As Congress hammers out disaster aid funding in the final days of the lame-duck session, advocates are pressing lawmakers to include $2.3 billion for more than two dozen national parks damaged by hurricanes, storms, wildfires and other natural disasters in the past two years.
The bulk of the funding request, $1.7 billion, would go for repairs on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, which was ravaged by Hurricane Helene in late September.
The rest would go toward restoring severely damaged areas of national parks from Yosemite in California, where a popular trail was hit by a rockslide in April, to Acadia in Maine, where back-to-back storms in January wiped out trails and beach areas.
The National Park Service, already facing more than $23 billion in deferred maintenance projects at the 432 units it manages across the country, including the 63 national parks, has not released details of its most recent infrastructure problems. The service referred questions about damage to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
But the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group with more than 1.6 million members, is distributing a fact sheet on Capitol Hill describing the damage done to parks across the nation in the past two years.
The fact sheet includes the damage caused by Helene to park units in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, especially at the most visited park in the United States, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Many parts of the sprawling park are still closed, including about 160 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs through it, as of Tuesday.
There are also emergency needs at Olympic National Park in Washington, where a popular lodge burned down in May; at a number of park units in California hit by mudslides and heavy snowfall; at several units in Texas damaged by floods; and at recreation areas hit by storms in Oklahoma, New Mexico and South Carolina.
“I’m not overstating things when I say this is critical,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations at the NPCA. “If Congress fails to provide the full amount of needed disaster funding for the Park Service, it would be nothing less than a tragedy for more than two dozen parks and critically, the many communities that depend on their infrastructure being functional and open to the public.”
Garder noted that national parks annually generate about $56 billion in economic activity. A Nov. 19 letter to congressional leaders led by the NPCA and signed by dozens of advocacy groups said that in western North Carolina alone, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park support 20,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in economic output.
There is some doubt, however, about whether full funding for the Park Service will be approved in the lame-duck session. One reason is the OMB did not include the full amount needed for parks in a $98 billion supplemental funding request made in November but only added it later as part of a second supplemental request totaling $16.1 billion.
Lawmakers from the Southeast called out the administration’s plans in a Nov. 26 letter led by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Mark Warner, D-Va.
They offer support for the initial $98 billion supplemental but add that they are “deeply concerned that the President’s request did not include funding for recovery efforts on public lands,” according to the letter. “Any disaster supplemental appropriations package considered by Congress must include robust funding for recovery efforts on public lands so our communities that rely upon these natural assets can continue to sustain their essential tourism industries.”
Congress has usually been responsive when national parks are hit with natural disasters, including after Yellowstone National Park was devastated by floods at the height of the tourist season in June 2022, Garder said.
“Being mindful of the national debt is entirely appropriate, but these are places that are in desperate need of aid, and in the case of national parks, in desperate need of repair, in part because they are contributing more than $56 billion annually to the national economy,” he said.
But once the immediate needs are addressed, much more work lies ahead to help the Park Service catch up with its massive backlog of deferred maintenance, Garder said. A 2020 law dubbed the Great American Outdoors Act, which provided up to $1.3 billion per year for five years for park projects, expires next year, he said.
Advocates are already working on the next version of a parks funding bill that they hope to see enacted in the next Congress. A group of senators, led by Montana Republican Steve Daines, last month introduced legislation dubbed the America the Beautiful Act, that would provide the Park Service with up to $2 billion annually for eight years, according to a statement by Daines and Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., and Mark Warner, D-Va.
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