B and B

Another state park story -- from Oregon

Land Use Watch provides the story of a state park system that was rescued from the brink of collapse through gubernatorial leadership. The state is Oregon and the governor is Ted Kulongoski—that is, Democrat Ted Kulogonski. From The Oregonian on August 8:

Brian Booth, the former longtime chairman of the state parks commission, says the governor deserves credit for helping spur what is being viewed as a renaissance for a state park system that just 10 years ago was on the brink of collapse.

"The public beaches and parks are the soul of Oregon," says Booth. He remembers the bleak days in 1996 when the parks commission was threatening to close dozens of state parks and Republican lawmakers were pushing a bill to privatize and commercialize others. "It's why people come from all over the world to see Oregon."

Of course, the governor did not do this alone.  The true impetus came from the citizens of the state:

An avid canoeist and backpacker, Kulongoski sat down with then-parks director Mike Carrier and questioned him about the possibility of building and staffing a series of new parks that would accentuate Oregon's cultural and environmental allure.

Four years earlier, voters had approved Ballot Measure 66, which dedicated 7.5 percent of state lottery revenues to parks. The initiative provided a huge financial boost to a system that had been cut off at the knees by a previous ballot measure that banned using gas taxes on parks.

...

At the groundbreaking [of the first new state park in 32 years] in June 2004, Kulongoski outlined his plan to open one new state park every year. "More people mean more demand for state-of-the-art parks and recreation facilities," he said. "This demand has gone unsatisfied for far too long."

Certainly Texas, 22-million people strong, can do at least as well as Oregon and its 3.6 million residents?

One new park a year for Oregon equates to six new parks a year for Texas.  Time to get busy.

False advertising

As DriveDemocracy points out, it appears the Republican government of the state of Texas has short-changed state parks to such an extent, that they even defrauded Texas citizens wishing to support the parks -- engaging in false advertising and diverting money from a license plate program ostensibly devoted to supporting our parks system.  As reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram yesterday:

Nature-loving Texans who cough up a little extra cash each year for license plates honoring the horned lizard or Texas bluebonnets are told that their money is being spent on state parks, fisheries and various wildlife projects.

But for several years, the Texas Legislature has been using money raised from specialty license plates to help balance the state budget, even as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is experiencing its most serious financial crisis ever, records show.

What other unpleasant surprises lurk behind the scenes in Austin?

Perry's parks sell-off already underway?

Eddie at The Red State here in San Antonio points to a post a DriveDemocracy that informs us that Rick Perry's sell-off of Texas state park land may have already begun:

Parks & Wildlife transferred 12,000 acres of the Black Gap Wildlife Area in Big Bend to the General Land Office so it can be sold.

This land is some of the most beautiful and important in our state. It includes Rio Grande River canyons considered among the wildest in America. A portion of the Rio Grande that runs through Black Gap has been designated a Wild and Scenic river by the federal government. And Perry’s going to sell it.

A quick Google News search turned up this confirmation from an Austin news station's web site:

The GLO says the land is not for sale but would "consider any offers brought to them."

That doesn't sound like 'not for sale' to me, unfortunately.

That same article points out this quote from our not-so-esteemed governor:

"If you've got a park somewhere that no one's using, that could bring in a substantial amount of money to operate parks that people are truly using, then I think it makes sense to have that debate."

This is what our governor thinks of our magnificent parks:  cut their budgets; slash their operating hours; claim they aren't used; then sell 'em off.

DriveDemocracy has some further ideas:

Parks make money for Texas. They bring jobs. They boost local economies. We ask that Governor Perry use a portion of the Texas Enterprise Fund, flush with tens of millions of dollars, to bail out our state park system.

Rather than use the Enterprise Fund to make millionaires out of Washington D.C. lobbyists and Tom DeLay cronies, the money ought to be invested in our state land for the benefit of all Texans.

We’re talking about the soul of Texas. By selling our land and closing state parks, we are denying future generations what our parents and grandparents left to us. That is a disgrace.

Texans are organizing to stop the plundering. In Fort Worth, citizens are fighting the sale of Eagle Mountain Lake to private developers.

We have produced a brief film about Black Gap – “God’s Country: For Sale” – that we will make available to organizers and activists throughout the state. The film tells the story of one place. But it’s a story that’s relevant to all our public land.

It's pretty clear Perry would never follow the suggestion to use the Enterprise Fund, or any other fund, to bail out our state parks.  He's had six years.

But Texans can vote for new leaders in November.  It's our only hope for any change on this, and many other, important public concerns.

Gov. Perry takes on the Texas state park crisis

What better way to get back into regular blogging than to talk yet again about our wonderful state parks in Texas and their tremendous neglect by our state government?  Actually, a better way would be to talk about our wonderful state parks in Texas and how, at long last, our state government has woken up to the problem and is addressing it post haste.

Sadly, being a member of the reality-based community, I'm going to have to do the former.

Something I missed over the last few months while paying attention to more personal matters is that our governor, the Republican Rick Perry, has asked all state governments to slash their budgets by 10%.  All of them.  Even ones, like Texas Parks and Wildlife, whose budget had already been raided over the years to the point of starvation.

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Friday (emphasis mine):

To comply with a recent budgeting request by Perry, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department may recommend the closure of 18 parks and historical sites, further cuts in administrative staff, the shutdown of a regional center and nearly $4 million in cuts for local parks, said agency director Robert Cook.

“I’m not [saying] this because I want to scare anybody — but these are some of the things we’re seriously looking at,” said Cook, speaking Friday before a special committee examining the department’s ongoing budget woes.

...

Cook said one alternative would be the shutdown of “big money losers” for the parks system. He noted that list would include such popular and historically significant attractions as the San Jacinto Battleground near Houston and the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City. “And those aren’t good options — any of them,” he said. ``I’ve got to look somewhere else.”

A spokeswoman for Perry said the governor opposes the shutdown of historical sites, but that the agency should consider options for those parks that receive few visitors. She also said that it makes sense from a budgeting standpoint for all agency directors to look for ways to trim fat.

“The governor has an excellent relation with Parks and Wildlife [and] the governor does have a concern about the adequacy of funding for the parks department,” said spokeswoman Kathy Walt.

But the agency needs to submit its budget request and go through the process of looking at its priorities, she said.

During Perry’s tenure, state spending on parks has gone down while state spending overall has gone up.

Perry didn't invent this problem, but he has contributed to it over the last six years via his neglect, and now is proposing to make it even worse, even to the point of suggesting selling off some state park lands.

Because of this typical example of Perry-style leadership, there are no fewer than three major candidates vying to oust Perry in the general election this November: independent Kinky Friedman, Republican-turned-independent Carole Keeton Stayhorn, and Democrat Chris Bell.

Being a Democrat myself, I'm looking to Bell to provide some leadership on this issue.  Unfortunately, his website reveals no apparent interest in this subject -- at least none that I can find.  Fortunately, there is still time to change that and help bring this issue before the voters.

Heed the words of this recent editorial from the Victoria Advocate (emphasis mine):

We encourage Perry's opponents ... to make this a major issue in their campaigns to unseat the incumbent.

We also want to know specifically which state parks the governor would sell off. We then want to see him travel to the parts of the state where those parks are located to argue that their sale is good for Texas. Given the popularity of state parks and the pride people feel in the ones near where they live, Perry might not find warm welcomes.

Texas Observer on the State Parks crisis

The Texas Observer has an excellent article on the Texas state park system's legislature-induced crisis. It's the same story I've been relaying for several months now, but with further details filled in. It's well worth a read, if only to remind ourselves of what needs to be done.

Here is an excerpt:

Quality-of-life factors, such as parks and amenities, are second only to an educated work force as the top criteria companies use when evaluating locations, Dabney said. In 2001, when Dallas-Fort Worth was one of three finalists for Boeing’s new corporate headquarters, DFW and Texas offered more tax breaks and incentives than Chicago and Illinois did. But Boeing ended up going to Chicago, which includes 87,000 acres of open space, parks, and forests in Cook County in its quality-of-life portfolio. Instead of increasing funding of parks to make Texas more attractive, Texas leaders responded with cutbacks. [Walt] Dabney [director of state parks for Texas Parks and Wildlife] says that’s a dumb way to operate a government, especially if you’re trying to operate it like a business. “Tourism is the second or third component of the Texas economy and parks are the biggest component of the tourism segment,” he said. “If you’re not taking care of that, that’s bad economics.”

“What we’ve been doing is very parochial,” admitted [Parks and Wildlife Commission Chairman Joseph] Fitzsimons. “It’s ad hoc. There’s still not a plan to say how are we going to acquire new land, how are we going to tie the demand and the constituency to the service. The fish and wildlife constituency stay drilled into the department on a daily basis, from the squirrel hunters to the catfishermen to the bowhunters. They know their money [from hunting and fishing licenses] is going to the fish and wildlife division. They’re making sure they’re represented. But when you buy a canoe or a kayak or a mountain bike, you don’t have any expectations the sales tax from that is going to a place where you can use it. The sporting goods tax is a joke. It’s essentially GR [general revenue]. The sales of paddle craft have quintupled in the past 10 years. But I don’t have any more kayak trails to offer.”

...

The solutions are simple. Raise the cap on the sporting goods tax from $35 million to $85 million, as Rep. Harvey Hilderbran (R-Kerrville) has proposed. Better yet, eliminate the cap on the sporting goods tax altogether, as [former Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Bob] Armstrong suggests. Make it an honest user tax. Last year’s take of more than $100 million is more than enough to operate the parks division and to launch a program to buy more parkland for future generations. And the governor would do well to occasionally appoint a member to the Parks and Wildlife Commission who is a parks-first advocate. If nothing else, that would bring a different point of view to the table.

Will Texans save their parks for their children and grandchildren? If so, we had better get busy.

Bush's public land sale sputters along

A feel-good headline from the Rocky Mountain News: "Forest land sale sputters."

The first line isn't bad either.

There's little support for a Bush administration plan to sell 300,000 acres of Forest Service land, federal officials said Wednesday as they extended the public comment period.

The comment period would have expired today, but now we've got until April 30.

Meanwhile, two Democratic western Senators have a solution for Bush's de-funding of rural schools, which, as you may recall, has been the administration's pseudo-rationale for proposing the land sale in the first place.

U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is introducing legislation today that will fund the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act without selling public lands. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is cosponsoring the measure.

The bill will raise $2.6 billion over the next ten years for the rural schools program, commonly known as the county payments law, by closing a tax loophole that allows some government contractors to avoid their tax obligations.

...

The legislation would provide a steady revenue stream for the county payments law by closing a tax loophole in Federal contracts. Under current law, the Federal government does not withhold taxes owed from government contractors that provide goods and services to the Federal government. As a result, some contractors don’t comply with Federal tax law.

The Baucus proposal will help close the annual "tax gap" by withholding taxes from payments by the Federal government for goods and services delivered by public contractors at a rate of three percent of the payment amount.

While Senators Baucus and Wyden show some leadership, the Bushies, in the person of senior Ag Department official Mark Rey, show none. One of Rey's favorite lines is that there are no alternatives to funding rural schools other than selling off our national heritage, little by little. Just yesterday, he said, ”We're open to alternatives, but nary another alternative has emerged.”

What will his tune be tomorrow?

Crownridge Canyon: a new San Antonio nature park

Thanks to the foresight of the voters of San Antonio back in the year 2000, we all have a new nature park as of this past weekend—Crownridge Canyon Natural Area, 207 acres of Hill Country on the far northwest side, amidst an enveloping sea of fast-growing subdivisions. The grand opening was Saturday morning at 9. Not being much of a morning person, I didn't make that, but we did drop by for a brief visit late that afternoon. As you can see, I got a few pictures.

Compared to the 8,000-plus acres of Government Canyon State Natural Area, the 207 acres of Crownridge may seem like small potatoes. But, like the similarly-sized, twenty-year-old Friedrich Wilderness Park just a couple miles away, Crownridge Canyon will inevitably become a special place in the minds of many San Antonians. As the Friends of Friedrich Wilderness Park website says, these modest-sized parks provide "an opportunity for visitors to experience the sights, sounds, and scents of nature in a landscape of creeks, springs, hilltops, and wooded canyons."

Nearly a year ago, the San Antonio Express-News wrote about a sneak-preview tour of the park given by the city:

The Crownridge Canyon Natural Area is the first preserve resulting from about 6,500 acres funded by a sales tax increase that voters approved in 2000. The tax was meant to protect natural land near the aquifer, San Antonio's primary source of water, from the booming residential development in Northern Bexar County....

Staff provided short tours through the natural area, which is home to the endangered golden-cheeked warbler, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, butterflies and feral hogs.

The area will provide nature-based recreation including hiking, day camping and wildlife watching.

When completed, there will be about two miles of trails, nearly half paved with pervious material for wheelchairs and strollers and the other half natural.

"It's for people who want to get away from it all. Listen to the birds, hear the wind blow through the trees," said Janis Merritt, a park native plant specialist.

"It's a different experience from our city parks with soccer fields and picnic areas."

Visitors to Crownridge Canyon said they were impressed by the effort to keep the area natural and apart from the high-priced neighborhoods around it.

"You can see what this area was like before the development. We're surrounded by houses, but some places in here you wouldn't know because it's so quiet," said Francine Romero, a supporter of Proposition 1. "San Antonio has so many beautiful areas, and we're losing them so fast. I don't want people to forget."

During our visit, we perused natural history exhibits housed in a large open-air shelter. On the walls and floor of the shelter is a mural with a very watery theme—designed, undoubtedly, to remind visitors of the reasons why this land was spared from development.

News of the park's opening must not have spread very far yet, for, despite the perfect weather, we were one of only a handful of groups at the park. So it was quiet and peaceful. We proceeded up the wide, paved trail, catching glimpses of mansions dotting the hill tops surrounding the park and pausing to snap pictures and enjoy the late afternoon sun shining through the red oak leaves just budding out after a short, dry winter.

We admired the solid trail engineering—far more substantial than anything done by the volunteer trail building crew at Government Canyon State Natural Area of which we had been a part. The city clearly put a premium on accessibility.

As we reached the far point of the loop, a narrower, unpaved trail—more typical of those at Government Canyon—set off into the woods. Leaving that short adventure for another day, we continued following the paved path back towards the park entrance. Along the way, we watched a juvenile Red-shouldered Hawk circle above us before landing in a red oak a couple hundred feet across a meadow.

As we exited the park, we were reminded that what is left of the peace and quiet in this part of the Hill Country is not going to last much longer, apart from a few oases such as Crownridge Canyon. A sign in front of a large, undeveloped grassland advertised the opening of a private high school—coming in summer 2006.

Fortunately, the voters of San Antonio showed further foresight a year ago in extending the aquifer-protection sales tax for another four years. So, while subdivisions and car dealerships eat up our natural landscape more and more every year, more new city nature parks are in the works.

Forum on rescuing Texas' state parks, Houston, April 7

Those interested in solving the legislative neglect of Texas' state parks and who will be in the Houston area on Friday, April 7, take note. On that day, there will be a forum—hosted by the University of Houston-Downtown, the Sierra Club, and the Texas Coalition for Conservation—called 'Concerned Public to the Rescue of Texas State Parks.' It will address plans on where to obtain the necessary money to adequately fund our parks.

From the Houston Chronicle:

"We're hoping to give people the information they need to be effective advocates for the state park system," said Evelyn Merz, who is helping coordinate [the forum] at the University of Houston-Downtown.

...

"How park funding got into this tremendous crisis is much less important than how we solve the problem — how we find a long-term solution to the funding issue," Merz said.

To do that, the public and politicians need to grasp the gravity of parks' problems and see some potential methods of resolving it, she said.

To that end, forum speakers will including Walt Dabney, director of the state parks division of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and Joe Turner, director of the City of Houston's parks and recreation department, to help explain underfunding's impact on parks and the public.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend. But perhaps we can put something like this together in San Antonio, and other cities around Texas, soon.

Casey on Texas state parks

An excellent summary of the Texas state park system's current troubles was provided yesterday by Rick Casey, former columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and current columnist for the Houston Chronicle. (His move a few years back was a big loss for our local paper.) Some excerpts:

It seemed like a great idea about 15 years ago.

Texas state parks had always been a budgetary stepchild, so the Legislature decided to dedicate some of the money from the tax on sales of sporting goods to fund the parks.

They didn't want to gold-plate the parks, you understand, so the fund would be capped at $32 million. That amount would also include some money for development of city and county parks.

...

But a few years ago, the legislators who couldn't properly fund schools or health insurance for children in low-income families not surprisingly also decided they couldn't properly fund parks.

They cut the $32 million for parks, which had been set way back in 1993 and had not been adjusted for inflation, to about $20 million.

At first the state Department of Parks and Wildlife responded the way organizations typically do when their budgets are pinched.

...

"Last year we ran out of wiggle room," said Parks Director Walt Dabney. "In November we eliminated 73 positions and cut back operations in about 50 parks."

What we have is a parks system that is held together by rubber bands.

The average age of the system's vehicles is 10 years, with an average of about one new vehicle purchase a year in the past four years.

At Choke Canyon there is no potable water because the water system hasn't been repaired. Repairs from Hurricane Rita at the Sabine Pass Battleground State Historical Site and at Martin Dies Jr. State Park near Jasper aren't expected to be completed until summer 2008 at the earliest.

Many facilities are open only Fridays through Sundays, and many have discontinued or curtailed overnight camping.

The B and B team visited Choke Canyon State Park, two hours south of our base, a couple Mondays ago for one of our excellent birding adventures (which I hope to write up something about soon). Fortunately, we had plenty of our own water, as we were surprised to find out there was no water in the park. Now, thanks to Casey, we know the reason why.

I was not surprised to find out that Choke Canyon had eliminated overnight camping, as I had read about that when the cuts hit last fall. But I was surpised and disappointed to discover that we would be kicked out of the campground area near the shoreline of the lake, where we having a very productive and enjoyable birding afternoon, at 4:30 PM—with hours of daylight left.

Choke Canyon is a fine park that deserves better treatment than this. Our state can do better.

(Via By the Bayou.)

More opposition to Bush's "sneaker" public lands sale

GOP Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina have added their voices to the rising tide opposed to the Bush administration's plan to sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of public land this year to temporarily fill a budget gap.

Yesterday, Alexander said, "I think the administration, with all respect, needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea." He added, "It kind of reminds me of selling off the 'back 40' to pay the rent. It's short-term thinking."  Dole wrote a letter to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources saying "I do not believe it is a wise investment to sell our public lands in return for short-term funding of a program that deserves full funding on its own — especially when the lands have been selected without the input of local communities and park rangers."

In this opinion, Alexander and Dole join numerous Democrats and a significant number of Republicans, including at least three other GOP Senators—Conrad Burns of Montana, Larry Craig of Idaho, and John Thune of South Dakota.  Meanwhile, the congressional GOP leadership, in the person of Alexander's fellow Tennessee Senator, Bill Frist, stands with its collective finger in the wind—balancing their instinct to join the Bushies in privatizing public interests against vocal criticism from the voters who put them in office.

Advocates for the privatization agenda are thus forced to rely on their mercenaries—the think-tanks funded by numerous right-wing foundations. Think-tanks such as the Property and Environment Research Center, whose Holly Fretwell writes in the online Wall Street Journal today:

[T]he idea [for the sale of these public lands] is closer to holding a federal yard sale to clear out some of the junk that has accumulated over the years.

Note that this 300,000 acres of "junk" is so junky that the feds think they can get $800 million dollars for it.

Let's hear more about what Fretwell has to say about this surprisingly valuable junk:

At least one-quarter of the lands proposed for sale in the Gallatin National Forest near Bozeman, Mont., are inaccessible to the public. Other acreage is near metropolitan areas and has lost its Forest Service character: A small Forest Service parcel in Oregon is in the middle of a parking lot; another is being used to grow crops. Finally, some of these lands were previously designated for land exchange (trades with other agencies or private owners).

Left unasked—if we can trust Fretwell's descriptions—is how in the world did someone get away with paving a parking lot over an entire parcel of public land?

According to Fretwell, land exchange—the traditional, widely supported, way for the Forest Service to get rid of isolated parcels while improving public access to other parcels—is just too troublesome to bother with.  She gives only the barest of justifications for this novel opinion.

Fretwell throws out several deceptive comments in this piece, leading me to conclude that it is not a serious attempt to convince a wary public, but simply a pile of PR baloney—typical of Wall Street Journal op-eds and all-too common from administration supporters these days.

For instance, she misleads her readers by saying, "To ensure there are no 'sneakers' in there, as [Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture David Tenny] calls them, the public will have a chance to comment on all acres proposed for sale."

This is true in words, but false in spirit. The public comment period is a mere 30 days long, is already 22 days old, and the feds did not even release the maps of the parcels to be sold until several days into this brief comment period. How are interested citizens to be expected to gather sufficient information on 300,000 acres worth of land spread over the entire country? The original list was reportedly compiled hurriedly in the few weeks prior to the program's announcement last month, with little critical thought about the nature of the parcels in question. Many "sneakers" are likely to slip through these gaping holes.

Fretwell also furthers the deception, originally thrown out by Mark Rey, Undersecretary of Agriculture and Bush's point man on this public lands sale, that the lands to be sold are worthless to the public. Fretwell writes, "Unlike Forest Service lands that contain important watersheds and wildlife habitat, these lands are a costly burden that all taxpayers are paying for. Let's stop the wastage."

With how quickly the list was thrown together and the ever-so-brief amount of time the public is being given to examine it, no one knows the true value of most of these lands. Declaring that they are a "costly burden" and "wastage" is a load of horse manure.

Listen to Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, who wrote to Mark Rey last week:

"While the Forest Service has indicated that these lands were selected because they are isolated, in actuality many of the tracts appear to be accessible, utilized and valuable."

Also from Missouri,

Jim Scheff of Missouri Forest Alliance said the Mark Twain [National Forest] list was compiled without thorough environmental analysis of the parcels and surveys of wildlife species and activities on the land. He said he "has no doubt" that there are parcels that provide important wildlife habitat.

This entire land sale is a "sneaker"—an old, worn out one with no further use.