| Parks & Trails NY has an expanded list of parks that will be closed if the "fine print" that LeBrun mentioned doesn't occur. They are:
Parks County
Brentwood State Park Suffolk
Heckscher State Park Suffolk
Hempstead State Park Nassau
Valley Stream State Park Nassau
Harriman State Park - Sebago Orange
High Tor State Park Rockland
Minnewaska State Park Ulster
Tallman Mountain State Park Rockland
Fahnestock State Park Putnam
Cherry Plain State Park Rensselaer
Grafton Lakes State Park Rensselaer
Minekill State Park Schoharie
Peebles Island State Park Saratoga
Bowman Lake State Park Chenango
Glimmerglass State Park Otsego
Sandy Island Beach State Park Oswego
Verona Beach State Park Oneida
Long Point State Park Cayuga
Pinnacle State Park Steuben
Silver Lake State Park Wyoming
DeVeaux Woods State Park Erie
Artpark (Earl Brydges) State Park Erie
Evangola State Park Erie
Reservoir State Park Niagara
24 additional parks, in addition to further state historical site closures and cut-backs in hours and programs. While DEC has already announced one campground closure, there's a potential for further cut-backs or closures. Even if the funding is found to keep these parks open, as well as keeping open some or all of those already scheduled for closure, it does not address the longer-term viability of these parks.
What will be the impact of closures on the parks? Once maintenance stops, infrastructure will start to deteriorate. Trails will start eroding and become overgrown. Buildings will develop leaks and start to decay. Pipes will develop breaks, picnic tables will rot, concrete and mortar will start to crumble, roads will develop potholes and then start to wash out, bridges will become unsafe. Vandalism and people using the park despite it's closure will cause damage as well. It's a fairly rapid phenomenon. A few years ago, I visited an area that had once been a picnic area for one of the local campgrounds. It had been "officially closed" for five years. If the person who was taking me there had not known exactly where it was, you wouldn't have known it ever existed. The only signs that there had once been something there were a couple of crumbling fireplaces, which were overgrown by ferns and brush. I regularly hike trails in my area, and every year it's remarkable to see the amount of damage that a single winter will inflict on a trail. Trees fall across the trail, and wash-outs are common. On the less-popular trails, it's not uncommon to find brush and branches growing into the trail. What exacerbates this is that both DEC and OPRHP have been cut back for years, and have been forced to skimp on maintenance. The trail and park infrastructure is not in good shape to begin with, closing them will just increase the severity of the existing problems.
If, and that's a big if, the economic climate in the state turns around, the possibility exists for the parks to re-open. Realistically, the longer any park remains closed, the more certain it is that it will remain closed. It's known that there is a serious maintenance backlog in the parks system - a very expensive backlog. Reopening a closed park involves more than just unlocking the gates. Cleaning out the detritus, repairing the infrastructure, checking and repairing the trails, beaches, and camping areas to ensure they're usable takes time and money. It's an additional expense on top of the existing ones. There's also the people. As parks close, besides the loss of seasonal employment, there will be the loss of skilled personnel, along with their knowledge of the park. While actual layoffs may not occur, the transfers, retirements or resignations of those people represents a loss of experience which will be difficult to replace. Each park, besides its physical layout, has a corresponding infrastructure layout with its own issues. Every park is different, and it takes time to learn not only where everything is, but also how to maintain and manage the park. The loss of that institutional memory means that reopening the park requires the staff start from scratch.
Economically, the park closures will have a reverberating and long-lasting impact on the local economy. Parks & Trails NY estimates that state parks create over 2 billion dollars of economic activity. In looking at the study, that's only for the OPRHP parks. DEC facilities also generate a large amount of financial activity for their areas. These parks are often located in rural, economically depressed areas of the state. The parks serve as an economic engine for them, and their loss is not one that they will easily recover from, if at all.
There are a lot of efforts being made now to keep the parks open. Even though some of the efforts will succeed, some will fail. Some parks will close despite our best efforts. Whether we like it or not, the odds are that they will never reopen. Even "saving" those we can, is at best a short-term solution. We will be buying some time to ask the questions: What do we do to insure the long-term viability of our parks? How do we pay for it? It's a long-overdue discussion, but one that we must start. Because every year, the parks system this state has is getting close to the breaking point, and it's time to fix it before it's permanently broken. |
