The District has a lot of parks, and D.C. regularly scores the top spot on rankings of the best U.S. urban park systems. But most of that parkland—which makes up almost a quarter of the city’s total land—isn’t owned or managed by our own city government. Instead, the National Park Service operates 90% of our green space, from the National Mall to the littlest of triangle parks.
A report from George Washington University, released May 11, examined the many problems with NPS control over our city’s parks. Its authors argue that our green spaces would be better suited to D.C. residents’ needs, more equitably managed and easier to improve if the District government operated them.
One of the most interesting and compelling arguments in the report focused on a larger issue that hangs over every single interaction District residents have with government services.
“Lacking statehood, District residents do not elect representatives who oversee NPS,” it reads. “The agency’s lack of engagement with and disconnect from local voters means that NPS is not accountable to DC residents and elected officials.”
When I think about the fight for statehood, the first issues that come to mind are marijuana legalization (because we can all get a “gift” of weed but can’t just buy it) and crime (because of the recent move by Congress to overturn the D.C. Council criminal code reform bill). But parks are a visually obvious and direct way that citizens interact with government management.
It matters that the National Park Service has little incentive to make D.C.’s parks the best they can be for the communities who actually live near them. The underfunded national agency has a maintenance backlog of almost $2 billion in the District alone. And the funding it does spend on D.C. parks is spread unequally—the NPS division that includes Rock Creek Park gets four times more funding per acre than the division covering parks east of the Anacostia.
There’s no guarantee that D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation would do a stellar job, especially given the city’s current budget woes. But if DPR took years to fix a bench or neglected to maintain our trails, at least we could vote to change it.
