Bush lies about the national parks
PROMISES, PROMISES
“I will ensure that the federal government meets its responsibilities by devoting $5 billion to eliminate the backlog in maintenance and improvements at our national park.” Wouldn’t it be nice if a president said that?
Well one did—or at least he said it on his road to the White House. It was part of a stump speech George W. Bush gave on Oct 27, 2000, less than two weeks before the election.
Bush’s team came up with $5 billion figure from the 1998 General Accounting Office estimate that, in addition to the regular annual costs to run America’s National Parks, monuments, historic structures, and trails, it would take and extra $4.9 billion just to fix the crumbling facilities at parks and national monuments. This is called the backlog.
Bush crows that he’s taken care of 900 backlog projects to the tune of $2.9 billion. Wouldn’t that, too, be nice? Too bad it’s a lie.
Of that $2.9 billion supposedly spent on the backlog, only “roughly $200 million to $300 million” was money spent above and beyond the regular maintenance costs according to Deputy Park Service Director Donald Murphy in his testimony before Congress last July. The remaining $2.6 billion or so was just regular park spending, not the backlog.
And those 900 projects supposedly addressed actually number 840, according to the Campaign to Protect America’s lands. Fine, I won’t quibble over the Administration’s rounding up by 60. The problem is, the vast majority of those weren’t backlog projects, but rather emergency ones (safety repairs, raw sewage cleanup and the like).
msnbc.com |
