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Originally published March 23, 2013 at 7:10 PM
| Page modified March 23, 2013 at 9:58 PM

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At 100, state parks in grim state of disrepair

Washington State Parks turn 100 this month. But not since the
Great Depression has the park system been so imperiled.

By Lynda
V. Mapes

Seattle Times staff reporter

PREV  of  NEXT

Photos by BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

Maurya Broadsword, a worker at Kittitas County’s Olmstead Place
State Park, walks through a water-damaged, moth-infested bedroom of the site’s
historic home. A worn sign near Chehalis, top, marks the John R. Jackson House,
which has started to rot.

BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

.

A massive December storm took down hundreds of trees at Lake
Wenatchee State Park. With staff cuts, cleanup won’t be finished for summer.

Ranger Charles Andrade locks up the renovated lodge at Flaming
Geyser State Park in Auburn. For lack of funds to repair utilities, the facility
can’t be used.

Photos by BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

Pam Wilkins, a state parks manager, locks up at the John R.
Jackson House in Chehalis. Standing on the porch is former Secretary of State
Ralph Munro, who says that by failing to maintain historic properties, the state
is violating the trust of families who donated them.

BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

At Olmstead Place State Park in Ellensburg, a photo shows Clara
Olmstead, George Smith and their daughters. Clara Olmstead’s parents homesteaded
there in 1875.

BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

An interpretive exhibit at an old-growth forest near Lewis and
Clark State Park in Lewis County has been closed since falling into disrepair
about a year ago. Lack of funding keeps maintenance projects like this one on
the back burner, officials say.

BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

Tim Holen, left, his wife, Amanda, and daughter Avery, 2, of
Lacey, Thurston County, hunt for sand shrimp at Tolmie State Park near Olympia.
Tolmie, like many state parks, no longer offers the educational programs they
used to provide.

BETTINA HANSEN / The Seattle Times

Steve Ryder, Tolmie State Park ranger, gets a broom from a
maintenance closet. For rangers, interpreters and park aides, responsibilities
include upkeep of facilities often many years old. With staffing cuts, needed
renovations are often put off.

Cuts
for state parks lead to deterioration of historic sites

Play
video now

Related

Gallery:
Maintaining Washington's state parks

Gems
of our Washington State Parks: Fort Flagler

What's
your favorite (and least favorite) Washington state park?

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favorite photo from a Washington state park

Most Popular Comments
Hide / Show comments

Here. Let me repeat myself once again:
What the State spends its money on isn't about... (March 23, 2013, by Waylander) MORE

Finally- all of these politicians
talking about how important the state parks are-... (March 23, 2013, by Captain Wierd) MORE

... but for an NBA team ... open the
bank doors and the sky's the limit! Sad... (March 23, 2013, by fuz) MORE

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Washington state’s park system turns 100 this year, but not since the Great
Depression has it been so imperiled.

In a park historic site near Chehalis, Washington’s first courthouse is
rotting from the ground up. Outside Ellensburg, at Olmstead Place State Park,
heirloom hand-stitched dresses are moth-eaten and the walls water-stained in one
of the earliest farmsteads in Eastern Washington.

At Lake Wenatchee State Park, extensive wreckage caused by winter storms is
still lying on the ground, with another season about to open. At Flaming Geyser
State Park in Auburn, a historic lodge renovated to host weddings — a hoped-for
moneymaker for the parks — sits shuttered because there’s no money for needed
water, sewer and electrical repairs.

All over the state, many of Washington’s 117 parks, 700 historic buildings
and 33 heritage centers and interpretive sites are showing signs of neglect and
even abandonment as a result of dramatic budget cuts.

Former Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature in 2011 eliminated most direct
state funding for the parks, money which had provided an average of 70 percent
of the system’s general operating budget. Instead, the state bet that $30-a-year
Discover Passes sold to visitors would pay the bills.

But revenue projections for the pass proved wildly off the mark.

Reducing hours, cutting back maintenance, laying off rangers and reducing
park programing only worsened a crisis for a system that was asking visitors to
pay more to get less.

Since 2000, the state has shed 12 of its parks, reduced hours at others, and
shifted 66 of its 189 full-time rangers to seasonal jobs. Starting in 2009, the
state parks have reduced staffing from 595 full-time permanent employees to 395.

The situation has gotten so bad that Gov. Jay Inslee and key state lawmakers
say they are considering restoring some state tax dollars to fund the parks.

“The governor is a big supporter of state parks,” said David Postman,
spokesman for the governor. He said Inslee’s coming budget proposal will reflect
that. “Parks are struggling, and it gets worse every year. We can’t let that go
on; it gets harder and harder to get them back where they need to be.”

In a park system in which more than 30 percent of the land base was donated
by families, the parks’ state of diminishment and disrepair is unacceptable,
some said.

“Families gave this land believing it would be taken care of,” said Ralph
Munro, former secretary of state.

“They (the lands) were donated by individual families, who didn't charge us
for them, who gave them to the state and entrusted their care and their upkeep
and their future in the state. And now we're breaking that trust, we're
violating that trust, and that's wrong.”

He spoke standing on the porch of the John R. Jackson House, part of Jackson
House State Park in Chehalis. The structure predates Washington's statehood, and
the homestead served its early community as a post office, grocery store,
tavern, inn and courthouse. Its rotting foundation can be flaked with a
finger.

The roots of the parks crisis are in the recession, which reduced the amount
of state tax money available for everything in state government. As lawmakers
scrambled to pay for basic health-care services for the poor and elderly, and
for education, parks seemed an easy target.

It wasn’t the first time.

During Washington’s biggest budget crisis, the Great Depression, Gov. Roland
Hartley stopped funding the park system in 1929. For two years, the parks sat
shuttered.

It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Civilian Conservation
Corps brought crews of workers into the woods that the parks were not only
rescued but improved.

The stone and wood buildings that grace so many state parks today date from
that era, which turned out to be the high-water mark for state-park investment.

With the growing popularity of automobile travel, parks saw the dawn of an
era of family recreation that hasn’t quit since, as annual visits exploded from
1.6 million in 1950 to more than 7 million in 1960 to as many as 40 million
today.

Most visitors are day trippers, but some camp on Washington’s primo public
lands.

Washington has the fourth-oldest state-park system in the country — preceding
creation of the national parks by four years.

From saltwater to scab lands, the park system has had something for
everybody. In the past, there were guided ranger walks in the woods, lifeguards
on the beaches, interpretive guides at the state’s historic sites, expansive
campsites with well-maintained facilities — and no entrance fees.

Not anymore. Wrestling with diminishing revenue, state lawmakers enacted the
parks’ first parking fees in 2002. Trying to keep parks open, the state first
imposed a $5 parking fee. It was replaced in 2006 with a $5 voluntary donation
collected with vehicle license fees — next converted to a fee extracted
automatically unless drivers chose to opt out.

The amount of state funding for parks continued to crater, from 63 percent of
the $149 million total budget in 2007-09 to 18 percent of the $121 million
budget this biennium.

The percentage of the agency’s budget coming from user fees did soar from
about 25 percent to more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. But it wasn’t
enough.

As the recession bottomed out, then-Gov. Gregoire announced, while putting
her budget together in 2010 for the coming biennium, that the state’s share of
the parks budget would have to be supported by user fees.

The Legislature launched the Discover Pass in 2011, charging visitors $30 a
year to use state park facilities.

It was a radical step: No park system in the country is so heavily supported
by user fees, and the Discover Pass generated only about half the hoped-for
revenue. The cutting got deeper.

“It’s sad,” said Tom Pew, who takes care of a swath of parks from Nisqually
to Eatonville to outside Chehalis.

In his 31 years with state parks he has watched his job change from primarily
providing safe, rewarding experiences for park visitors to cruising the parking
lots for Discover Passes on the dashboard and running after emergency
maintenance.

“We are just getting by with keeping the campgrounds and the restrooms clean.
The heavy emphasis on the collection of the fees, that takes staff time too,”
Pew said. “We have less contact with the public, and the contact we do have is
in more of a negative manner.

“I guess you could say we have gotten more into a law-enforcement mode on our
contacts, from a friendly mode.”

At Lake Wenatchee State Park, storm damage downed so many trees that more
than half of the campsites are unusable, with the recreation season fast
approaching. Cleanup is slower, with fewer year-round staff to tackle the mess.

Meanwhile, all over the state, portions of trails, scenic overlooks and
campgrounds are cordoned off because there is no money to repair or maintain
them.

Some parks have been jettisoned by the state. Since 2000, 12 parks have been
transferred to local, federal or tribal governments, or closed.

Others, such as Fort Worden at Port Townsend, are in transition as the park
system looks for another way to operate them.

Negotiations are under way with a public development authority created by the
city of Port Townsend to co-manage Fort Worden, which has more than $89 million
in deferred repair and upkeep needs.

“We need partners to help us, and this is one option,” said Daniel Farber, a
state parks officials. “They want a lively, effective facility, and if they want
to keep it up and see the outcome based on their own efforts, this is
potentially good for them and for all of us.”

Some transfers have resulted in cautionary tales. The state used to operate a
string of parks along the Snake River, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
as part of its mitigation for construction of Snake River dams.

When the state ran out of money to operate the parks in 2002, it asked the
corps to take over, which it refused to do.

Today one park is closed, another operates only a few hours a year when
volunteers help, and another is open only seasonally by a concessionaire.

Even state legislators who pushed hardest for a user-fee system say the
effort has run aground. This has to be the year for a turnaround, some lawmakers
say, and it should be a permanent one.

Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, the chief budget-writer for the House, said
funding parks is good for business and the state’s quality of life.

“We are not trying to be Arkansas. We are not trying to drive the state tax
system into the ground. We are trying to say what are the right set of purposes
that people want, and in my district, people want parks,” he said.

“It’s one of the huge attractions of our state and why we have the high-tech
community that is driving the economy. Stiffing the state parks ... Are you
serious?”

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or [email-masked]

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