Park Service Tabulates Repair Backlog

Yosemite needs about $43 million in repairs; Sequoia/Kings, $40 million.

by Michael Doyle
Fresno Bee - March 29, 2004

Dollar by dollar, Yosemite National Park's maintenance backlog adds up.

Broken sinks. Peeling paint. Crumbling trails, shaggy shrubbery and fallen fences.

There are small projects waiting, such as the $62 tree-trimming work needed at the Arch Rock Picnic Area. There are medium-size projects, such as the $10,697 replacement of fire rings at the El Capitan Picnic Area. And then there is the supersize work, such as the $249,587 upgrade of the electrical system at the Yosemite Valley Visitors Center.

All told, a first-of-its-kind assessment shows, Yosemite faces at least $43.3 million worth of backed-up maintenance needs that in some cases have lingered for years.

"With a big park like Yosemite, we're spread out, and we've got so many different things to take care of," Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. "There's so much here."

Yosemite's identified maintenance needs are not particularly unusual, compared to those of other national parks. At nearby Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, for instance, officials have tallied more than $40 million worth of deferred maintenance.

Some parks need even more work. Grand Canyon National Park has tallied $67.8 million worth of deferred maintenance, which does not include estimates for campsite and sewage-system repairs.

It's a lot of money, but the alternative is hardly cheaper.

Replacing all of the run-down Yosemite assets, instead of repairing them, would cost more than $560 million, according to estimates.

"Some of these assets we're talking about are precious," said Tim Harvey, an El Portal native and former Yosemite employee who now leads the National Park Service's facilities management team.

Harvey helped put together the Park Service's first comprehensive inventory of assets: the buildings, roads, trails, campgrounds, houses and sewage and water systems upon which park visitors rely.

For all but four asset-intensive parks nationwide, the agency's computers can spit out reports useful for number crunchers and resource managers alike.

"This is a phenomenal undertaking," said Sue Masica, associate Park Service director for planning, facilities and lands. "People elsewhere [in government] aren't doing what we're doing; we're on the leading edge of trying to implement industry standards."

The asset inventory is important because the National Park Service's maintenance backlog has long consumed park officials, local lawmakers and environmental advocates. The concern grows, moreover, as officials face questions about Park Service spending.

On Thursday, for instance, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella assured lawmakers that she was immediately suspending all foreign travel by her agency. The Park Service spent $650,000 on foreign travel in 2002 and $300,000 last year as part of a $44 million overall travel budget that Mainella pledged to cut.

"Who's minding the store here? Are you all sort of oblivious to what's going on?" Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., who serves on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, demanded of Mainella.

Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House panel overseeing national parks, questioned Park Service priorities even more sharply. Rahall asserts that President Bush has sought "only incremental increases" in park maintenance budgets, and that Bush's park proposals "have never approached the levels promised during the [2000] campaign."

In 1998, the General Accounting Office reported, the backlog had reached $4.9 billion. That estimate, though, was not really an item-by-item accounting. Rather, Mainella told lawmakers, the widely reported figure was "just a compilation of desired projects in parks" rather than a comprehensive assessment.

But over the past several years, Park Service officials began compiling a truly systematic tally. It hasn't always come easy. Park superintendents and rangers out in the field sometimes resist headquarters innovations.

The results, nonetheless, are taking shape. Last summer, for instance, a team of contractors visited Yosemite for about a week.

Accompanied by park officials armed with laptop computers and digital cameras, they checked out each and every Yosemite asset: the 344 buildings, 24 campgrounds, 288 trails, 25 sewage systems and more.

Ultimately, they came up with individual repair and replacement estimates, as well as what the Park Service calls a "facility condition index" for comparison purposes. This compares the repair cost to the replacement cost. A separate "asset priority index" ranks the facilities by how important they are to the park's overall mission.

"It's extremely valuable," Gediman said, "because it enables us to prioritize the different maintenance projects that we do. This will enable us to look two or three years down the road."

At Kings Canyon, for instance, officials found a water distribution system at Grant Grove needing repair at an estimated cost of $4 million and picnic tables at Lodgepole Campground said to need painting or replacing at an estimated cost of $301,438. Both projects are given a moderately high priority ranking.

For $2,074, officials also figured they could repaint the interior of the park's Lewis Creek cookhouse -- but this ranks very low among the park's overall maintenance priorities.

Computer software provides automatic cost estimates, which can overlook individual differences and rely on certain assumptions. The estimate on the Lodgepole Campground picnic tables, for example, evidently assumes picnic tables at each of Lodgepole's 204 campsites would be painted or replaced at an average cost of $1,477.

The asset reports for all Park Service regions nationwide show a maintenance backlog of $2.3 billion.

That probably understates the total, though, because not all assets have been tallied. The report for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, for instance, does not yet include totals for housing, trails or sewage and water systems.

Park Service officials also caution that the maintenance backlog is a constantly moving target, which can't really be pinned down with a simple bottom line.

"There is no one number that can capture it," Mainella told the House National Parks, Recreation and Public Lands Subcommittee. "It is not a static number."