Page 18 - Flathead Beacon // 3.30.16

COVER
PARK FUNDING
Mark Preiss, left, CEO of the Glacier National Park Conservancy, speaks during a brief ceromony to welcome Glacier’s new superintendent, Je Mow. BEACON FILE PHOTO
to the fundraising achievements of the Glacier Conservancy, Mow acknowl- edges that the park cannot sustain its reliance on diminishing Congressional appropriations, prompting a paradigm shift that refocuses thinking on strate- gic, collaborative funding and increased sustainability.
“Going into the centennial, part of the solution lies in what we are not think- ing about,” Mow said last week. “And one aspect of what we are not thinking about is that Congress will suddenly come up with a signi cant appropriation to increase our base operations. Even in light of the centennial year, the increase ofappropriationsforoperationswasnot very large. And even though it’s di cult times, and it’s a struggle, we have to come to grips with that reality. We cannot just wait it out and hope that there will be a magic increase in operational funds.”
The Park Service has the second larg- est infrastructure in the U.S. after the Defense Department, yet it only accounts for 1/15 of one percent of the total federal budget.
Mow said the starkness of that real- ity is brightened by a changing model in which public-private partnerships are less transactional and more collabora- tive, so as to identify and package the projects that are most important to the
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visitor experience while still appealing to outside donors.
“This has de nitely been an incubator for us to learn and think about innova- tive and creative partnerships so we are not shouldering 100 percent of the oper- ational costs and maintenance costs,” he said.
Preiss said that in the past, the park usually told the support groups what type of funding it needed, and the sup- port groups doled out what they could. But identifying needs was never really a collaborative process. Since the merger, the conservancy and the Park Service have worked together to prioritize proj- ects that need funding, running the gamut from scienti c research to historic preservation.
“The federal government is respon- sible for providing the base operations for the park, and what we do is provide that margin of excellence,” Preiss said. “Those projects would not happen if we were to continue to rely exclusively on federal appropriations. When Je and I started, we came into this knowing that we wanted to have one of the best part- nership models in the National Park Ser- vice, and we wanted to really have a col- laborative partnership where we were leveraging the highest and best use of the resources that we bring to the table, so
that we are committed to protecting the integrity of the park’s resources across the spectrum.”
John Garder, budget and appropri- ations director for the National Parks Conservation Association, the non- pro t advocacy group that lobbies for the parks, said a cure-all solution does not exist, and the next century will include
a mix of appropriations, fees, endow- ments, sponsorships, and public-private partnerships.
Still, Congress has an obligation to fund the nation’s parks, Garder said, and the agency’s anniversary should galva- nize lawmakers to invest in a system that maintains more than 400 sites across the country.
Glacier National Park ranger Kathy Dodd secures a sign indicating a park closure Oct. 1, 2013. BEACON FILE PHOTO MARCH 30, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM