WASHINGTON — “Our parks are literally crumbling,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said last week at a meeting of senior National Park Service officials, repeating a theme he has sounded frequently since being confirmed earlier this year. Bernhardt described visiting a maintenance shed at Acadia National Park in coastal Maine where the grout between concrete blocks had worn away almost completely, he said, effectively creating new — and unwanted — windows.
Bernhardt’s remarks last week — delivered in the Interior Department’s penthouse, which is decorated by a recently restored 80-year-old Native American mural — made clear that the administration’s search for new revenue continues apace. Trump’s Interior Department has already considered raising entry fees to national parks. At the same time, the department has leased hundreds of thousands of acres to energy companies.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who created the national parks, often spoke of his love for unspoiled nature. By contrast, in his address to the national parks advisory council, Bernhardt spoke about parking lots that needed to be expanded to accommodate larger cars. There were several references to “enhancing” visitors’ experiences, as well as a reminder that the park service had always been “in the marketing business.
And yet when Trump proposed a budget in March that would have drastically cut funding for parks, Bernhardt praised the president for “an effort to restore fiscal sanity in Washington.” Three months later, he was in Yosemite with Pence, calling on Congress to fund the $12 billion repair shortfall. Goodwin, the Interior official, disputed any suggestion that the condition of national parks had been intentionally mischaracterized. “We stand by those estimates,” he said.
“Private companies are profiting off national parks that belong to all Americans — and they’re too often reaping the benefits without absorbing the full costs associated with operations,” Gentile told Yahoo News, calling Delaware North “a particularly egregious example of how concessionaires can manipulate a public good into a major private-sector handout.”
Parks are public land and access should be free and funded by the government
Trump is definitely the 'Creep-in-Chief'.
Good.