Saturday, October 28, 2017

National Parks so every American can enjoy our natural beauty

If you can afford to get there. And then there's a small entry fee.  But what a wonderful heritage.  And I urge you to go NOW to visit any of the amazingly beautiful national parks in this country  that you can because, this is the Trump era...
Entrance fees during the busiest months at Shenandoah National Park would more than double under a National Park Service proposal issued Thursday. Under the proposed fee change, entries for cars would jump from $25 to $70 between June 1 and October 31. Rates for motorcyclists would go from $20 to $50, while fees paid by individual visitors who hike or bike into the park—or arrive on tour buses—would jump from $10 to $30.

[...]

Sixteen other NPS sites around the country would see similar price jumps during their biggest months, including the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Joshua Tree, Yosemite, and Yellowstone.

[...]

The Park Service says the fee increases are meant to cut into the agency’s backlog of deferred maintenance projects, a list of repairs that would cost an estimated $11.3 billion to fix. Barnum says the proposed figures were determined by analyzing historical NPS data sets and the cost of admission at other “family attractions” like amusement parks. (A one-day ticket to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom costs $124, for instance.)

  Washingtonian
Yeah, well, Disneyland isn't publicly owned land, assholes. And the national parks don't have multi-million-dollar rides and exhibits to service.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Representative Will Hurd of Texas have a bill that would create dedicated funding to cover the NPS backlog, but it has gone nowhere since it was introduced in March. And while the Interior Department has said the maintenance backlog is a priority, the White House’s proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year would cut nearly $300 million from the National Park Service budget.
Sure. And when visitation dwindles down to near nothing because nobody can afford to go, there'll be a good argument for selling off the land on the cheap to private interests.  Hey, nobody goes, so there must not be any interest in keeping public parks, right?

We have until November 23 to "comment".




What a disgusting lot of greedy predators we now have running the show.

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