To Show Our National Parks Some Love, Congress Must Fund Repairs

Treasured sites face nearly $12 billion in overdue maintenance

Article February 14, 2017 By: Marcia Argust Read time:

Projects: Restore America's Parks

Watch this video, share it with your friends, family, and lawmakers, and ask them to join the national call to Congress and the Administration to #FixOurParks.

For hundreds of years, Valentine’s Day has been a time to show people you care about how much you love them. This year, let’s extend that sentiment to our national parks by encouraging Congress to provide funding to restore those treasured natural, cultural, and historic sites and address their overdue repairs.

Why? Because the National Park Service (NPS), which maintains more than 400 sites nationwide, needs almost $12 billion to address deferred maintenance at the parks—issues ranging from crumbling roads, rotting historic buildings, and blocked trails to deteriorating memorials, and outdated water, sewer and electrical systems.

In 2016, Americans joined together to celebrate the Park Service’s 100^th anniversary. Now, as the agency enters its second century, all of us who enjoy our parks should find it unacceptable that the NPS is struggling to properly maintain and protect these special places because of unreliable federal funding.

This pipeline, which supplies drinking water for millions of Grand Canyon National Park visitors each year, needs $150 million worth of repairs.

Let’s show our national parks some love, to ensure that future generations can experience the joy, discovery, and connections to American history that parks offer.