Speaker comments, as provided

Sue Masica
Resource Development Council
April 19, 2012

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Good morning. It has been a few years since the National Park Service has joined you for a breakfast meeting, and we appreciate the invitation to be with you today.

Because it has been awhile, let me start with a quick overview of the National Park Service nationally, and in Alaska – a snapshot that I hope will convey one message: national parks are a vital piece of economic diversification in Alaska.

As an agency, we are nearing our 100th anniversary, but like to think we look pretty good for 96 years old. Across the country, there are 397 units in the National Park System. We annually host some 275 million visitors, and spending by visitors contributes more than $31 billion to local economies. That spending, by both Americans and overseas visitors, supports an estimated 258,000 jobs nationwide.

Our Alaska numbers are more modest, except when it comes to acreage. The Alaska Region includes about 54 million acres, or 2/3 of all the national park acreage in the country. We run on an annual budget of about $115 million, a small but important slice of the Servicewide budget of $2.6 billion. And, something particularly important in rural Alaska, the NPS has staff on the payroll in 24 communities – paying rent, buying groceries, airplane flights and fuel, as well as serving important volunteer roles in their towns and villages. In 2011, during the government’s once-a-year charity drive, National Park Service employees pledged the largest dollar increase of any Federal entity in Alaska to the Combined Federal Campaign.

As summer approaches, we will see our NPS employment numbers grow from about 500 employees in the winter to more than 1,000 in June. Many of the seasonal employees will be Alaskans, hired locally or into jobs elsewhere in their home state. Recent legislation sponsored by Senators Murkowski and Begich will improve our ability to hire local residents. This is an important piece of continuing to implement the Alaska Lands Act, and a legal change which will benefit other federal land managers as well.

In terms of visitation, the projections this year are for a modest increase in visitation to Alaska generally, and likely a similar increase in parks. In 2011, we had about 2.2 million visitors to parks statewide; that is likely to rise by a small percentage this year if the forecasts by the Alaska Travel Industry Association and others are correct.

Those visits come disproportionately in Southeast Alaska, with Klondike Gold Rush NHP seeing more than 900,000 visits, primarily from cruise ship passengers. Glacier Bay NP sees visitation in the 350,000 range, also largely on ships. And Sitka NHP will see more than 100,000 visitors this year, a significant number but down by more than half over the last few years because of cruise ships taking different itineraries.

Elsewhere in Alaska, Denali National Park will continue to be our best-known park and will see more than 300,000 visitors this summer as it has for more than a decade.

Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward remains another popular destination, with a well-developed day tour boat industry running out of the Seward harbor and a significant amount of land traffic to Exit Glacier. This year, we were pleased to open up a new business opportunity at Exit Glacier. This came at the request of a local business – Adventure 60 North – which had a snow coach and a desire to offer winter trips out Exit Glacier Road. Based on earlier planning work, we issued a commercial use authorization and for about $200 in park permits, he was set to go. His weekend trips have already brought many new users to the park.

This type of commercial authorization is common in the Alaska parks. We issue more than 300 such permits. They are generally issued non-competitively, and typically do not offer any measure of exclusivity.

In addition to these, we issue about 100 concession contracts which are typically larger business operations and are offered on a competitive basis. Together, these companies do generate about 100 million dollars in revenue in Alaska’s parks. The majority of this revenue is from cruise ships in Glacier Bay, the transportation concession at Denali, and the lodges at Glacier Bay and Katmai. Smaller dollar volume contracts include sport hunting guides in national preserves and climbing guides on Mount McKinley.

The 400-plus businesses operating in Alaska’s national parks bring significant private employment opportunity as well. Excluding the cruise and tour boat operations at Glacier Bay, we estimate these businesses have upwards of 2,000 employees. The largest operations are at Denali (~325), Glacier Bay (~75), and Katmai (~35).

Economics has been referred to as the “dismal science,” and I promise not to mix breakfast with too many more numbers. But in the case of national parks, I think the economy associated with them is actually a rather upbeat picture.

The National Park Service uses something it calls the Money Generation Model to estimate the impact of government and park visitor spending. Being a national model, it does not perfectly capture the unique aspects of Alaska’s visitor economy but does provide an order of magnitude. The latest figures show visitor spending at more than $200 million, generating an estimated 3,500 jobs from both National Park Service and visitor spending.

A recent study by the National Parks Conservation Association and local economist Ginny Fay looked specifically at Katmai National Park. They found that visitor spending was nearly three times higher than our national estimate, providing a larger boost to the surrounding community than we had estimated.

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While we know that national parks are significant economic engines for Alaska and local communities, that’s not the underlying reason for their establishment. Congress focused on the resources within parks, the experience of visitors, and the value for local residents in terms of preserving landscapes that in many cases support their subsistence lifestyle.

Alaska’s national parks encompass about 54 million acres, or about 15 percent of Alaska. Describing these lands would take several meetings, but remember a few superlatives:

• Lake Clark and Wrangell-St. Elias national parks hold many of the headwaters and spawning grounds for heavily used red salmon runs that move through Bristol Bay and the Copper River, respectively.
• Because of the relatively light impact by people on national parks, they are unique laboratories for studying how a changing climate will affect Alaska. We are documenting retreating glaciers, the influx of taller alder and willow into areas that were once low tundra, slumping permafrost, and changing fire seasons. How this affects our legislated mandates regarding specific species, the experiences of visitors and how we manage our capital investments is a growing discussion topic among park managers and the public.
• Northern parks provide significant habitat for the Western Alaska Caribou Herd, a significant subsistence resource in northwest Alaska.
• National parks such as Yukon-Charley Rivers, Sitka, Klondike Gold Rush and Wrangell-St. Elias are home to scores of historic structures now in public ownership which are the fabric of key periods in Alaska’s history. Any of you who own older homes or cabins can appreciate the challenges of maintaining safe public access to these buildings while at the same time preserving as many of the historic elements as possible.

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Lastly, I want to touch on a few planning and legal issues which are currently in the public process in one form or another.

Denali National Park is re-evaluating how it manages traffic along the park road. We will conclude a multi-year process later this summer with a management plan that will focus less on a specific number of vehicles on the road and more on ways to maintain a high quality visitor experience and not adversely change the wildlife patterns in the park. We have had substantial comment from the business community, and appreciate that guidance.

Denali is also looking at plowing the park road several more miles to the west each winter, beginning next winter. This planning process started with a request from municipal government in Fairbanks as well as the travel industry. While the decision is not final, we believe this will expand access for both visitors and Alaskans looking for expanded winter opportunities.

We are in mid-stream on two lawsuits regarding our jurisdiction on the Yukon River and other navigable waters. The Department of Justice represents the Park Service, and while our position has not been set out before the federal courts in detail, I can say that we believe our regulations in the area of boating safety (which parallel state regulation) and resource protection do apply on navigable waters passing through units of the National Park System. The State of Alaska and many Alaskans believe otherwise, and it is this disagreement that the courts will have the opportunity to sort out.

At the core of the NPS mission is our role in stewarding some spectacular cultural and natural resources around the country. While we have some special provisions that guide our management in Alaska, we are still part of a national system of parks. One area where we face some challenges has to do with wildlife, where the state has a role, but so too do we have responsibilities. Our legal and policy frameworks do not always align neatly, so we seek to cooperate given that the species – and many individuals – don’t understand those differences.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, the National Park Service is coming up on its 100th anniversary as an agency. With that in mind, we are looking at how we do business and how that might change in our second century. There are a few key questions I’d like to leave you with, and hear your answers either this morning or by one of the contact cards we’ve left on your tables.

Most of our visitation looks a bit like the audience in this room, and I count myself among you – fairly white and middle aged or older. Less and less, this is not the face of America or Alaska. We want to attract not only people who come from a demographic like this room, but people who are younger, who come from a wide range of educational and economic backgrounds, or whose parents immigrated to the United States to become Americans by choice.

As a federal agency, we are lurching into 21st Century technology but we are not at the place where many of you are in terms of how you plan vacations or attract customers.

How might we do better in terms of offering a “virtual visit,” trip planning, or other information on-line and on mobile devices? How are we doing with you as business partners? We have a relationship with some 400 businesses. I know that cheaper and faster is going to be one suggestion, but what specifically could we try to do that would make working with our agency easier for you?

And as Alaskans who likely enjoy recreation in this amazing state, what can we do differently in the parks? Are there commercial activities, like the winter snow coach idea, that we should be considering? Are there other issues we might be able to address?

I appreciate the work over the decades that RDC and its members have done with the National Park Service. I look forward to continuing that relationship, and would welcome any questions.