[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 138 (Tuesday, August 4, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4718-S4719]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE GREAT AMERICAN OUTDOORS ACT

  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk 
about some positive news and some positive news that happened just 
today. It is not about the coronavirus. It is not about politics. It is 
not about Hurricane Isaias.
  It has to do with some urgent and historic help for our national 
parks, something that is really important to all of us. We all love our 
parks.
  Today President Trump signed into law the landmark Great American 
Outdoors Act, landmark, bipartisan legislation that will protect and 
conserve our public lands. I am happy to see this effort finally cross 
the finish line because the natural beauty and rich history of America 
is something that we must preserve for future generations.
  A big part of the new law is bipartisan legislation that is called 
the Restore Our Parks Act that I have worked on for more than 3 years 
with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Senator Mark Warner from 
Virginia was my partner in this, as well as Senator Lamar Alexander of 
Tennessee and Senator Angus King of Maine. Our legislation involves 
urgent stewardship of our national parks, which is something that I 
have spent more than a dozen years working on. I guess I shouldn't 
admit that. Sometimes things take a long time around here. But going 
back to my days as Director of the Office of Management and Budget 
under President George W. Bush, I started focusing on this issue of the 
backlog of maintenance projects at our national parks.
  It is alarming. It has been growing. It now adds up to over $12 
billion, far more than the parks could ever afford to take care of 
based on the annual budgets we provide them from Congress. By the way, 
the annual budget from Congress for all operations and all maintenance 
is less than $3 billion. Yet there is a $12 billion maintenance 
backlog.
  When Teddy Roosevelt started the national parks, he wanted to 
preserve some of the most beautiful, pristine lands in America. He 
wanted to be sure they were going to be there for public use. It was a 
good decision. We now have 84 million acres of parkland all around the 
country. Some are those beautiful, pristine places like Yosemite and 
Yellowstone and the Tetons with spectacular, beautiful vistas, but 
others preserve our history.
  We have historical parks around the country. We have battlefields 
that we have preserved around the country to tell the story of our 
country, good and bad. We have Presidents' homes that have been 
preserved to be able to help, again, tell the story of America.
  Recently, I was at one of our national park sites in Ohio, and it is 
the home of an individual who was the first Black colonel in the United 
States Army. He was also the first Black superintendent of a national 
park. The home is also a site on the Underground Railroad, so it is a 
place where people can go and see where escaping slaves were harbored 
and understand more of the history, not just of slavery but also of the 
cooperation and the seeking for freedom that came out of the 
Underground Railroad. This is the Charles Young home near Xenia, OH.
  So our national parks are really important for so many reasons. Yet, 
during the past couple of decades, we haven't taken care of them as we 
should, and this backlog has built up.
  People appreciate our parks. During the past decade or so, we have 
had an increase of about 58 million in the number of visitors to our 
national parks. More are coming every year. Why? It is a relatively 
inexpensive vacation. They are beautiful. People from all over the 
world know about our national parks, and it is one of the things they 
love about America.
  The problem is that, when these people visit the parks nowadays, they 
are

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going to find that, over the years, we haven't kept up with these 
maintenance needs so the water systems, the roads, the bridges, the 
bathrooms, the visitor centers, some of the trails--many of these are 
now in bad shape. Some are closed, actually.
  When you go to a national park, you may find that a facility is 
closed because of a lack of funding for the deferred maintenance. We 
just haven't had the funding to do the capital improvements they need 
so that they can stay functional.
  Just the other week, I saw that firsthand at Cuyahoga Valley National 
Park in Northeast Ohio. It is a great park. It is the 13th most visited 
national park in America. It kind of runs between Cleveland and Akron, 
OH.
  It suffered from these deferred maintenance problems for years. I saw 
a crumbling trail. I saw trails that were falling into the Cuyahoga 
River and couldn't be used. I saw rusting historic train tracks that 
run through the park. It is a tourist railroad that runs through. Train 
tracks are an expensive thing to replace. Again, it has to be done. I 
saw a bridge that was really unsafe to be on and has to be restored. It 
is a historic bridge. We want to preserve it, but the costs are just 
too high given the annual budget for that park.
  Their maintenance backlog at that park alone is $50 million, yet 
their annual budget is about $11 million, which goes to the rangers and 
the programs and the maintenance and operations but is not enough money 
to take care of these big problems.
  In a way, by not fixing these problems, we are also increasing the 
cost. Think about it. These costs compound year after year. In your own 
house, you might think about what happens if you don't fix the leak in 
the roof. What happens is the drywall begins to have problems. You 
might have mold. The floors begin to get wet and wood floors begin to 
buckle. You have additional costs that, if you had just fixed that 
roof, you wouldn't have.
  Well, that is where we are with the parks. If we take the time and 
the effort to make the fixes now, we will save money over time for 
taxpayers because we will not have the compounding costs. Every day, it 
gets worse and worse.
  Now, finally, we have come up with a way to deal with it. Congress 
has asked our parks, over the last few years, to give us their deferred 
maintenance projects with specificity: What are your priority projects? 
What are the top priorities? We have asked them to lay it out in 
detail.
  It has been very helpful because we now know we have over $12 billion 
in maintenance needs but about $6.5 billion of that is high-priority 
projects--the projects most in need of immediate attention. We know 
what they are. They are shovel-ready. They have been vetted. We are 
proposing a source of funding to be able to deal with that because, 
again, the annual appropriations process does not come near enough to 
matching what we need to have done.
  The highest priority needs at the parks is about $6.5 billion. In 
this legislation--now law of the land--royalty income is taken from 
onshore and offshore oil and gas, and some of that royalty is directed 
toward this use.
  The next 5 years, enough of that funding will be there to deal with 
the $6.5 billion, half of the maintenance backlog. We would like to do 
better, but, frankly, this is historic. Never have we had so much 
funding go to the parks, never have we been able to deal with these 
backlogs that have built up over years.
  It is really a debt unpaid. That is how I look at it. It is something 
we should have been doing all along. We weren't. The costs have now 
snowballed, and now we need to deal with it. It is not so much a new 
responsibility as it is stewardship we never did in the first place. It 
is a debt unpaid.
  Second, again, it is going to save us money over time--assuming we 
want the parks to be working, we want the trails to be open, we want 
the visitors centers to be welcoming--all of which, of course, we do 
want and we must have.
  The bill is not just important for our parks but also our economy, 
too, because these projects are infrastructure projects. We have talked 
a lot about that here on how to get more jobs into our economy right 
now. With the impact of coronavirus on our economy, we need more 
opportunities out there. Infrastructure is one. These are 
infrastructure jobs--over 100,000 new jobs in this legislation alone.
  Again, these projects are shovel-ready. They are vetted. They are 
ones that Congress--thanks to our asking the Park Service for the 
information--knows what jobs are out there and what projects need to be 
done.
  It is a long-term investment too. As of 2019, visitor spending in 
communities near our parks resulted in $41.7 billion of benefit to the 
Nation's economy and supported 340,000 jobs. It is new jobs in terms of 
construction, but it is also ensuring the parks continue to be able to 
be attracting these visitors, which adds such a big economic boost to 
our economy.
  I am proud that Congress has come together as Republicans and 
Democrats in a nonpartisan way to support this important initiative, 
and I am thankful for the President and his support. He showed bold 
leadership by saying: You know what, we are going do this. Other 
Presidents have talked about it. In the last three or four 
administrations, we have talked about it. Again, I have been working on 
it for a dozen years. Now we have actually been able to do it.
  I also want to thank the Director of Office of Management and Budget, 
Russ Vought, for his help; the Secretary of the Interior, David 
Bernhard; and other members of the President's team, including Ivanka 
Trump, who has always been strongly supportive of our national parks.
  This is about responsible stewardship. These repairs were a debt 
unpaid. We are finally addressing them before the cost increase. Our 
parks have stood tall for more than a century now as the embodiment of 
American history and our shared commitment to preserving some of our 
most magnificent lands. Thanks to Restore Our Parks Act, we will now 
ensure that those parks stand tall for centuries to come.

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