Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Editorial: Just-in-time stimulus
Long underfunded national parks will benefit from an injection of federal funds -- a special boon for the parkway.
From the RoundTable blog
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As federal stimulus money works its way out of Washington, some is falling on cash-starved national parks, including $13.3 million to give a little long-delayed love to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
It's a timely valentine. A year of festivities to celebrate the parkway's 75th anniversary begins in the fall. The linear park will have until November, when a two-day affair is planned in Cherokee, N.C., to start spiffing itself up.
With a $280 million backlog of needed upgrades and repairs, the well-traveled touring road between North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains and Virginia's Shenandoah National Park is badly in need of a makeover before the party. The backlog is daunting, but the $13.3 million announced last week is just a portion of new federal funding in various categories to be arriving this year and next.
All told, Superintendent Phil Francis expects the parkway to cut its backlog by one-quarter in a year and a half -- amazing progress after years of budgetary neglect.
In a phone interview, Francis mentioned the more than 800 vistas that need to be maintained along the 469-mile parkway. Part of the $13.3 million in stimulus money the Interior Department announced last week will be used to renew some of those views.
Part will be used to rebuild the historic stone walls along some sections of the road.
Part will go toward general maintenance, like cutting back vegetation along roadsides before it becomes too overgrown.
In other words, in its effort to spark the moribund economy, Washington finally is investing some of the money required for the kind of general upkeep necessary to maintain any asset and help it hold its value.
The Interior announcement included $17 million as well for the Shenandoah, at the northern end of the Valley of Virginia. A big chunk of that money will go to restore 16 overlooks along Skyline Drive.
The Appalachian Trail will get an injection of $650,000 for improvements along its entire length. Of that, $25,000 will be spent this summer in Virginia to hire a Student Conservation Association crew to move two miles of trail from private to permanently protected land near Pearisburg in Giles County.
The stimulus is providing much-needed investments not only in jobs, but in the nation's natural heritage, a gift that will long outlast the current recession.
