Is the NPS doing a good job? Should they get more money? What national parks have you visited? http://www.wsj.com/articles/happy-100th-birthday-national-parks-1472076265 OPINION COMMENTARY Happy 100th Birthday, National Parks Yellowstone could cover its operating budget with a daily fee of $11. Glacier could do so for $7.19. By TERRY L. ANDERSON Aug. 24, 2016 6:04 p.m. ET 37 COMMENTS As the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday, Americans should take a moment to consider how they can ensure the health of their national treasure for many generations to come. Few federal agencies command more widespread support than the NPS. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 73% of Americans were satisfied with the governments handling of national parks, despite their overall dissatisfaction with the federal government. There are now 84 million acres in the national-park system, including 59 national parks, 20 of which were added after 1980, and 353 national monuments, battlefields and historic sites. Every year Congress creates more parks, often referred to as Park Barrel Politics. But, loved as they are, the national park systems and monuments arent being treated well. Adding more parks makes matters worse. At Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. ENLARGE At Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS There is already a backlog of maintenance projects, including deteriorating roads, buildings and sewage systems, that will cost $12 billion to fix. Each year the NPS goes to Congress asking for funding for its operating budgets but almost always gets less than it requests. Between 2005 and 2015, the federal budget grew by 39%, yet the NPS operating budget increased by only 1.7%. Meanwhile, park attendance in 2015 reached a record 305 million visits. A simple change would allow parks to increase fees to cover their operating costs. When the first national parks were created, they were expected to be self-supporting. Receipts for Yellowstone and Yosemite in those early days often exceeded expenditures. Adjusted to 2016 dollars, entry fees then were astronomical. Mount Rainier, the first to allow cars in 1908, sold 1,594 auto permits at a price of $475 in todays dollars. In 1916 seasonal auto permits, also in todays dollars, ranged from $120 at Glacier and Mesa Verde to $240 at Yellowstone. Today the price of a seven-day pass to Yellowstone for one vehicle is $30. What would entrance fees have to be today to cover operating costs? Not very much. Yellowstone, with more than four million visits in 2015, could have covered its operating budget with a daily fee of $11. This means that a family of four would pay $44 a dayless than the cost of a trip to the movies. The entrance fee to Disney World costs more than $100. Other parks could cover their operating budgets for less: at Grand Canyon, $7.63; Glacier, $7.19; Grand Teton, $6.40; and Smoky Mountains, $2. Another simple change would be to charge higher fees for foreign visitors, who pay no U.S. taxes. Differential pricing is common in parks outside the U.S. Kenyas Maasai Mara National Reserve charges its citizens $10, compared with $70 for noncitizens. With foreign visitors to U.S. parks making up as much as 25% of the total, charging them more would provide a substantial budgetary boost. Congress is also working on a simple budget fix. The National Park Service Centennial Act, presented to Congress earlier this year and sponsored by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D., Ariz.), calls for raising the price of a senior-citizen lifetime pass to $80the current price of a regular annual national park passfrom a mere $10. No doubt there will be a backlash from AARP, but if the NPS sold 600,000 senior passes, as it did in 2015, at $80, it would generate an additional $42 million for operating costs or maintenance. If Americans love their parks as much as they say, the NPS centennial celebration is a perfect occasion to take parks out of politics and politics out of parks by giving the gift of operating-budget autonomy. If entrance fees covered the NPSs annual operating costs of approximately $2.5 billion, congressional funding could be used to start work on the maintenance backlog. Freeing the NPS from politics would also better connect the parks bureaucracy with its customer base and change its focus from Washington to Americas best idea. Mr. Anderson is a distinguished fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and a senior fellow at Stanfords Hoover Institution.
Simply remarkable, go to the link and read the whole thing: http://www.aol.com/article/2016/08/...ger-who-works-full-time-and-never-w/21459019/ Meet the 94-year-old park ranger who works full-time and never wants to retire Business Insider RACHEL GILLETT Aug 25th 2016 4:30PM X ​ At 94, Betty Reid Soskin is something of a celebrity. The park ranger assigned to the Rosie the Riveter-World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, writes frequently on her blog, has her own Wikipedia page, and has been interviewed by numerous media outlets. She's become so popular, she says, that the park's tour audiences have doubled, tours are now booked months ahead, and the park has added tours to keep up. There's no question why Soskin is such a celebrity: She's seen it all and has lived "lots and lots of lives," as she tells NPR. Soskin served as a clerk in an all-black trade union during World War II, became a political activist and noted songwriter during the civil-rights movement, and now interprets her wartime experience through her stories. But she is not simply the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service — Soskin helped shape what the park has become, first as a consultant and later as an interpretive park ranger, and she's even been honored by President Barack Obama for her service. Bay Area Woman Is America's Oldest Full-Time National Park RangerJustin Sullivan/Getty Images Soskin works five days a week, about five hours a day, and occasionally works extra hours. Most Wednesdays and Fridays, Soskin will spend the day answering emails and requests from her desk at headquarters in downtown Richmond. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays she'll work at the Visitor Education Center and give two or three presentations in its small theater. Some days she'll conduct bus tours through the sites that make up the national park or give presentations. Last year, Soskin gave Business Insider a glimpse into her life, and she had a lot to say: How did you get started at the National Park Service? I entered as a state employee at the planning stages of an emerging national park in 2000. One of the scattered sites was the Ford Assembly Plant, which was designed by Albert Kahn and constructed upon state-owned land. That means that, as a field representative for a member of the California State Assembly, there was a seat at the planning table because that important iconic building had been constructed on state-owned land. It was built on air rights. That placed me at the planning table, which eventually morphed into the role of a consultant to the National Park Service, which then evolved into a contract worker paid for by the Rosie Trust. I resigned my position with the State in 2003. What were early influences on your career? When one has lived through nine decades before entering the park service, holding many roles — wife, mother, artist, caretaker, merchant, administrative aide, field representative for a member of the state legislature, administrator for a research project for the UC Berkeley psychology department, chief of staff for a city councilman for the City of Berkeley — all added color to my current career and influences my work in every way. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images What skills are most useful to have to be a park ranger? That would be dependent upon the field in which one is assigned. Since the National Park Service rangers cover the full spectrum of career opportunities — from botany, marine biology, and forestry to communications and graphic design — the required skills would reflect a variety of areas. If one is in interpretation, people skills are surely a premium, and enough imagination and research abilities to enable one to communicate the themes of any particular park site. I must admit, though, that I'm not a trained interpreter, and what skills I may process came in with me — having been acquired long before I discovered the park service. Becoming an interpreter, however, allowed me to be able to identify and hone what skills I brought with me into a more marketable shape, but there is little that is newly acquired. That probably has to do with my age, and the extraordinary opportunity I experienced by being hired as an interpretive ranger at the age of 85. The fact that I came in as a primary source for the period being celebrated and memorialized — 1941 to 1945 — was surely a given. What's the pay like for a park ranger? I have no idea. In fact, with today's technological advantages, and since I never see my paycheck — I use automatic electronic transfers — I have no idea what I'm earning or precisely what the benefits are. That would suggest that my earnings are not central to my upkeep at this point in life, and whatever I earn is in addition to my Social Security checks — also electronic transfers. I'm far beyond the need to even keep track. It's also kind of interesting that I'm collecting Social Security while still paying into the system through withholding — and it feels like someone is just not paying attention anymore — besides me, of course.
