Interior – National Park Service

www.nps.gov

About the National Park Service

Congress created the National Park Service, a bureau within the Interior Department, in 1916 to manage 40 national parks and monuments. Today the NPS manages 388 “units” in every state, except Delaware, and in the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands. These “units” include 56 national parks plus assorted national historic sites, monuments, memorials, battlefields, seashores, parkways, lakeshores, preserves, reserves, recreation areas, scenic trails and rivers.

The NPS' mission, according to its enabling legislation, is to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment for the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

The National Park Service's Director is Jon Jarvis. The department's annual budget is $2.75 billion and includes some 28,000 full-time employees and over 2 million volunteers. The NPS website reports about 11.7 billion visitors for the year of 2008.
The big issue for the National Park Service is funding. President Bush campaigned on a promise to wipe out an estimated $5 billion backlog in park maintenance projects. While the Bush administration has put more money into fixing the nation's aging parks, advocacy groups complain that this money, for the most part, is being diverted from other worthwhile park service programs.

In March 2004, the National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington-based watchdog group, released a report that said the national parks receive only two-thirds of the money they need to operate properly. The report listed numerous park facilities and programs that NPS officials were considering closing or discontinuing in summer 2004 to save money. Fran Mainella, the director at the time, backed away from the proposed cuts after the House Appropriations Committee's Interior Subcommittee complained.

To get a list of the public affairs contacts at the various national parks:

http://www.nps.gov/pub_aff/refdesk/NP_POC.pdf a>

Does this agency's information need updating? programs@nationalpress.org