The spending bill passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would increase funding the National Park Service needs to address its nearly $12 billion maintenance repair backlog.
Under the proposal, which will be considered by the Senate before a Friday deadline, the Park Service would receive a 9 percent increase to its current budget. The measure includes about $160 million to make repairs that would help growing numbers of visitors do everything from navigate challenging trails to have better access to restrooms. It could allow expensive transportation projects to begin soon.
The proposed funding contrasts sharply with the 8 percent cut proposed by the Trump administration, which provided $99 million for repairs.
In addition to better funding for the Park Service, the bill would provide new funding to the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department to fight wildfires.
It would keep the nearly $1.4 billion the agencies currently use while allowing them to draw from billions of dollars in new disaster relief funding when wildfires morph into monsters such as two fires last year outside San Francisco and Los Angeles. In past fire seasons, the Forest Service was forced to borrow money from programs meant to prevent fires, manage forests and improve recreation to pay for more firefighters and equipment as fires grew larger and more plentiful.
Key members of both political parties agreed the practice of siphoning money from other Forest Service accounts, called “fire borrowing,” creates a vicious cycle that fueled even worse forest fires, and needed to be addressed in the latest spending bill.
“Common sense has finally prevailed when it comes to how the Forest Service pays to fight record-breaking forest fires,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.
Two other House proposals aim to provide more funding for the Park Service’s maintenance and repair backlog, using royalties from offshore and onshore oil development, or possibly adding royalties from renewable energy development. Lawmakers on the Natural Resources Committee are set to debate the legislation next month.
Environmentalists hailed the bipartisan spending bill as a triumph for conservation. “The funding bill will provide a major boost for important road, bridge, and trail repair projects and for fixing historic sites — just as the National Park Service is preparing for another busy summer travel season,” Kristen Brengel, vice president for government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.
The Nature Conservancy’s Lynn Scarlett said in a statement that the bill “is more than just a positive step — it is a jump forward for conservation.” She praised the wildfire funding as “a tremendous victory. It will mean we will no longer have to pay to fight increasing wildfire disasters out of the very same budgets that could have instead gone toward making forests healthier and less prone to these extreme wildfires in the first place.”
The fix to “fire borrowing” was a hard-fought political victory. “It’s possibly the most important bipartisan natural resources accomplishment in years,” said Collin O’Mara, head of the National Wildlife Federation. “These things don’t happen every day.”
The spending bill also includes a number of provisions designed to make the jobs of preventing fires easier, but some environmental groups contend these provisions will enable more logging on public lands.
