Ranking Member Grijalva: Next Century for National Park Service Must Be About “Doing More With More,” Not Fighting for Resources
Saguaro National Park, Ariz. – Speaking before Interim Superintendent Leah McGinnis and a diverse audience at Saguaro National Park outside Tucson, Ariz., today, Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva highlighted the opportunities and challenges facing the National Park Service (NPS) as its celebrates its 100th anniversary and looks ahead to its next set of goals. Grijalva emphasized the need to increase NPS funding, permanently reauthorize conservation programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), and reject political efforts to weaken, subdivide or transfer federally protected areas.
Rather than “doing less with less,” Grijalva said, the agency should be helped and encouraged by Congress “to do more with more.” Grijalva called on Congress to give NPS the resources it needs to protect its assets and maintain our national parks and public lands as the democratic institutions they were designed to be.
The LWCF is a popular program that uses a percentage of oil and gas revenue from federal leases to help the NPS, other agencies and state authorities to conserve land in collaboration with willing partners. Grijalva sponsors a bill, H.R. 1814, that would reauthorize the program permanently and prevent any potential lapse when it comes up for reauthorization in 2018. His bill has 209 bipartisan cosponsors but has not been brought for a vote by the Republican majority.
Grijalva emphasized in today’s remarks that efforts to transfer federally protected land to state or local authorities should be resisted. Such calls ignore the economic realities of managing federal land and would lead to the sale of previously public property to private developers at no benefit to the American people.
The National Park Service has been and continues to be one of the country’s greatest economic engines, creating more than 295,000 jobs and more than $32 billion in economic activity in 2015 alone. The next century, Grijalva said, should be about harnessing and increasing that potential rather than dividing it and selling its parts to private interests.
Ranking Member Grijalva with Saguaro National Park Interim Superintendent Leah McGinnis (courtesy of the Office of Rep. Grijalva)
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