The National Park Service turned 100 this year, commemorating a century’s worth of history and preservation in the United States.
On Wednesday, Dwight Pitcaithley, former chief historian for the National Park Service, will speak at Fort Lewis College on the changes, problems and successes the system has faced over the past 100 years.
As chief historian for the Park Service from 1995 to 2005, Pitcaithley’s job was to be “head cheerleader” for ensuring the most current scholarship was available at Park Service sites throughout the country.
But as the Park Service continues navigating a budgetary shortfall that has afflicted it for decades, keeping that history current, which is critical to educating the public, has been difficult. “It’s grim,” Pitcaithley said of the Park Service’s 30 percent shortfall. “And it’s been there for decades.”
Pitcaithley began working for the Park Service in the mid-1970s, and since then, the annual budget has been flat or on the decline. When he retired in 2005 as chief historian, the Park Service’s overall budget was about $2.5 billion. Today, it’s about $2.8 billion, which doesn’t keep up with inflation and isn’t enough to handle $12 billion in backlogged projects.
The Park Service estimates most of its sites are operating on budgets two-thirds of what they need, and some research suggests Congress would have to double the entity’s annual budget to adequately fund it.
“At the current rate things are going, NPS will never catch up,” Pitcaithley said.
The results can come in the form of facilities in disrepair, or in ways that Pitcaithley, as a historian, worked to prevent. Some park exhibits, for example, are decades old.
Despite growing funding issues, the National Park Service has changed in two positive, significant ways in a century, Picaithley said.
The first is the size of the system: There were 38 sites at the Park Service’s inception a century ago, including 22 monuments, 14 parks and two reservations. Today there are 412.
The second is there are now a host of community-assistance programs authorized by Congress to preserve land, structures and sites outside of the Park Service’s purview. Those include programs to maintain rivers and trails, and tax credits for historic preservation of commercial buildings.
“Places get preserved, instead of torn down,” Pitcaithley said. “The National Park Service is a U.S. history textbook of places.”
Picaithley is a professor of history at New Mexico State University. He will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Center for Southwest Studies, at Fort Lewis College.
jpace@durangoherald.com
