For Immediate Release

November 20, 2004

APPROPRIATIONS BILL BOOST NATIONAL PARK FUNDING

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Wrapping up the current session of Congress, the House and Senate approved a substantial boost in funding today for the National Park Service that will result in a direct five percent increase in the operations budgets of each National Park, U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks said. 

            The park funding is contained in a multi-agency spending bill that will fund several government agencies, including the National Park Service, through the end of the current fiscal year.  Through efforts of Rep. Dicks, who serves as the ranking Democratic member of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, the overall National Park Service budget was increased by $95 million over the previous year, with $75 million of that amount dedicated to individual park operations budgets. 

            The result builds on efforts that Rep. Dicks and other members of the Interior Subcommittee made this year to address the shortfall that has reduced staffing at Olympic National Park and other national parks and historic places around the nation.  In June, when the House considered the Interior funding bill, Rep. Dicks argued that an insufficient portion of the National Park Service budget was actually given to the individual parks to maintain visitor services and to fund interpretive activities that citizens expect at all of the Park Service's 388 sites nationwide. 

            Later in the summer, after visits to all three of the national parks in the state of Washington, the congressman said he was committed to seeking a budget increase that would translate into a specific boost for the operation of each park, rather than for Park Service or Interior Department overhead.

            "This is a major step forward for park operations," Rep. Dicks said.  "We are committed to reversing the decline that has made it harder and harder for park superintendents to give visitors the high quality outdoor experience they expect," he added.   

              The appropriations bill approved today contains other Interior-related funding, including the activities of the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and it continues a sustained program of restoring salmon habitat throughout federally-owned lands in the Pacific Northwest. 

            The bill includes a special appropriation inserted recently by Rep. Dicks in order to increase seismic monitoring around Mount St. Helens as a result of the recent indications of increased volcanic activity.  The funds will be spent by the U.S. Geological Survey to expand and upgrade its capability to interpret seismic activity.

           The bill also funds two other efforts launched by Rep. Dicks in recent years in the Pacific Northwest -- a program to restore culverts that affect fish passage along streams and rivers, and a program of identifying hatchery raised salmon stocks in order to protect threatened and endangered species.  This "mass marking" program has been implemented in the past year, allowing hatchery fish to be visibly distinguished by clipping the small, unused adipose fin using automated machinery.  The Interior funding bill for the next year contains another increment of funding in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in the Fish & Wildlife budgets to continue this important work, the congressman said.

            It also contains another critical element of the Elwha River restoration project that will remove the two dams on the Elwha River and restore one of Washington's historically productive salmon-rearing rivers.  In the next fiscal year, another $13.45 million has been allocated for continued work on the Elwha project.  Thus far, the federal government has appropriated a total of $126.7 million for the project in the past several years.         

            The bill also addresses another important environmental challenge in Washington State -- the depletion of oxygen levels in Hood Canal.  Rep. Dicks said the bill includes a $350,000 to continue a study of the dissolved oxygen problem in Hood Canal.  A similar amount was included in the Interior bill last year, and Rep. Dicks secured $200,000 in the EPA budget account and another $1.4 million in this year' s Defense Appropriations bill for Navy participation in the joint effort to investigate the low levels of dissolved oxygen in the Canal.

            A listing of the major Washington State items in the Interior Appropriations portion of the FY 2005 Appropriations bill follows:

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