A group of former high-ranking National Park Service employees -- including five with Utah ties -- took a Yellowstone-sized swipe at the Bush administration Friday.

President Bush speaks to supporters, Friday, Aug. 15, 2003, at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Bush reported advances Friday on his campaign promise to spend nearly $5 billion on upgrading national parks, but critics said he was exaggerating the progress and lambasted his environmental record. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Their charge: that the president and his Interior Department have not put their money where their mouths are when it comes to funding the National Park system. And that their policies -- from privatizing more park functions to allowing gas and oil drilling near park boundaries -- are threatening the system from inside and out.

"I've spent 32 years in the National Park Service, and I'm not a particularly partisan person," said Don Castleberry, a retired NPS regional director from Omaha. "But in recent years, it appears that support for the National Park Service has been politicized to a degree that I never saw when I was working.

"The current staffing situation and operating budgets are inadequate, and as such will continue to stymie the park service from carrying out its mission."

The Washington-based Campaign to Protect America's Lands spearheaded the release of Friday's letter, signed by more than 120 former National Park Service (NPS) administrators, including directors, deputy directors, regional directors and park superintendents.

Former Utah NPS administrators, including John Lancaster (Glen Canyon National Recreation Area), Don Gillespie (Utah state director), Fred J. Fagergren (Bryce Canyon National Park) and William Herr (Golden Spike National Historic Site) and Helen Dionne (Glen Canyon), were among the signees.

"Never before have so many former employees come together to voice their concern for the state of the park service," said Bill Wade, a former superintendent of Virginia's Shenandoah National Park.

In the Aug. 12 letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Wade and other participants criticized the administration for failing to adequately address the maintenance backlog -- which Bush vowed to tackle during his 2000 presidential campaign. They also protested what they call Interior's propensity for "disregarding professional, scientific and public opinion" in decisions and policies affecting the parks. Finally, the letter panned administration plans to privatize an increasing number of park service occupations.

Despite the goals and claims of Bush's "National Parks Legacy Project," the letter says, "We are growing increasingly concerned that in your policies and actions, you are not living up to your promises, nor to the ideals described in the mission of the National Park Service; and most importantly, you are not living up to the intent of the law."

The former park administrators took particular aim at the park service's maintenance backlog -- estimated at $4.9 billion, according to a 1998 report by the General Accounting Office, and now estimated as high as $6.8 billion.

The Bush administration claims it has spent $2.9 billion so far to address the backlog and has promised to eliminate it over a four-year span. But critics say most of that money was already earmarked for annual maintenance, and that the administration's contribution of additional funding was closer to $200 million to $300 million. The backlog has not been reduced "in any significant way," said the letter.

NPS spokesman Dave Barna said Friday that he had not seen the letter, and would not comment on it until Norton's office was ready to respond. But at least in terms of the maintenance backup, he thinks Bush critics are off-base.

"There has been a shift in how the money in the [NPS] budget is spent," said Barna. "The Democrats historically have tended to grow the park system, to spend the money on land acquisition. This president wants to spend that money on maintenance. So the total budget didn't go up, but the budget has changed."

© Copyright 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune.

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