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April 09, 2009
States and Municipalities Struggling to Maintain Parks
The story quoted below illustrates an alarming trend of states and municipalities that are unable to afford the upkeep on their community's parks. Because of the economic downturn, many families are choosing to vacation close to home in their local parks. Yet when they arrive at their local vacation area too often they are finding facilities that are broken, insufficient or even closed.
Our parks are an important part of our national heritiage. We need stimulus funds to bring these public recreational lands back to a fully functional state. If this decay is allowed to continue, soon politicians will be arguing for their privatization and/or sale. Once parks are gone they are almost impossible to replace!
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- While more Tennesseans are vacationing in affordable state parks, many are disappointed to find the aging facilities with broken plumbing, rusty equipment and chipping paint.
A national professional group of civil engineers ranked Tennessee a D-plus for its state parks and officials say a tight budget has created a $100 million backlog of maintenance projects at its 54-park system.
Still experts say there's no safety risk to the more than 30 million visitors to state parks this past year. More are expected to visit in 2009.
Richard Jones, a co-author of the Tennessee Infrastructure report card, told the Tennessean that besides the budget problems and mounting maintenance issues, many of the parks infrastructure is over 60 years old.
From the Tennessean, April 8, 2009
Posted by dop_editor at April 9, 2009 06:13 PM
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