Could highway bill help tackle agency's $11.3B maintenance tab?

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
June 5, 2014

Can you see that herd of elk up ahead in Yellowstone National Park? Or is it obscured by the dozens of cars stacked up in traffic?

When Yellowstone's Grand Loop Road was built on top of wagon tracks after the turn of the century, engineers never imagined how popular the world's first national park would become.

Today, much of the 140-mile, figure-8-shaped road falls short of federal standards for lane widths and shoulders, which means that whenever one car stops to snap pictures of a grizzly, geyser or stunning sunset, everyone stops. Likewise, when a bison decides to lumber down the road at 5 mph, cars have little choice but to follow.

The "bear congestion" is just one reason the National Park Service wants to overhaul the road.

"Our forefathers built the road right on top of a thermal feature," said Steve Iobst, deputy superintendent for the 2.2-million-acre park famous for its geysers, steam vents and mud pots.

Replacement of the Grand Loop, which began in 1987, will end up costing more than $1 billion, according to parks advocates. The park this week began a new project to widen a 16-mile stretch of road between Norris Geyser Basin and the Golden Gate area with the first phase costing $20 million.

That money won't come out of NPS's appropriated budget, which only covers minor maintenance like snowplowing, patching and restriping.

It will come out of the federal highway bill, whose allocation for the Park Service has been flat at $240 million since 2009 and been stretched for the past two years to cover that agency's transit projects, too.

Grand Loop is among the many road, bridge and tunnel projects that make up more than half of the Park Service's $11.3 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Completing work on Grand Loop will require an additional $500 million, which represents a major portion of the backlog, Iobst said.

As the backlog continues to grow, parks advocates and some lawmakers are eyeing the federal highway bill as an opportunity to increase funding for the agency's 5,500 miles of paved roads and 1,800 bridges and tunnels.

Congress must address the highway bill by fall when funding runs out.

"It's not often you have a piece of funding legislation that needs to move that has such significance to the parks," said Craig Obey, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Whether Congress boosts national park funding in the bill -- a major unknown -- could also influence the passage of future bills to create or expand national parks and fund the acquisition of federal lands.

Fiscal conservatives have long opposed creating or buying new parklands while the maintenance backlog grows unabated.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), for example, has blocked bills to create national historic parks honoring Harriet Tubman and Delaware's colonial history and to expand the Oregon Caves National Monument, saying new designations without a funding solution would stretch the Park Service's budget even thinner.

"No one would purchase a new car while ignoring a leaking ceiling or broken pipes in their own home, but that is essentially what Washington is doing with our national parks," Coburn said in a report he released last fall (Greenwire, Oct. 29, 2013).

But while buildings, utility systems, wastewater treatment plants, landscapes and monument fortifications make up the rest of the maintenance backlog, relatively less attention has been paid to the roads.

"The problem we have now is largely inadequate funding," said Vic Knox, NPS's associate director for park planning, facilities and lands. "A lot of our system was built between the 1930s and 1960s. There has been reconstruction, but it is an aging road system."

The Park Service has asked Congress to provide it $970 million annually for six years, a level it said would address a "national federal responsibility" as the agency celebrates its 100th anniversary, while also significantly reducing the cost of maintaining its roads into the future.

That's a major increase above the $240 million NPS receives annually from MAP-21, the highway bill set to expire this fall.

But parks advocates say inaction by Congress is a dangerous path. While MAP-21 kept funding for parks level with the last bill, known as SAFETEA-LU, it eliminated a program that had historically provided the park service $15 million annually for transit projects -- which is now covered by the $240 million pot -- and a ferry project NPS used to compete for was also phased out, Knox said.

"All told, changes between MAP-21 and SAFETEA-LU resulted in a roughly $63 million per year loss in funding for the NPS transportation system, a 14 percent decline," the agency said.

To sustain the system's roads, bridges and parking areas in their current condition would cost about $340 million annually, a major hike over current funding, Knox said. To bring those assets up to "good" condition would require about $740 million, he said.

"The Park Service is on the same downward spiral as the rest of the country," said Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, a top Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which has yet to take up a highway reauthorization bill.

DeFazio, who is also the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee with jurisdiction over NPS, said the agency needs a "substantially larger allocation" in the upcoming highway bill, though he did not specify how much.

While many lawmakers are familiar with park roads in places like Yellowstone, fewer are aware that NPS also maintains commuter routes including the 1932 Memorial Bridge connecting Virginia to Washington, D.C., DeFazio said. The bridge serves 55,000 vehicles a day but needs between $125 million and $240 million in rehabilitation work within the next decade -- work that must occur within a two- to three-year period, NPS said.

"We can't see how this fits into our $240 million allocation," Knox said.

President Obama last month released a proposal to reauthorize federal highway funding known as the "GROW AMERICA Act." The $302 billion, four-year proposal would create a new $150 million annual program to fund projects of national significance on federal and tribal lands, such as the Memorial Bridge.

While it's a start, parks advocates warn that it could stretch the money too thin. In addition to all of the Interior Department bureaus, the Department of Defense and Army Corps of Engineers could also compete for the funding. "It makes everybody and their cousin eligible," said NPCA's Obey.

In the Senate

In the Senate, the Environment and Public Works Committee last month advanced a six-year highway bill that would maintain NPS's core $240 million in annual funding but would also allow federal lands highway projects to compete for $400 million per year for projects of "national or regional significance" (Greenwire, May 15).

But to the dismay of parks advocates, the bill set a $350 million threshold, which would only qualify Yellowstone's Grand Loop and a proposal to elevate more miles of the Tamiami Trail in Everglades National Park to improve water flow.

"That is a start," said Jennifer Talhelm, a spokewoman for Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who worked with EPW Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to ensure that parks projects could compete for the $400 million.

Udall has expressed interest in the Obama administration's proposed $150 million set aside for federal and tribal lands, but the price tag is a potential obstacle. New Mexico's national parks maintenance backlog is about $400 million, Talhelm said.

"Senator Udall has pushed to create a new program to address park roads and the significant national backlog," Talhelm said. "While there is bipartisan agreement that these roads need to be maintained and updated, the critical issue is, of course, funding."

Obey said both the Obama administration and Congress need to shoot higher. He's hopeful that an amendment boosting parks funding can be added on the Senate floor once the EPW Committee bill makes its way out of the Banking and Finance panels. Udall is seen as a potential sponsor, but nothing has been introduced.

Congress "should stop treating national parks and public lands as incidental or secondary assets, but rather as the core federal assets that they are, including significant transportation systems that serve states, communities and park visitors," Obey said last summer at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the parks backlog.

Other funding options

NPCA is proposing Congress allocate 1 cent out of the 18.4-cent federal gas tax for roads in parks and on public lands, which would raise $1.5 billion, plenty to cover NPS and other agencies' critical projects. No lawmakers have endorsed the proposal.

Deciding whether to change the gas tax -- which has not been raised since 1993 and has lagged behind inflation -- is a central challenge facing lawmakers in the highway bill, as it is the main funding source.

Yet another option is funding park roads outside of the highway bill, such as through the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a concept some lawmakers want to explore.

Created in the mid-1960s, LWCF collects money from offshore oil and gas drilling and authorizes up to $900 million annually to be spent on land acquisitions, conservation easements on private lands and grants for states to fund urban recreation, among other programs.

In recent years, appropriations for the fund have hovered around $300 million with many Republicans opposed to land acquisitions due to the maintenance backlogs faced by NPS and other lands agencies.

Republicans including Coburn and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) have suggested diverting some LWCF funds to deferred maintenance until the backlog is under control.

DeFazio believes an agreement is possible between environmentalists and fiscal conservatives to split funding between roads and conservation, as long as Congress approves mandatory full funding for LWCF.

"I'd be willing to negotiate a deal," he said of LWCF, which is up for its own reauthorization in 2015.