Park officials face funding challenges - Budget woes
Park officials face funding challenges - Budget woes
By JOHN PEPIN
MUNISING — With little increase anticipated in park revenues over the next five years, rangers at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore will likely have to cut some staff and reduce visitor services in light of a projected budget deficit totaling more than $400,000.
“The park is facing a very significant budget shortfall,” said Pictured Rocks Superintendent Jim Northup.
This summer, park services will remain intact at last year’s levels. However, beginning with fiscal year 2007, which begins in October, expenditure costs are expected to begin outstripping anticipated revenues.
A shortfall of $100,000 is predicted at the end of next year, with the gap widening to $400,000 in five years.
“Over the years, we have done our best to prevent these budget challenges from having a direct impact on park users and visitor services,” Northup said. “But there is very little flexibility left.”
The Bush administration has ordered national park units to demonstrate they can operate at 80 percent or less of their budgets. The initiative is meant to have parks concentrate on their core missions of taking care of park natural and cultural resources, while trimming any excess from park base operating budgets.
By 2011, all national park units are expected to have completed the “Core Operations Analysis.” Pictured Rocks is one of the first parks in the Midwest region to test the new initiative.
Over a three-day period, rangers met to brainstorm ideas for cutting costs and retaining services. They will take a couple of months deciding which ideas to use.
“We are in the process of trying to determine how we can ‘live within our means’ with the least possible impact to the condition of park resources, our visitor facilities and our staff,” Northup said.
Currently, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore has an annual base operating budget of about $1.9 million, with 86 percent of that spent on salaries and personal services.
That cost imbalance has rangers likely looking to cut five full-time positions over the next five years. Since 2001, Pictured Rocks has already left seven positions vacant because funds were not available to refill them.
The park has 22 permanent employees and 11 seasonal workers funded through the park base budget.
Northup said the park has a “legal and moral obligation” to keep staff and visitors safe and rangers want to provide the best possible service to the visiting public, which numbers 450,00 annually at Pictured Rocks.
But he said the staff in place can only do so much to take on extra work from those employees not replaced and still perform their duties effectively.
“Our employees are enormously dedicated and hardworking, but there is a limit to how much more they can absorb,” Northup said. “We have pretty much a skeletal operation right now.”
Complicating the problem is an anticipated increase in visitors to the park with the improvement of Alger County Highway 58. The 45-mile roadway is slated to become a paved byway stretching between Grand Marais and Munising, providing the prime access to the park.
Park rangers have proposed several cost-cutting measures to help ease the budget concerns ranging from maintaining fewer ski trails to closing some less-frequently used visitor contact stations.
“No final decisions have been made yet on how we’re going to handle this budget deficit,” Northup said.
Dovetailing with the park’s core analysis is a business planning initiative taking place at the park. Under that graduate student program, a student from Dartmouth and the Yale School of Forestry are compiling a detailed cost-benefit analysis for Pictured Rocks.
A business plan — identifying problems and exploring ways to raise revenue — will be completed by the students by the end of summer.
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