New Budget Plan: Sell The National Parks!
Scale back the tax cuts for the wealthy?
Nah.
End the staggeringly costly war in Iraq?
Nah.
Perhaps stop giving massive welfare to the most prosperous companies on Earth?
No, but perhaps we can find some spare change in the couch cushions if we sell off some national parks! All that unspoiled beauty was getting in the way of corporate profit, anyway..
As a note - this measure isn't expected to be passed - it hasn't even been introduced. It's been suggested as blackmail, essentially, to get drilling in the ANWR moving along. Which doesn't make it any less reprehensible..
Nah.
End the staggeringly costly war in Iraq?
Nah.
Perhaps stop giving massive welfare to the most prosperous companies on Earth?
No, but perhaps we can find some spare change in the couch cushions if we sell off some national parks! All that unspoiled beauty was getting in the way of corporate profit, anyway..
As a note - this measure isn't expected to be passed - it hasn't even been introduced. It's been suggested as blackmail, essentially, to get drilling in the ANWR moving along. Which doesn't make it any less reprehensible..
posted by Management at 5:52 PM
1 Comments:
Washington -- House Resources chairman Richard Pombo is circulating a draft of a bill that would sell 15 national parks and require the National Park Service to raise millions of dollars by selling the naming rights to visitors' centers and trails.
Pombo's spokesman said the proposal, written by Pombo's House Resources Committee staff, is intended only to influence lawmakers to support an item in the budget bill that would permit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
If drilling continues to be banned in the refuge, Pombo's staff argued, the government would have to sell parks as well as advertising space on park buses, trams and ferries to reach the level of revenues expected from oil leases sales in the Alaskan refuge.
While Brian Kennedy, Pombo's spokesman, said the Tracy Republican lawmaker has no plans to introduce the bill, environmental groups expressed outrage that he would even suggest selling national parks -- including the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville -- to raise money for the federal Treasury.
"These proposals for the national park system are unconscionable," said Craig Obey, vice president of the National Parks Conservation Association. "It's hard to believe anyone could even contemplate drafting something this extreme."
The proposal by Pombo's staff is a strange byproduct of the contentious debate over whether to drill in the Arctic Refuge, which is expected to be voted on by Congress in October.
A budget bill passed by the House this spring directed Pombo and his committee to come up with $2.4 billion in savings for the federal budget -- which not by coincidence is what the Congressional Budget Office predicts the government could reap in revenues from oil lease sales in the refuge during a five-year period.
"This document was intended to illustrate not just for leadership but for members of the House that the chairman feels we have no choice but to open (the refuge)," said Kennedy, Pombo's spokesman.
Kennedy said Pombo doesn't have any intention of selling off parks or historic sites, and committee staffers who prepared the proposals viewed much of the plan as "absurd and laughable."
But Democratic lawmakers, environmentalists and some park officials aren't laughing.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., noted that one of the parks proposed for sale -- the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Massachusetts -- honors the founder of American landscape architecture, who helped design the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the White House and other National Park Service sites.
"In keeping with his design to gut our country of national treasures, the chairman has put the home of America's foremost park-maker ... on the list of national parks to be cut," Markey said. "He is trying to sell the park-maker's park."
Among the parks the staff proposed for sale is the Fort Bowie National Historic Site in Arizona, where Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to U.S. soldiers in 1886, and the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House in Washington, D.C., which honors the woman who founded the National Council of Negro Women.
The draft legislation also calls for the sale of several huge nature preserves in Alaska -- including the Lake Clark National Park and the Yukon-Charley Rivers Preserve -- and for commercial development of Theodore Roosevelt Island, a 91-acre wooded island of nature trails in the middle of the Potomac River in Washington. The National Parks Conservation Association estimated that the draft legislation would affect 23 percent of the National Park Service's land.
In the Bay Area, officials at the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville expressed surprise that the committee suggested selling the house where the famed playwright wrote some of his best-known plays in the late 1930s and 1940s, including "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," said David Blackburn, chief of interpretation for the park, after hearing of the proposal. He said the National Park Service's regional office usually informs staff members about proposed legislative changes.
Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope said the proposal shouldn't be viewed as a joke because it was made in the same week that Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., introduced a bill to sell 15 percent of Interior Department lands to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
"These public lands are icons of our natural and cultural history," Pope said. "They belong to us all, and it is not up to congressmen Pombo or Tancredo to offer them to the highest bidder."
The 280-page draft bill also calls for increasing government revenues by expanding drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, an idea that has long been in favor with some conservatives but is opposed by most officials of both parties in California.
Pombo's spokesman said the proposal was intended to be a conversation starter to focus Congress' attention on the push to drill for oil in the Alaskan refuge as part of this fall's budget reconciliation process.
"Ultimately it's not serious in any way as proposed legislation, but it's very serious with regard to what the committee's real alternatives are," Kennedy said. "The chairman is actively working to make sure that it's ANWR -- and (the Arctic refuge) alone."
National parks for sale?
A proposal by House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, would sell 15 national parks to raise money for the government. Pombo insists the draft bill was aimed at convincing lawmakers to raise the revenue instead by drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Among the National Park Service sites suggested for sale:
-- Eugene O'Neill National Historical Site, Danville
-- Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, Texas
-- Fort Bowie National Historical Site, Arizona
-- Frederick Law Olmsted National Historical Site, Massachusetts
-- Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, District of Columbia
-- Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, South Dakota
-- Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, Pennsylvania
-- Thomas Stone National Historical Site, Maryland
-- Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, Alaska
-- Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Alaska
-- Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Alaska
-- Kobuk Valley National Park, Alaska
-- Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Alaska
-- Noatak National Preserve, Alaska
-- Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska
E-mail Zachary Coile at zcoile@sfchronicle.com.
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/24/MNG2HETE8D1.DTL
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