Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | National Parks

The changing of the guard: increasing demands placed on border parks and icon parks are draining funds intended for broader protection of historical and natural resources.

Article Excerpt
Visitor bag inspections at the St. Louis Arch and weapons wands at the Lincoln Memorial. Fewer backcountry patrols in the Grand Canyon and messier bathrooms at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. These are symptoms of a National Park Service (NPS) that has shifted some of its focus from a long-held mission of protecting natural resources and ensuring visitor enjoyment toward issues of security.

Park Service representatives hesitate to cite homeland security issues as a significant funding concern in light of war expenditures and broader budget issues. But park advocates believe the costs associated with beefed-up security infrastructure, more active law enforcement, and remediating the environmental impacts of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol place an undue burden on the Park Service (see sidebar, opposite page).

Apart from the national icons that are likely targets for terrorists, public lands along the Mexican border are a top concern. The Interior Department manages 39 percent of the southern border, including seven national parks with a wide variance in the impacts of real and perceived security threats. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona faces some of the biggest challenges.

Jesus Rodriguez is a supervisory border patrol agent whose territory stretches from the New Mexico border almost all the way to California, and includes Organ Pipe. According to Rodriguez, between October 2005 and June 2006, 2,400 agents arrested nearly 300,000 illegal border crossers and seized more than 460,000 pounds of drugs.

Border patrol agents can no longer assume that the average immigrant crossing in Arizona "is coming to work at a farm," says Rodriguez. "Now we're getting rocks thrown at us. [Serious incidents] that never would have occurred a few years ago are happening on a daily basis. Aliens...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!