NPS should not view reducing service as adding safety

Beaches, like playgrounds, would be much safer without children. If children would not attend playground activities or beaches, no children would ever be hurt by them.

Is that the kind of logic we’re dealing with here as the National Park Service seeks to “improve visitor on-water safety by removing potential hazards such as the swim docks”?

Because the other course of action to improve safety at Spring Canyon would be to add staff, bring back lifeguards, upgrade (not tear out) playground equipment and, in more general terms, actually serve the needs of the public.

But there are several problems with that approach. First and foremost, the NPS would have to be wondering what to do with all the money a thoughtful Congress had allocated to not only clear NPS’s $12 billion backlog of maintenance projects, but actually improve parks for the American public.

It would also help a great deal if our litigious society were not so trigger happy when it comes to blaming someone else for every misfortune or accident, and if there weren’t quite so many lawyers behind every bush whose fortunes depend on gleaning compensations off the misfortunes of others. But that’s life in these United States.

Operating one little park, let alone a nationwide system of them, is a risky business that will never come close to eliminating risk or paying for its own upkeep, unless you count what economists and accountants in charge of budgets never can: the joy, the discovery, the learning, the health, the mental health, the physical exercise, the understanding of nature in a wider world and our place in it.

Those things bring incalculable value to life in these United States, including for those who come to Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, which contributes $66 million to the regional economy just by being such a pleasant place to visit, according to a 2018 study.

And it’s evidently up to us to keep it that way.

So if the recreation area’s final plan still keeps deducting joys from the park you love, your next move is to write your members of Congress about it. Oversight of government on your behalf is part their job.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers represents this state’s 5th District in Congress, (202) 225-2006. Rep. Dan Newhouse, (202) 225-5816, represents the 4th District. They’d like to hear from you, and it can only do them good to understand where your values lie — in keeping our parks the valuable, available places they currently are, or in cutting their budgets to the point where common upkeep is very difficult, let alone improvements.

It would definitely be cheaper, and less risky, to not have parks at all, but is that what we want? Because that’s where the current logic of reduction in service at Spring Canyon seems to be headed.

Scott Hunter

Editor and publisher