Congress passed the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act in 1964 with vigorous bipartisan support, in part to “strengthen the health and vitality of the citizens” in parks where they could stay in shape by running, walking, bicycling and playing.  This was long before the obesity epidemic that has gripped America in the last two decades. 

The Act authorized the use of motorboat fuel taxes, proceeds from sales of surplus federal land and federally collected recreation fees to fund acquisition and improvement of local, state and federal parks. But in 1968, with a booming population and an according need for new parks, Congress tapped a major new revenue source. Offshore oil drilling was taking off, and it was happening on seafloor controlled by the federal government. Currently, up to $900 million per year of the drilling royalties are available for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. 

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Those royalties helped preserve some of America’s most special places – from California’s redwoods to North Carolina’s Chimney Rock – and provided opportunities in and around cities for outdoor recreation. The Fund provided money that would eventually be used for almost 42,000 grants to states and local governments. That funding, along with state matching money, purchased more than 2.6 million acres – an area bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. More than $3.9 billion-plus has gone to state and local parks. 

At first, the park-buying program was popular and successful. Grants soared to an ambitious $370 million in 1980. 

But total outlays dipped to zero when Reagan administration budget cuts hit in the early ‘80s, jumped back up to $110 million in 1983 and then began a long slide to just $16 million a year starting in 1988. For four years in the late 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, the program was again zeroed out: Oil companies continued to pay royalties for offshore drilling, but the money coming into the Land and Water Conservation Fund was not allocated to parkland for states and cities, as the law called for. And while campaigning in 2000, President George W. Bush promised to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund – which he did, only to divert funds to other Department of Interior programs while trying to slash outdoor recreation spending to zero in his second term. 

“The program has been up and down for years in resources given to grants,” said Joel Lynch, chief of the Park Service’s State and Local Assistance Programs Division. 

Over the decades, staffing went on the same roller-coaster ride as the budget. In the 1970s, the program operated as an independent agency, employing about 100 people. By the 1990s, it had shrunk to a backwater National Park Service bureau where, Anderson said, the number of personnel dropped from about 75 in 1995 to just 12 in 1997. Today the equivalent of 23.5 fulltime employees work there – about a quarter the number in the 1970s. 

Yet the number of parks protected under the act has continued to grow year by year. 

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Land values have appreciated significantly since many of the parks were first created. As a result, government and developers have been looking for ways to capitalize on that value. And as cities and counties have grown, sometimes infrastructure needs collide with recreation space. 

'Equal fair market value'
Park Service officials say one of the most frequent reasons parkland is converted is to build or widen roads, although conversions for other uses, such as cellphone towers, have become more common in recent years. 

Under federal regulations, a decision to convert a park to private use or anything other than public outdoor recreation has to be approved ahead of time by the Park Service – even though Park Service officials freely admit that large numbers of park conversions are a done deal by the time they get wind of them. By law, if parkland that has received Land and Water Conservation Fund money is converted, acreage of “at least equal fair market value and of reasonably equivalent usefulness and location” must be set aside for a new park. 

The law also says such a decision has to be made under the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. That law requires that federal officials in any decision affecting the environment look at all alternatives and listen to the public. The Park Service leaves it to states to carry out this responsibility when it comes to park conversions. 

However, Park Service officials acknowledge that when they find out a city or state already has allowed parkland to be converted to some other use, the consideration of other alternatives is effectively precluded, because one – keeping the parkland intact – may have already been foreclosed. 

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Lynch, head of the Park Service program, acknowledges the shortcomings: “We know the states are struggling and we know there’s a lot of issues we need to address,” Lynch said. 

And a lot of those problems trace back to one key chokepoint, he said: “We don’t have enough horses pulling the wagon.” 

Jason Alcorn contributed to this report, which was edited by Carol Smith. InvestigateWest is a donor-supported investigative newsroom in Seattle. Support its original, independent journalism for $5 a month.

 

The government promised that the public would get parks where citizens could exercise and stay strong – shared open spaces that would be theirs forever, places that would inspire and invigorate.

But one park became a Las Vegas hotel. Another was almost turned into a beachfront McDonald’s. Another is being converted into an upscale private resort in Oklahoma.  And in New York City, the National Park Service allowed the New York Yankees, the nation’s richest baseball franchise, to build a parking garage atop public ball fields that needy kids at the local schools didn’t see replaced for six years.

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Forty-eight years after Congress and President John F. Kennedy promised parks to the public, the budget-battered National Park Service program that awarded $3.9 billion-plus to state and local governments to buy or improve those parks has routinely allowed the land to be converted to other uses. Frequently, critics contend, these transactions violate federal law and regulations requiring that federally funded recreational acreage be replaced by lands of equal value.

'Desperate for funding'
Now, with tough times crimping cities’ budgets, parks advocates say they are seeing increasing efforts to privatize parks funded under the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act.

“Cities are just desperate for funding to keep schools open and what-have-you, and that becomes a big threat,” said Huey Johnson, the former California natural resources secretary who founded the parks-advocacy group Defense of Place. “The place the cities turn is, ‘Well let’s sell the parks.’ . . .  This is really affecting the quality of people’s lives.”

For three years, InvestigateWest tracked the Park Service program and several large park conversions where critics contend the Park Service has sanctioned parkland trades that shortchange taxpayers.

In Oklahoma, the state allowed one of its most popular parks -- Lake Texoma State Park -- to deteriorate badly before selling it in 2008 to a developer who is turning it into a luxurious private resort named Pointe Vista. The development team includes one of the state’s wealthiest businessmen. The state still has not replaced the park facilities.

In Michigan, stands of towering trees on a woodsy 22-acre patch of parkland were knocked down so three holes of a privately owned golf course could be built – extending right to the crest of sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan. The town, Benton Harbor, the poorest in the state, is predominantly African-American. In exchange, residents are getting a system of hiking trails connecting smaller chunks of inland acreage. The replacement land was located around old industrial areas and contained lead, benzo()pyrene and about 20 other chemicals, according to a report prepared for the developer.

Related story:

• Check the database of park grants in your state
• Budget-battered federal program can't police park conversions

Towering condos

In Sandusky, Ohio, residents nearly lost a waterfront park to a developer’s hotel and towering condos.  In exchange for a view of Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie, residents were going to get contaminated acreage inland that looks out on a T.G.I. Friday’s. Only the developer’s financing problems scotched the deal.

From New York’s Yankee Stadium to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, neighborhood public parks improved with grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act are being converted to private uses.

In every case it knows about, the National Park Service says it has wrung from those who take over parkland a promise to replace the open space with land of “at least equal fair market value and of reasonably equivalent usefulness and location.”  But the agency relies on states to alert the agency to parkland being converted to different uses in the first place – a key limitation in the Park Service’s oversight authority.

And critics say some such conversions go on under the radar without the parks ever being replaced. Even when the Park Service is notified, an imbalance of power between local advocates and wealthy private developers sometimes means uneven deals get struck. Opponents have sought to block a few such deals in court, with mixed success.

InvestigateWest found that the Park Service’s internal controls are not adequate to fully police the program, and only in the last 12 years has the agency started to keep detailed information about park names and locations, a necessary step for monitoring compliance. These failures have led to what parks advocates contend is an increasing number of park closures and conversions, including cases where the replacement land is inferior to the original.

Moreover, the federal government relies on states to conduct inspections of LWCF-funded parks within five years of project completion and every five years thereafter, as Park Service  rules require. However, some parks go without inspection for up to a decade, leaving large windows of time for opportunists to strike deals to appropriate parkland.

“The financial situations in the states are pretty critical across the board,” said Joel Lynch, chief of the Park Service’s State and Local Assistance Programs Division. “I’m sure some states have forgotten their responsibilities on inspecting the sites. We know that’s occurring. We don’t have a sense if it’s widespread or not.”

Sometimes local governments just don’t want to hear about the law’s requirement that privatized parkland must be replaced, said Sam Hall, who directed the program during the 1970s through the 1990s. When Las Vegas allowed a hotel to be built on federally funded parkland in the early 1990s, city officials wouldn’t agree to build a new park until the Park Service threatened to invoke provisions in federal law that allowed withholding of federal funding for highways and other purposes, Hall said.

Local governments have tried even more outrageous shenanigans.  For example, American Samoa started making plans to allow a McDonald’s to be built in a park that offers the only public beach in the South Pacific U.S. territory, said David Siegenthaler of the Park Service, who polices park conversions in California and American Samoa.

When Siegenthaler, who’d gotten an anonymous tip about the proposed deal, called to check on it, Samoan officials repeatedly denied they planned to allow the McDonald’s, he said. Eventually, however, he discovered the governor had signed an agreement to allow the deal. Ultimately the deal was killed.

History of abuse
The National Park Service is ill equipped to monitor these parkland takeovers.

Hall, the former program director, said Congress originally provided enough funding to double-check on whether states were enforcing the requirements that privatized parkland be replaced.

“We found a lot of conversions. We found primarily local governments who would sell lands to a local developer for housing, or they put a fire station on the land or wanted to turn it into a municipal city dump,” he said.

In one case in Louisiana, the concessionaire running a state park campground beside a reservoir actually started selling off RV pads, Hall recalled. State inspectors who were coming around dutifully at least once every five years caught him.

“People had put in brick patios and all kinds of developments on their little sites,” Hall said. “It was a major conversion.”

But staff and funding cuts whittled away at the National Park Service’s ability to keep on top of the trend.

Government auditors long ago documented how overwhelmed federal workers were unable to keep up with the growing parkland acreage purchased or improved under the program, although their findings were little noticed by politicians or the public. The U.S. General Accounting Office reported in 1977 that the federal agency then responsible for the program, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, had not set up a reliable system for inspecting the parks to make sure they stayed available for outdoor recreation for the public. Auditors described one aspect of the inspection system, checks made on parks under development, as “hit or miss.” They also said staffing levels were too low to police the whole process.

Environmental woes imperil America's national parks

Fast-forward to 2008, and the results of a federal Department of Interior Inspector General report suggested that the problems have only snowballed.

“We believe (the Park Service) needs to strengthen its monitoring and oversight of program results,” inspectors wrote.

While the Park Service’s rules call for a program audit of each state every three years, Park Service officials say those have not been done in many years for some states, and they are catching up on a backlog that in some cases meant states escaped such scrutiny for eight years or more. Bob Anderson, supervisor of the Park Service’s Midwest region for state and local assistance, said while the Park Service previously assigned one person to most states, some workers now manage as many as eight states. And travel money is short.

Michael D. Wilson, who ran the Park Service unit in charge of policing park conversions until 2010, said in recent years the agency has been finding out about increasing numbers of park conversions, although it's unclear whether more are occurring or the agency is just getting better at detecting them through modern methods such as Google alerts. The agency is pursuing more than 60 cases in Oregon, some dating back a decade, for example.

At least some states know they’re falling down on the job. Auditors for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection reported in February of this year that the state had stopped doing inspections, instead relying on “limited self-inspections” by cities, noting: “This could lead to misuse of grant funds.” The same system is being tried as a pilot program in other states including California, Park Service officials said.

Michael Gelardi is a Portland, Ore., attorney who analyzed the park-conversion issue in a 2007 law review article at the University of Washington. He pointed out that cities are violating federal law when they convert a park without Park Service permission.

“The National Park Service should be keeping track of the investments that they’ve made with the public’s money in these parks,” Gelardi said. “They need to make sure that the recipients of these grants follow federal law.”

Johnson, the California parks advocate, cautions that unless reforms are undertaken, more cash-strapped cities are likely to push for privatizing parkland without offering citizens equal recreational opportunities.

“It’s just like watching bank accounts if you’re a bank president,” Johnson said. “If you walk out of the bank and don’t watch… someone’s going to walk away with some of the money.”

More on this story from InvestigateWest

Heart of Michigan park sacrificed for private golf course

Oklahoma park bought and paid for

Kids wait six years for ballfields taken over by Yankee Stadium

LuAnne Kozma, a Michigan parks activist, said the entire debate needs to be re-framed so that cities and states no longer look to the biggest patch of green on their map when government coffers come up short.

“We’re trying to get people to realize that there shouldn’t be a dollar value attached to a park any more,” she said. “Once a park becomes a park, it’s out of the market . . . It’s just priceless.”

Jason Alcorn contributed to this report, which was edited by Carol Smith. InvestigateWest is a donor-supported investigative newsroom in Seattle. Support its original, independent journalism for $5 a month. 

CHECK THE DATABASE: Look up park grants in your state.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The latest battle for control of Alcatraz Island is under way.

Many have laid claim to the wind-swept rock in the middle of the San Francisco Bay since the last prisoner left the federal land in 1963. American Indians occupied the island for 19 months ending in 1972. And politicians have floated the idea of building a casino or even a new San Francisco 49ers football stadium on Alcatraz.

Today, the National Park Service and organizers of the America's Cup are tussling over Alcatraz's role in the Super Bowl of yacht racing. The island will offer some of the best views of the most prestigious competition when multi-million dollar boats take to the San Francisco Bay in 2012 and 2013. Alcatraz sits almost directly in the middle of the proposed race course and offers 360-degree views of the bay.

But the island already receives 1.4 million visitors a year and is at capacity during the summer tourist season. Therein lies one of the main sources of tension over how to balance competing priorities that arose when San Francisco was selected to host the 34th America's Cup contest.

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The National Park Service manages the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Alcatraz and much of the race course. The city of San Francisco is in charge of satisfying environmental regulations, securing government permits and spearheading planning for the event.

The two got off to a rocky start when the city released a draft environmental impact report over the summer stating Alcatraz would be closed to the public and given over to well-heeled event sponsors and other VIPs for private viewing of the race. The report also made similar claims about Fort Baker at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Both are popular tourist destinations.

"All lands and facilities in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including Alcatraz and Fort Baker, will remain open to the public throughout the entire period of the races," park officials declared in rejecting that proposal.

Today, the city's America's Cup project manager says the episode was a misunderstanding rooted in poorly written passages in the report.

Project manager Michael Martin said that organizers did discuss setting up private viewing areas for sponsors. But that idea was scrapped after park officials made it clear the America's Cup would have to abide by the same rules as the public when visiting the island.

The park service forbids any kind of seating — from bleachers to folding chairs — and limits picnicking to a dock area with obstructed views on Alcatraz. There are no food vendors on the island.

"There won't be any great accommodations," said park service spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet. "Because of that, Alcatraz may not be the best place to watch."

Park officials said America's Cup organizers will have to go through the same permitting process the public must go through to secure the prison for after-hours functions. Organizers plan to host parties in the prison's cell block in the evenings.

The America's Cup is expected to create 8,000 jobs and inject more than $1.4 billion into the region's economy during planning, construction and the actual racing, which will take place in a series of contests in 2012 and 2013. But the millions of spectators over that time— with 500,000 on peak days_will test the Bay Area's transportation network, sanitation systems and the environment during about 50 days of racing.

The city's draft environmental impact report, which lays out the preliminary plans for the races and the proposed precautions to be taken to protect the environment, drew comments and concerns from 34 public agencies, 41 non-governmental organizations and 115 individuals. The report, the comments and the city's responses will be presented to the San Francisco Planning Commission on Thursday. No construction can began until the commission approves the report, and its decision can be appealed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The National Park Service's comments and concerns over the environmental impact run 22 pages. One concern was the potential impact of 80,000 people descending on historic Crissy Field, which has a beach and a newly restored wetland.

The park service also said the city has failed to explain "how ferry traffic to and from Alcatraz would be maintained, and what impacts would be to visitors attempting to visit the island." It noted that ferry service "currently runs every 30 min. through what would be the race area."

In response, the city said it would work with the U.S. Coast Guard and the ferry service to ensure safe passage during the races.

The park service is also concerned about how organizers plan to protect birds, marine mammals and plants. The city said it will prohibit America's Cup-related boats from coming within 100 yards (90 meters) of Alcatraz and barring helicopters from getting any closer than 1,000 feet (300 meters).

"In our experience, it is not realistic to believe that all events will proceed as planned around Alcatraz and that sensitive areas and closures will be adequately enforced," the park service responded in asking for bigger buffer zones.

Both sides say they are continuing to negotiate.

"We are still in a dialogue with the park service," said the city's project manager Martin. "We are taking their concerns very seriously."