 before retiring after 34 years with the NPS. He now leads the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which is an independent group that works for the protection of national parks.

In 2004, the Bush administration asked the National Park Service to reach an 80-20 ratio of fixed to discretionary spending as part of the "Core Operations Analysis" initiative. It is officially meant to help park managers identify and improve upon park inefficiencies, but has been trumpeted by some environmentalists as an order that forces park officials to cut into staff levels and visitor services in an effort to reduce their fixed costs. It may give the parks more discretionary funding if their budgets are not decreased in the future, but the savings would be dug out of fixed costs, which may or may not have been part of efficient park operations.

The fixed costs that will have to be decreased include permanent salaries, administrative costs and other base expenses such as maintenance and law enforcement. Discretionary money is spent on things like studies, park improvements, special projects, new programs and natural damage clean-up.

“It comes right down to my programs,” Olson said. “I’ve taken reductions that I’ve had to make that I wish that I did not have to make.”

Beck-Herzog said the park did not view the 80-20 ratio as realistic based on the essential needs of the park. Shenandoah has been operating with fixed costs claiming a percent of the budget in the high 90s and is reaching for a 95-5 proportion in five years. The park has operated at 98 percent fixed costs this year, meaning that of Shenandoah’s $10 million budget, about $200,000 is available for discretionary spending, Beck-Herzog said.

In the past year, Shenandoah has begun a more formal program to analyze and streamline park operations. This means a leaner staff and services. Most of the cuts in fixed costs will come from leaving positions empty that have been vacated through transfers, retirements and resignations, Beck-Herzog said. Over 20 positions have been left vacant in the last five years, with empty slots in every department. The park employs the equivalency of 185 people, with every 280 hours of work counting as one full-time position. And interpretative programs have taken a hit. Probably 400 program sessions have been cut in the last four years, Beck-Herzog said, including ranger-led hikes and talks.

“We have really consolidated and come down to our core,” Beck-Herzog said. The park has dealt with budget issues through not replacing staff who leave, combining positions, cutting department budgets, hiring fewer seasonal workers, slimming the number of ranger-led programs and pushing maintenance needs back until there is money available.

“The idea is to become more self-reliant,” said Shenandoah biologist Rolf Gubler, which has led to a smaller staff and tighter budget. “Because of that, we just don’t have flexibility.”

Many of the cuts have come from training, Olson said. His division has no money for expertise updates. “You won’t see any difference except maybe at some point we won’t be the sharpest tacks out of the box because we haven’t gone back for refreshers,” he said.

In the late '60s and early '70s, the parks went through a period of specialization in response to rising crime within the parks as well as innovations in science and technology that demanded greater expertise from park stewards, Olson said. Now with positions being sliced or combined, the parks are losing some of that ability to maintain a specialized staff.

“There’s more than one of us with more than one type of hat these days,” Olson said.

Catherine Gilliam, the Virginia program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that Shenandoah has had to close campgrounds because of funding issues, demolished an aging visitor center because there was no money to renovate it, and removed benches from a picnic site because there were no funds for a custodian to collect the trash.

One way the park deals with weak funding is by welcoming outside researchers into the park who bring their own money and staff, Gubler said. The University of Virginia, for instance, is conducting a water study in the park. About one-quarter to one-fifth of park employees’ study proposals are funded, Gubler estimated, but that funding may not kick in for two to three years, since the federal budget process can last 21 months or longer.

Volunteers and donations have been a boon for Shenandoah while it operates on limited financial resources. The number of volunteers has risen from 518 contributing regularly during 2002 to 691 in 2006. The 1,059 people who donated their time in 2006 gave a total of 61,306 hours. That is equal to 29.5 full-time employees and $1,105,690 worth of salaried work, and includes volunteers who helped with special events.

“The problem becomes when you have to rely on volunteers to carry out what might be essential programs or activities,” Wade said. Volunteers simply don’t have the same level of expertise or experience as professionals, he said, and up until recently, parks have not had to rely on volunteers for essential functions.

“Volunteers were like the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself,” he said.

The volunteers assist with maintenance, education and interpretation programs, administrative duties, park protection and visitor reception. Each division submits volunteer requests, which are posted on a Web site. Most of the help is directed to maintaining the trails, cabins and huts and comes through a partnership with the Appalachian Trail Club.

As a government agency, the park is not allowed to solicit donations, and instead must rely on organizations such as the National Park Foundation for fundraising. The Shenandoah National Park Trust was formed in 2004 as part of the NPF to focus on Shenandoah.

This year the trust has granted $62,000 to the park, $50,000 of which will go to renovate an overlook on Skyline Drive and $12,000 for a GPS system. The GPS units will be available at visitor centers for a fee and will be programmed with information about natural and historical sites and some popular trails.

The park may gain more leeway with private funding in terms of how the money is spent, and donating can instill greater ties to the park, McNair said. But the parks are national public lands of economic and cultural importance, Gilliam said, and as such should be fully funded by Congress. And, as the GAO report noted, donated funds can vary from year to year rendering them unsuitable for long-term projects, and may come with stipulations attached.

“While there’s an appropriate role for private funds, we don’t want this to be a substitute for Congressional funding,” Gilliam said.

Wade feared possible quid pro quos for donations in terms of recognition or benefits and the prospect of advertisements or credits plastered around the park.

The park also gains funding from concessions sales. Aramark is the sole concessionaire on park grounds and gives five percent of its gross receipts to the park service. That money goes to special projects and activities separate from normal operations or maintenance. Shenandoah decides on the projects and the regional office approves.

One final source of revenue for the park is its entrance fees. Shenandoah keeps 80 percent of the fees it collects, with the rest going to the park service. That income can be used for anything besides permanent salaries and administrative costs.

The current fee for a seven-day pass for a vehicle was raised last year from $10 to $15 in-season, and remained $10 out of season, meaning $10-$12 of each car’s admission fee goes directly to Shenandoah.

“The problem with increasing fees is that it begins to discriminate against certain people within the country,” Wade said.

The last time the park changed its admission price was in 1997, and the recent increase was only to adjust for inflation. Any change in fees must be approved by the NPS director, though Beck-Herzog said that park officials are not looking to raise entry fees on a regular basis because they want these public lands to remain accessible to everyone.

The number of people who visit Shenandoah each year has declined dramatically. Fewer visitors equate to less revenue for the park because less entrance money is collected. While this money can’t be used for daily operations or permanent salaries, it does mean that there is less to spend on backlogged maintenance projects and other visitor services.

Visitation rates for Shenandoah have dropped from above two million visits per year throughout most of the 1960s and 1970s to hover around 1.9 million in the early 90s to 1.4 million in 2000 and slightly under 1.1 million last year. The decrease in visits from 2004 to 2005 was 166,000.

Although no official studies have been performed to determine the effect of raising entrance rates, park officials conducted an informal survey of volunteers, charity organizers, tourism industry and local government officials and the general public to ascertain public opinion about an entrance fee increase. Beck-Herzog said that the overall feeling was positive and the park has not received any complaints yet.

Beck-Herzog cited possible reasons for the dropping visitation rate, including inclement weather during the past two years, more options for how to spend one’s time than in the past, and children connecting to technology more than nature.

Wade also mentioned nature competing with technology as a reason for the visitation decline. He reasoned that the increasing cost of gas could dissuade people from visiting, especially those who would come for only a day or weekend trip. And rising entry fees, Wade is convinced, are keeping certain sections of the population from the park.

The cuts made to staff and visitor services may have compounded the problem, he said. If people travel to the park and don’t find the same availability of programs as in past years and don’t see a ranger and discover the benches from their picnic spot are gone, they’ll be less inclined to go back.

The sliding visitor rate is a concern for Shenandoah, Beck-Herzog said. The park is working to increase its visibility through meeting with regional tourism representatives, travel associations and media outlets and applying for marketing grants.

Photos by Meghan O'Connell