I just got done looking at the website for the National Parks Service’s Centennial Challenge, the supposedly major project designed to significantly upgrade many of our national parks for the 2016 centennial of NPS.
Boy, does this baby throw around nickels and dimes like manhole covers.
Only $50 mil pegged for all projects, and half of that private donations. And $9 mil of that total is for creation of an urban park in D.C. on land recently transferred to NPS from the District.
The 50-year Mission 66 project was MUCH more ambitious.
Examples of how chintzy, and short of reality, the Centennial Challenge actually is?
Petrified Forest NP in Arizona will get a whole $20K for preservation of ancestral Puebloan and other ancient Indian sites. (All projects are listed by total funding, including private amounts.)
Death Valley gets just $20K for a biological taxa survey.
Great Smoky gets a small $200K for repairs to the Elkmont Historical District.
Beyond that, a lot of the individual projects sound like grab bag items.
I will concede that the Everglades and Redwoods get significant money for necessary natural history/stabilization projects, but those two plus the DC project gobble up one-third of the whole project’s funds.
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