Park Barrel

An Oregon legislator, Fred Girod, wants to make Silver Creek Falls, a popular recreation area, into a national park. Such a park, he says, would be a “magnet for tourism,” which would be good for businesses in his district.

One of the waterfalls in Silver Creek Falls State Park. Trails take hikers behind many of the falls.
Flickr photo by John Hann. Click photo for a larger view

Of course, a state legislature cannot create a national park. But even if it could, would this be a good idea?

The National Park Service’s first director, Stephen Mather, believed that national parks should be limited to the “crown jewels” of the nation. He strenuously opposed proposals to create national parks out of areas that he believed were of less than national significance, even going so far as to persuade President Coolidge to veto a park bill. Mather promoted the creation of a state park system in every state so that these areas of less than national significance could receive some protection for recreation use.

Mather’s Park Service even once studied the Silver Creek Falls area as a potential national park, but rejected it because it had been logged over by timber companies. Silver Creek Falls State Park currently has about 9,000 acres that include 14 spectacular waterfalls as much as 178 feet high. But waterfalls are pretty common in Oregon — you can find as many (and several taller ones) in the Columbia River Gorge. It isn’t clear why a few waterfalls are deserving of the same status as, say, Crater Lake or Yellowstone.

This waterfall is visible from the road in Silver Creek Falls State Park, but seeing most of the falls requires a moderately difficult (because of slippery trails) 4- to 7-mile hike.
Flickr photo by kightp. Click photo for a larger view.
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When Mather was incapacitated by a stroke, his replacement went on an acquisition binge and persuaded Congress and the president to add numerous monuments, historic sites, and other areas to the National Park System. Since then, the Park Service has swung between such growth in acreage (particularly in the 1930s and 1970s) and construction projects in the parks (particularly in the 1960s and 1980s). Today, the Park Service manages about 30 different kinds of parks, including parks, monuments, historic sites, recreation areas, and so forth.

In the 1960s, Stewart Udall appointed George Hartzog as director of the Park Service. Hartzog soon learned that the chair of the House Appropriations Committee had no interest in boosting the Park Service’s budget because there were no parks in his district. Hartzog and Udall decided they needed to have a park in every state and a historic site or some other designation in every Congressional district so that every member of Congress would have an interest in increasing the agency’s budget.

They found a friend in Representative Phil Burton, who wanted to create some national parks in California. To get broad support in Congress, he put together packages of dozens of new parks in states and Congressional districts all over the country. These became known as “park barrel” bills.

Hartzog invented another strategy to maintain park budgets. In 1968, President Johnson did not want to be the first president to propose a federal budget of more than $100 billion, so he ordered most federal agencies to cut their budget requests by 10 percent. Rather than cut the budgets of the least-used parks, Hartzog decided to “spread the paid” and ordered the closure of many popular camp sites and other recreation areas.

Most importantly, he closed the elevators in the Washington Monument. When tourists complained, park personnel on the Washington mall told them to direct their complaints to their members of Congress a mile or so away. Johnson fumed, but Congress quickly restored the Park Service’s budget. Since then, any government agency that cuts a popular program in an effort to get more funding is said to be using the “Washington Monument strategy.” (More about Pork Service history is available here.)

Not all Park Service directors have sought to expand their empires. James Ridenour, under the first President Bush, followed in Mather’s footsteps by opposing the willy-nilly creation of new parks, which he said “thinned the blood” of the National Park System. Congress is eager to create new parks but is less interested in maintaining old ones. So the Park Service didn’t have enough money to manage the parks it already had, and creating new ones just added new burdens to the system.

Nor is it clear that designating Silver Creek Falls as a national park would really help the economy in Representative Girod’s district. Many national parks receive less recreation use than Silver Creek Falls attracts today. Some units of the National Park System (not national parks) receive less than 10 visitor days of use per day (a visitor day is 12 hours of recreation use). Some idea of national park visitation rates can be gained from this table. Though the data are from 1994, overall national park visitation has not changed much since then.

The Oregon State Parks Department says that Silver Creek Falls is its most popular state park. It earns $800,000 a year from the million annual visits to Silver Creek Falls, which isn’t quite enough to cover its costs, but is close. Oregon and the National Park System would be better off leaving the area in the hands of the state parks department rather than convincing Congress to make it a national park.