This article from Capitol Weekly lays out the original proposal. Among the key facts:
- Budget cuts would save $13.3 million — about a dollar for every family in California.
- Closures would shut out an estimated 6.5 million of 79 million annual park visitors — the largest state park attendance in the nation.
- The California Parks Foundation has 90,000 members.
Divide 90,000 members into $13.3 million and you get $147 and change. If every member of the Parks Foundation passed the hat among their family, friends and neighbors and thew in $100 of their own, the shortfall goes away.
What that tells me: if everybody who uses California parks regularly gets busy, gets generous with their time and thinks creatively, we could make a huge dent in the parks funding crisis.
Another interesting link at the Parks Foundation’s site: Henry Coe State Park tallies 34,395 visits a year and takes in $67,344 (less than $2 per visitor — good thing so many people are car-pooling, eh?); at Portola Redwoods, it’s 36,277 visitors and $161,136 in revenue (they get a lot more campers there).
Should we get ourselves worked up over parks that get fewer than 100 visitors a day? Absolutely: as soon as the visit count goes to zero, it’ll be far too easy for the state to succumb to the temptation to start eating its seed corn by selling public lands to raise cash.
The key will be to create partnerships between the state parks authorities and the private organizations that already support the state parks. It doesn’t have to be cash, it could be in-kind contributions of expertise. Whatever it is, it has to keep the parks in the hands of the public.
Tom, I think this is a dangerous idea for several reasons. It has a certain short-term idealist appeal, but in the long run I don’t think this is where we want to go.
Once we start down the “support parks with donations” route, I’m quite certain that those who think that _any_ parks funding is too much funding will push to reduce the budgets even further. “Let those who want to use parks pay for them.”
A truism in government funding is that during difficult budget times, if you can cut without causing real pain and loss there is room to cut more. The survival of parks through this short term budgetary crisis by way of donations would, in the end, look to some like a solution that should be permanent.
There are quite a few examples of this process at work. Back when the California lottery was first promoted, it was said to “provide extra funding” for education. If memory serves, there were even promises that “lottery dollars would augment, not replace, existing funding.” Fact is, it didn’t work that way. Overall education funding adjusted for inflation did not increase as a result of additional lottery dollars – instead the lottery dollars essentially became part of the base funding.
If the donation idea were to take hold, in the end this would probably not increase overall support for parks – it would simply shift it away from the state an force parks to rely more and more on begging.
I don’t think that is what we want.
Dan
Dan: they will close the parks for lack of funding and they will not raise taxes to keep them open. I take these as a given.
I think it’s amoral at best to say “just give us what we want” when we know full well it could take money away from other essential services.
Tom, I think you are a bit too quick to assume what the outcome will be. Let’s just say that I’ve watched the budget dance somewhat carefully since the passage of Proposition 13, and the ultimate outcomes – and the actual facts about the budgets, taxes, and the positions of principal players – are often not known until the poker game between (and within) the legislature and the governor plays out. And that likely won’t be for months.
Dan