Why US parks put land purchases on hold

Prior to 1998, the lion’s share of the LWCF funding actually went to purchase land. But in recent years that has flipped around: Now most LWCF funds are spent on federal land programs that don’t actually purchase land, a 2006 Congressional Research Service (CRS) study found.

Just 7 percent of the LWCF’s $969 million funding went to such “other programs” in 1998. A dramatic shift began in 2001 with “other programs” leaping to 46 percent of the fund. By 2006, overall LWCF appropriations from Congress had shrunk to just $346 million. But within that total, the “other programs” share gobbled up almost two-thirds, the CRS reported.

Such “other” programs include, for instance, a new administration push for cooperative programs that pay private land owners to maintain natural resources on their land to support rare or endangered species living there.

Noble as they may be, such changed priorities in spending – along with budget cuts – have left little in the way of funds to buy parkland.

“There just isn’t any will in the current administration to preserve these parks and enhance them,” says Roxanne Quimby, a philanthropist who has purchased many acres in Maine on behalf of Acadia National Park.

“The administration’s position is strong that we have to take care of the land we have now,” the Park Service’s Mr. Olson says. “Budgets are tight and a war is going on.”

Whatever the reason, as the Park Service nears its 2016 centennial, it is left with a nearly 2-million-acre backlog of “priority land-acquisition needs” valued at $1.9 billion across 154 of 359 park units, NPCA says.

Land whittled away
Next door to Petrified National Forest at Fitzgerald’s ranch, fossils and petroglyphs are still intact, so far. But practically no research has yet been conducted on them – and scientists are eager to get going.

“The Twin Buttes ranch is a Rosetta stone for paleontology,” says David Gillette, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. “Not to acquire this land for the park would be a huge missed opportunity for the American public. It’s a scientific resource we can’t match anywhere else.”

There’s hope that some private inholdings will end up as parkland. In Maine, Friends of Acadia and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust have joined to purchase about 140 parcels worth about $40 million to fill gaps in Acadia National Park and prevent development in those areas.

Similarly, a charitable group played a key role in purchasing land in the middle of Picket’s Charge Field, is helping restore the land for Gettysburg National Military Park.

For his part, Fitzgerald has been aiming for a long shot: find a buyer willing to keep the ranch land undeveloped until the Park Service is able to buy it. He recently had to sell a small corner of his property to someone who is now using excavators to mine it for petrified wood, something that upsets him.

“I don’t want my land to get chewed up by mining or development,” he says. “But it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure what else I can do.”

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