State Parks Look for Ways of Surviving the Budget Ax (TIME)

[eppur_se_muova]

By MATT VILLANO Sunday, Aug. 02, 2009

Among some hikers in the San Francisco Bay Area, the quad-straining trail to the summit of 4,344-ft. Mount St. Helena near Calistoga, Calif., is known as "the stairway to heaven" for its panoramic views of the Napa and Sonoma valleys. These views, however, soon may be off-limits to visitors — the latest victim of the Golden State's staggering budget crisis. The trail sits within Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, one of up to 100 state parks in California that might be closed by Labor Day to help close a budget gap of $26 billion. While the Department of Parks and Recreation isn't releasing a list of potential sites on the chopping block, the stairway-to-heaven park likely is at risk because it has some of the lowest attendance figures in Northern California.

The news from Sacramento could be a lot worse: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's original proposal was to cut $70 million from the parks and recreation budget, which would have shuttered 220 of 279 state parks. That outcome was averted by a last-minute legislative agreement in late July that leaves the parks people needing to cut just $16.6 million. "The situation is still very serious," says Ruth Coleman, the state's director of parks. "We're charged with protecting these natural treasures and making them available to the public, but for the first time ever, we simply don't know how we're going to do that without closing some parks for good."
(Read "Spotlight: California's Budget Crisis")

And California is not alone. Budget gaps are forcing officials in just about every state to scale back hours, reduce services and close even some of their most popular tracts of open space. But rather than panic, park officials are looking for alternative approaches to funding what was once exclusively paid for by the government. "After years of suffering budget cuts and scrambling for strategies to make ends meet, it's almost like parks people have had enough," says Phil McKnelly, executive director of the National Association of State Park Directors, an industry group in Raleigh, N.C. "People finally realize there has to be a better way."

This epiphany certainly didn't happen overnight. Most states have sliced parks budgets for the better part of the last decade — in some cases shrinking ledger sheets by as much as 70%. In Colorado, for example, Bonny Lake State Park in the Eastern Plains near the Kansas border had been open year-round but now will be closed from October through April, and will also trim its staff from four employees to one. "At the same time we're cutting back, we have one of the fastest growing states in the country, full of people who come here for the beauty and want to be able to get out and enjoy nature," says Dean Winstanley, director of Colorado State Parks.

As states carry out these cutbacks, many park officials have started investigating long-term strategies to find more reliable sources of funding. Margaret Bailey, senior vice president with CHM Government Services, a consulting firm in Beverly, Mass., says parks are trying to move away from operating with money in their states' General Fund accounts. These catchall coffers historically have financed public spaces but in recent years have been decimated by legislatures redirecting much-needed cash to fill other lines in their budgets. Of the seven state park systems that are not tethered to their General Funds, Oregon finances its parks with money from the state lottery. Maryland uses a 0.5% tax on all real estate transactions to fund its parks. Similar initiatives exist in Missouri, which dedicates a fraction of the sales tax to parks, and Texas, which applies an extra tax to sporting goods and recreational equipment.
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more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914009,00.html?xid=rss-topstories-cnnpartner




Looks like MD is doing it right.

[Not Me]

1. State parks, city parks, zoos, libraries, public pools, museums/galleries

are all having a horribly hard time in this economy. When municipalities have to make the choice between police/fire protection and lifeguards or librarians, the public security budget always wins.