The Bush administration has failed to live up to its promises to protect America's national parks, says a group of former National Park Service employees from across the country.

In an Aug. 15 letter to President Bush and Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, the 123 former employees contend that the administration has sacrificed preservation for profit in its policies on park maintenance, air pollution enforcement, road development and snowmobile use on federal lands and encouraged the movement of park service jobs to the private sector.

"[Y]ou are strangling the very core of park stewardship, sidestepping the important issues that are facing the parks and ignoring the operational budgets of the parks," wrote the former employees, including four past directors of the park service. "We are seeing evidence at every turn that when private for-profit interests vie with resources of the park, the private interests, and not principle, governs."

Bill Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, said the group wanted to call attention to such issues now because today marks the 87th anniversary of the law that created the National Park Service within the Interior Department.

"In the minds of many of us, this is probably the most dismal birthday that the National Park Service has ever had," said Wade, who retired from the park service in 1997 after 34 years.

Mark Pfiefle, a spokesman at Interior, defended the administration's stewardship of the parks, saying the group's criticisms were off-base and politically motivated.

"The letter was organized by partisan special interest groups," Pfiefle said. "It represents a sliver of the tens of thousands of former park service employees. The Interior Department is working aggressively to fix our national parks, provide clear vistas, promote strong employee relations and an enjoyable experience for visitors."

The letter was coordinated by the Campaign to Protect America's Lands, a nonprofit that is part of the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group headed by Eric Schaeffer. Schaeffer is a former enforcement chief at the Environmental Protection Agency who resigned in March 2002 in protest over the administration's air pollution policies.

A spokesman for the Campaign to Protect America's Lands said it is nonpartisan.

The former employees say the administration's Clear Skies Initiative has undercut the Clean Air Act and led to the development of new smog-producing power plants near parks such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Moreover, they say efforts to open up traditional park service functions to private contractors squander money and staff resources despite administration assurances that such moves promote efficiency. And they accuse Bush officials of being "misleading" in touting the administration's commitment of $2.9 billion toward a park maintenance backlog, because only $200 million to $300 million is new money.

Pfiefle said such charges are "misleading and inaccurate." He said the administration had accelerated an effort to catalogue maintenance needs at all national parks, a program begun under Clinton that would have taken more than a decade to complete. Officials expect to nearly finish the inventory by the end of this year, he said.

When it comes to preserving parks, Wade said he would give the Bush administration an F and the Clinton administration a B. But Wade said he and others would like to see the stewardship of national parks removed from political control and placed in the hands of an independent agency akin to the Smithsonian Institution.

"They're not just public lands, they are the exemplars of this nation's heritage," he said. "And maybe there ought to be a way to manage those areas that could be done in a way that isn't as subject to changes every two or four years when new elected officials come in."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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