National Parks Get a Little Green

  • Junior Rangers-to-be explore the beach at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

There was a time – not that long ago –
when a lot of the National Parks in the
country were strapped for cash. They
were cutting staff and cutting services.
But, Mark Brush reports, now Congress
is investing more in the parks:

Transcript

There was a time – not that long ago –
when a lot of the National Parks in the
country were strapped for cash. They
were cutting staff and cutting services.
But, Mark Brush reports, now Congress
is investing more in the parks:

It started changing in the last year or two of the Bush Administration. The Bush White House realized that the National Park System was coming up on its 100th Anniversary in 2016.

No one wanted the Centennial marred by crumbling roads or Parks that were understaffed. So Washington pledged to increase the overall budget for the National Park Service by 100 million each year until the Centennial.

And folks like Tom Ulrich say Congress has been making good on that pledge. He’s the deputy superintendent at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan.

“A few years ago our discussions weren’t, you know, ‘Well, we got a little bit of extra money how are we going to spend that?’ They were, ‘We have to cut from last year. What are we going to cut?’ And so it’s nice to have those discussions change.”

Ulrich says a lot of National Parks are also getting some money from the stimulus package passed earlier this year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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