WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Angus King (I-Maine), Ranking Member of the Senate National Parks Subcommittee, continued his bipartisan effort to address the $12 billion maintenance backlog affecting America’s national parks across the United States. Senator King highlighted the Restore Our Parks Act, a bipartisan bill he is leading with Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to address the deferred maintenance backlog. Senator King also emphasized the importance of this solution for Acadia National Park, which welcomes a higher density of visitors than the majority of national parks; the maintenance backlog in Acadia alone is approximately $60 million. Senator King’s comments came during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee Hearing on deferred maintenance needs and potential solutions.

“I’m sitting here thinking about politics and partisanship,” said Senator King. “[The Restore Our Parks Act] is probably the most conservative bill before the Congress, in every sense of the word conservative – because we are literally conserving, we are protecting something that has been handed to us by our forefathers and mothers and predecessors. But it’s also conservative because it’s all about paying down debt. It hasn’t been mentioned so far today, but deferred maintenance is debt, just like it’s debt on the balance sheet and I think once it’s looked at that way, it eases some concerns to me that have been expressed about this bill. We’re not adding to our debt, we’re actually diminishing our national debt because these problems will have to be taken care of someday. When they are, it will be more expensive, so there’s interest on the debt. So I think that that’s why this is so important and that’s why I’m so glad to see there is bipartisan support for these various bills.

“Number two, one of the reasons this is so urgent to me is, I did a little calculation and I looked at the top ten visited National Parks and there acreage and it’s a very interesting calculation of visitors per acre and that is a proxy for pressure on the park. Great Smokey Mountains, the most visited national park in the country, which is a little surprising to me, by a factor of two, 21 people per acre or 21 visitors per acre; Zion, 29 [per acre], more typically Yosemite 5.5 [per acre]; Yellowstone 1.8 [per acre]; Acadia National Park in Maine: 74 people per acre. In some cases ten or twenty times the visitation, that’s why this is an urgent problem for me, because our park is being loved to death.  It’s an absolutely wonderful place and that’s why all those people go there, three and a half million people to one park in one state that has a population of 1.3 million. So almost three times the population of Maine goes to Acadia National Park every year, so this is an urgent priority both in terms of our responsibility to our predecessors, but also our responsibility to the people of America that enjoy these wonderful places.”

The Restore Our Parks Act, supported by a bipartisan group of 39 Senators and the Interior Department, would establish the “National Park Service Legacy Restoration Fund” to reduce the maintenance backlog by allocating existing revenues the government receives from on and offshore energy development. This funding would come from 50 percent of all revenues that are not otherwise allocated and deposited into the General Treasury not to exceed $1.3 billion each year for the next five years. This consensus legislation has been praised by witnesses at a Subcommittee on National Parks hearing last July and has the support of key Administration officials, including the Interior Secretary. In addition, in September 2018 Senator King joined Acting NPS Director Dan Smith on a tour of Acadia National Park to assess the park’s critical maintenance need; the backlog at Acadia alone is estimated to be approximately $60 million.

As the Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, Senator King is known within Congress as a champion of efforts to preserve, protect, and promote America’s national parks and public lands. In addition to his lead sponsorship of the Restore Our Parks Act, Senator King has long advocated in favor of permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and clarification of Acadia National Park’s boundary line – both signed into law as part of the public lands package in early March.

Witnesses at today’s ENR Committee Hearing included Scott Cameron, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget, U.S. Department of the Interior; Lenise Lago, Associate Chief, USDA Forest Service; Dan Puskar, President and CEO, Public Lands Alliance; Liz Archuleta, Supervisor, Coconino County Board of Supervisors; and Jessica Wahl, Executive Director, Outdoor Recreation Roundtable.