National Park Service

Reexamination of Employee Housing Program Is Needed Gao ID: RCED-94-284 August 30, 1994

Since 1916, the National Park Service has provided rental housing in parks to many of its employees. The Park Service has an inventory today of about 4,700 housing units. Nearly half of the housing inventory is more than 30 years old. Park Service estimates of what it would cost to repair, rehabilitate, repair, and replace this housing inventory have increased significantly during the past several years; the total estimate is now more than half a billion dollars. This report (1) describes the Park Service's housing program and compares it with the housing programs run by two other large land management agencies--the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management--and (2) identifies options that are available to the Park Service to deal with its housing problems.

GAO found that: (1) the Park Service provides a wide variety of in-park housing to many of its employees because it believes that this housing is vital to providing in-park visitor services; (2) the Forest Service and BLM have significantly less employee housing than the Park Service because they do not focus on providing visitor services and have different approaches to providing employee housing; (3) the Park Service's maintenance costs are significantly higher because most of its housing units are historic in nature and single-family or multiplex units; (4) the repair, rehabilitation, and replacement costs for Park Service housing units are about 3 times higher than for the Forest Service or BLM; (5) although the Park Service has requested $30 million to upgrade its housing inventory in fiscal year 1995, the Forest Service has requested only $1 million in maintenance costs and BLM does not plan to upgrade its housing inventory; (6) it is unlikely that the Park Service will receive the funding it has requested to stop further deterioration of its housing inventory because of federal budgetary constraints; and (7) the Park Service needs to explore options to reduce its housing inventory by reexamining its housing requirements, disposing of the housing units that cannot be adequately justified, and attempting to move some of its employees into local housing markets.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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