Funding increase for National Parks - something we can all agree on
And who said bipartisanship was dead.
Last week President Obama signed a $32.2 billion Interior and Environment Appropriations bill for the 2010 fiscal year. And in that bill, the National Park Service received $2.7 billion - roughly $218 million above the 2009 funding level.
As The Boston Globe put it, "apparently things are so bad for the nation’s parks that some Republicans took a time out last week from the bitter partisanship over health care and their general blockade on climate change legislation and helped Congress pass a $32.2 billion spending measure that boosts funding 17 percent."
Other agencies will benefit from the bill, including; the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Wildlife Refuge System. The measure also included a 35 percent increase for the Environmental Protection Agency and a 67 increase for programs to study climate change.
From the National Parks Conservation Association, here are some of the highlights:
* NPS Operations received roughly $130 million above last year's funding level, which fulfills the President's pledge to increase park operations $100 million above inflation.
* The NPS portion of the Land and Water Conservation Fund--a fund used to purchase critical lands now on the market for conservation and public recreation--received $126.26 million. This is an increase of $61 million over last year's level and $28 million above the President's request.
* Public-Private Partnerships, previously known as the Centennial Challenge, was funded at $15 million.
* A potentially harmful rider that would have required a public hunt to manage the growing elk population at Theodore Roosevelt National Park was removed. The rider would have overridden longstanding agency-wide policy.
* Most importantly, and beyond the numbers, the NPS is now better able to hire more rangers, fill out the authorized boundaries of many parks, enhance its ability to address the impacts of climate change on our national parks, and preserve America's Everglades, Great Lakes, and other nationally-significant ecosystems.
