Park Service

Protecting and preserving park resources for future generations while at the same time meeting the needs of hundreds of millions of park visitors is a difficult task, one made even more difficult by tight budgets at the Park Service and other federal agencies. Managing the national park system under these conditions requires making choices among competing priorities. Within the Park Service, these choices are delegated to the individual park managers and typically involve trade-offs in funding resource management activities, visitor services, or park maintenance. Although the Park Service gives managers a great deal of decision-making authority, it lacks a system to hold them accountable for the consequences of their decisions. Under the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), the Park Service has begun to establish goals for the park system. The next task will be for the Park Service to begin measuring the individual parks' progress in achieving these goals. Implementing GPRA can help Congress and the Park Service reach agreement on goals and expectations for the agency and can help hold the individual parks accountable for achieving their goals. The transition to results-oriented management in the Park Service will not be easy or quick, but GPRA has the potential to improve the agency's performance--a particularly vital goal given limited resources and high public expectations.

GAO noted that: (1) while headquarters plays a key role in formulating requests for increases to the Park Service's operating budget, decisions about spending and operating priorities associated with park operating funds are delegated to the individual park managers; as a result, the individual park managers have broad discretion in deciding how to spend park operating funds; these decisions have been difficult because, while park budgets have been rising, the costs of operating the parks have also been rising in response to factors such as required pay and benefit increases; as a result, spending decisions made by park managers frequently involve trade-offs among competing demands within the parks for activities such as resource management, visitor services, or maintenance; (2) the most significant limitation associated with the Park Service's decentralized priority-setting and accountability systems is that they lack a focus on the results achieved with the funds spent; according to the park managers GAO spoke with, regional or headquarters staff rarely, if ever, discussed with them operating priorities or the results accomplished with the funds provided; key components needed to hold park managers accountable are missing; no expectations have been established for the goals that are to be achieved in the parks, and there is no process for measuring progress toward these goals; (3) GPRA offers the Park Service an opportunity to improve its system of accountability; the Park Service is currently implementing GPRA and plans on issuing its strategic plan, which will extend through fiscal year 2002, in the spring of 1997; (4) information is not available from the Park Service to determine agencywide trends in cutbacks of visitor services; each of the four parks that GAO visited has reduced its visitor services to some degree over the past 5 years; however, it is important to note that the cuts in visitor services were relatively small compared with the reductions in other park activities, such as maintenance and administration; and (5) spending on operations by the Park Service has increased in real terms by about 30 percent since 1985; (15) similarly, the operating budget of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has grown by about 28 percent over the same period; the Bureau of Land Management's and the Army Corps of Engineers' operating budgets have increased by 5 percent and 3 percent, respectively while the Forest Service's operating budget has decreased by 24 percent.