Sports

TOM VENESKY

It’s too bad that our state government doesn’t appreciate our state parks like the rest of the country.

click image to enlarge

Select images available for purchase in the
Times Leader Photo Store

Last week Pennsylvania’s state park system earned a 2009 National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Park and Recreation Management. The award was announced on Oct. 14 in Utah at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration and the National Recreation and Park Association. It recognizes the job that the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources does to attract people to our state parks through a variety of programs that, most importantly, connect them to the outdoors.

There are other factors that went into the award, but nothing means more than simply connecting people with nature. It’s a job that our 117 state parks do well.

From January through July of this year, more than 23.5 million people visited Pennsylvania’s state parks, a 17 percent increase from the same period in 2008.

Annually, the state parks average 35 million visitors. Pretty impressive … for now.

I expect that number to drop in the near future thanks to a state budget that hits DNCR’s Bureau of State Parks with a $9 million, or 15 percent cut.

As a result, DCNR seems resigned to the fact that it will have to close some of its Gold Medal parks to compensate for the shortfall. This summer the agency drafted a list of 50 state parks that would be considered first for closures. At the time the list was prepared the agency was doing other things to save money, such as letting seasonal employees go a few months early, implementing a hiring freeze and closing campgrounds earlier than normal.

The list was a last resort at the time, but with the passage of the state budget, it is looking more and more like a reality. Fortunately, none of the parks in Luzerne or Lackawanna counties are on the closure list. The parks in our region that did make the list include Gouldsboro, Big Pocono and Prompton.

Still, that doesn’t mean that parks such as Nescopeck, Frances Slocum, Ricketts Glenn and Hickory Run are out of the woods. Parks that aren’t on the list are still susceptible to having some services cut. That includes campgrounds and educational programs – two big attractions.

Last Wednesday, I visited Nescopeck State Park and was amazed by the amount of activity. The parking lot by Lake Frances was more than half full, cars were parked at nearly every pull-off along Honey Hole Road and people mingled around the environmental education center and hiked the trails leading to Nescopeck Creek.

And this was in the afternoon on a weekday.

Would these same crowds exist if the education center and its programs were discontinued?

Would parks like Hickory Run, for example, attract throngs of visitors if its campground was shut down?

I doubt it, and that would be a shame because it would mean fewer people would be experiencing and appreciating our natural resources.

DCNR press secretary Christina Novak said closing a park doesn’t mean keeping the public off the property. They could still use the land. Closing a park means discontinuing its services, and it’s basically something that all of our state parks are facing to one degree or another.

The thing that worries me if a park or parks are closed is what will happen to the land in the long run. Pennsylvania’s state parks total almost 300,000 acres. That’s a lot of property.

What happens is the reduction or elimination of services – campgrounds, programs, etc. – leads to fewer people using the parks? Obviously it will mean the parks generate less revenue, and when that happens it wouldn’t surprise me if a legislator somewhere in the state kicked around the idea of using that land for something else … a use far different than outdoor recreation to generate money.

Sure, the recent Gold Medal designation is a nice accolade for our state parks. It puts us at the top of the list nationwide. But it does little to protect the future of the parks. The only thing that can do that, unfortunately, is more money in the budget.