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Show TAKE IT OR "All the news that causes fits." THE CANYON COUNTRY. ZEPHYR EAVE IT. P.O.BOX327 MOAB, UT 84532 Jim Stiles, publisher (435) 259-7773 By Jim Stiles www.canyoncountryzephyr.com cczephyr@frontiernet.net moabzephyr@yahoo.com FEDERAL LAND as IS caer T CH MONEY? A HISTOR eee Rala9 KenSleight Robert Funkhouser Erica Walz @raDep rreNleels ess) kisi Wendell Berry Martin Murie Dan Rosen Bill Boyle Mark Steen Philip Hyde Chinle Miller Jack Bannion Lance Christie Nemo Glitz 6 the Heath Monitor Files At the core of this issue’s cover po land agencies of the federal government, that public land administrations are severely green. historic photographs 2 ao ep Gary Henderson subscriptions 6 transcriptions inda Vaughan circulation Moak. Marianne Apadaca Salt Lake City: Nancy Jacobsen Colorado/Arizona: Ken Hodges G Mark Anderson THE ZEPHYR. copyright 2004, Vb st siesta la 8 ~ The Zephyr is publishedsix timesa irs at Moab, Utah. The opinionsexpressed herein are not necessarily those of its vendors, advertisers, or even, at times, of its publisher. Allphotos andcartoons are by the publisher unless otherwise noted. that the parks and forests and BLM lands are from the federal fee demonstration program (fee demo), the management and infrastructure of all public lands will crumble and collapse. To quote Seinfeld, “yada yada.” Ihave the unique perspective of having been a government employee for over a decade. True, | was only a lowly seasonal ranger at Arches National Park. And it’s also true that it’s been a while since I wore the grey and Herb Ringer (1913-1998) a ae underfunded, suffering as a result, and that without this needed infusion of money MaCip aya John Depuy e4) Vig leldeaereL GS Seti ecosy] EVER SUCH A THING AS is the notion, perpetuated by the But from what I can observe, not much changed since I left the National Park Service, 15 years ago. Then as now, it was never a matter of not having enough money to efficiently and adequately runa national park; instead it was the park’s inability to prioritize its needs and spend accordingly. For several years, in the mid-eighties, | used to make a bet every March with the chief naturalist at Arches. Every spring, the administration at the park was hit with the threat of possible budget cuts and spending restrictions and the staff responded accordingly. It usually meant that the seasonal staff would be brought on duty later than planned, to save money. Despite the fact that, even then, tourists were pouring into the park in droves by mid-March, the park was often without a staff to protect the resource or provide aid and assistance to the visitors. “There’s no money! What else can we do?” cried the park superintendent. “Money is as tight as bark on a tree,” he used to say. The chief naturalist concurred for one ue ae es crew collected trash from standard hout the campground. The system seemed to work, Then itdecided to replace the cans witha reduced number of bins. The old cans were discarded, new bins were purchased How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape. houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one we bother least about John Galsworthy 1867-1933 at a cost of $20,000, new hydraulics were installed on the trucks to lift the bins at a cost of more thousands of dollars, and a year later, the NPS dumped trash collection by NPS staff altogether and went to a private contractor. That didn’t work and a year later, the NPS took over again and replaced all the bins with cans, reinforcing the Cyclical Theory of Stupidity. * A decade or so ago, the NPS decided to replace all the fire grates in the Devils Garden campground. The old grates were still working and their new replacements didn’t look any different. The NPS hauled all sixty steel grates to the dump where an enterprising local commercial campground owner grabbed them and used them in his own business. For once, at least, someone benefitted from Park Service ineptitude. * When I first Wein arrived ee air rontinonts at Arches, the visitor center was cooled by a Systegy It wes expensive to operate and the with efficient ssaparauie air coolers-swamp coéleron we call them here in the West. They worked well, but when a new super arrived in ite late 80s, the first thing he did was to tear out th lers and them with, you guessed it, a refrigerated air conditioning system. By. then, I was here at The Zephyr and | asked for an explanation. He said it was needed because the new computers could not handle the heat, which I found sort of odd since I'd been cooling my computer room with a swamp cooler for years. * The Arches Entrance Station. For years the pay station at Arches was a small kiosk-like structure, about the size of an outhouse, that sat in front of the visitor center. In the early 90s, it was torn down and replaced by something quite similar. The Zephyr even reported the new construction and praised the NPS for its fiscal restraint. We learned that the new entrance station had been built for $10,000 an Park Service day labor to build it. It looked like this: : | But when it came to the entrance station itself, what was wrong with the old one? They could have moved the old entrance station to its new location and built two more just like it, for a cost of maybe $30,000. Instead they built th and so one year, I asked her to put her money where her mouth was. In the federal government, the fiscal year runs from October 1 to October 1. There was also a rule that prohibited any federal agency from carrying over surplus funds froma previous year. So, when it comes to spending, as the fiscal year draws to a close, the battle cry is, “Use it or lose it.” They are required to spend their allocated budget by October 1. “Yl bet you,” I satd, “that by early September, you'll be even be ae to the seasonals, looking for ways to spend the ‘year-end’ money you're about to lose.” She took the bet. I won. The stuff the park used to buy in September was mind-boggling. We’d get all kinds of new camping gear and medical equipment to replace the equipment we already had, which was already quite adequate and which had usually been purchased with previous yearend spending spree money. The chief naturalist paid off, I got my steak dinner and received my free meal every year for the next two years until my winning became such a sure deal she wanted odds. I used to see money squandered in ways that would make a fiscal conservative pull his hair out. Just a few examples from my archive of goofy NPS spending sprees: * Arches could never decide how to handle its garbage collection. In the early years, in the campground, With visitation soaring in the 90s, the need for another station became apparent. Often cars and RVs backed up to the highway as visitors waited to pay their fees. Last year, the NPS, working with the Utah Department of Transportation, designed and built a new entrance road. They extended the road almost a half mile south to a point where visitors can exit US 191 more safely. No complaint from here on that move. I didn’t like it but it was necessary. PAGE2 I’ve asked the NPS for the cost of this new monster entrance station-it looks like an airport terminal to me—and have not heard back, but my guess is that it’s about $500,000. What was the point? Does this somehow enhance a visitor’s park experience? Does a tourist feel better forking over his inflated entrance fee when he can pass beneath the portals of a structure like this? Meanwhile, the interpretive staff suffers, the backcountry suffers, all because there isn’t enough money in the budget. And what else has the NPS done with its feedemo money? Well, they constructed a half million dollar cut stone stairway in the Windows and they installed heaters in the campground toilets and winterized the campground water pipes, mostly so they could justify charging fees yearround. So the bottom line here is that nothing has changed. FEE DEMO is a new angle on an old story. It goes on and on, year after year, decade after decade. These federal land agencies never have enough money. They always want more. But the cold hard truth is, if they ever learn how to efficiently use the funding they receive, if they ever learn to spend their budgets in the places where it’s most needed, they won’t have to complain. They will have finally learned how to live within their means, the way most of us have to live. (I welcome input and criticism from the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Tell me where I’m wrong. Or even where I’m right.) FREEDOM: WHO NEEDS IT ANY WAY? On page 4 of this issue is an essay by Michael Wolcott and his recent travails at the Glen Canyon Dam visitor center. According to Michael, the War on Terror has now reached Page, Arizona. In fact, I suggest you stop here, read Wolcott's Point Blank article and then come back. See you ina few minutes... OK, now you have yet one more example of how ridiculous we’ve become as a nation since September 11. We are a fearful and timid people. We're pitiful. I had my own experience at the dam, just a few weeks after Michael. I’d read his essay but didn’t somehow grasp the extent of the search operations at the visitor center until I walked through the reflective doors and encountered the uniformed lady with her wand and pistol. This security staff wasn’t even Park Service and when I asked them if they were federal agents, they got downright huffy-it turned out they were a private security company, “under contract to the federal government,” as one of them snarled. Or “rent-a-cops” as Wolcott more succinctly called them. After I’d been patted down, I stopped to linger a moment on the other side and watched pac Sn couE after another walk through the front door. A li d meekly, “But I don’t want |