Travel Woes

May 1, 2004

As director of the National Park Service, Fran Mainella oversees the 385 national parks, monuments, trails, cemeteries, seashores and other sites that encompass 84 million of our most scenic, remote, historic and hallowed acres. Her agency's assets include more than 18,000 permanent structures, 8,000 miles of roads, 1,800 bridges and tunnels, and 4,400 housing units. In 2003, the national park system logged 266 million visits and, according to the NPS, nearly all of those visitors went away happy; agency surveys reported a 96 percent satisfaction rating.

It may not be worth justifying public spending on business trips.

But when Mainella appeared before a decidedly hostile House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior in late March, only one figure seemed to matter-$50 million. That's how much the NPS spent on domestic and foreign business travel in 2002, according to a General Accounting Office report (GAO-03-354).

Fifty million dollars out of a $1.6 billion operations budget is not a lot to spend on travel, especially for a park system that stretches from the Bering Sea to American Samoa to Key West. But to Congress, that $50 million carries the whiff of boondoggle. It's not so much the amount that raises eyebrows. It's the concept of taxpayer-funded travel itself that fires the passions of elected officials.

The potency of this issue is something almost every politician learns at an early stage. Some find out the hard way, as did a group of Minnesota state legislators in 1993, when a local TV station followed them to a legislative conference in San Diego and proceeded to film them playing golf. Others, such as Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., find great success in mining the travel issue. She won her first office by knocking off her former boss, a congressman whose foreign junketeering on the government dime helped cost him his seat.

Those who use a recess to embark on junkets quickly discover two things: It is possible to tour the world on the federal tab with just a fig leaf of official duty, and the media is always interested in taxpayer-funded travel. This knowledge is then applied to the departments and agencies that Congress scrutinizes.

During the Clinton administration, it was the Energy Department that sparked congressional outrage over Secretary Hazel O'Leary's penchant for living well on the road. She won the most dubious honor accorded to public officials-a starring role on the "NBC News" segment known as "The Fleecing of America."

In Mainella's case, the problem was that, at a time when the NPS was considering reducing hours and services in response to tight budgets, it also was occasionally sending employees to meetings and conferences in China, South Africa and France.

Mainella didn't show it, but the urge to fight back against the criticism must have been strong. The park system includes many sites that are easily accessible, but others can be reached only by expensive transportation such as air taxi, bush charter or ferry. As for globe-trotting, roughly half the foreign trips were to Mexico and Canada, hardly evidence of extravagance since more than half a dozen national parks share a border with one of those countries.

Then there is the matter of post-9/11 security. Travel costs spiked in 2002 in part due to personnel assigned to high-value targets such as the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and the National Mall in Washington.

In the end, Mainella bit her tongue and drew on more than 30 years of experience at the state, local and federal levels in her response to the subcommittee. "I've heard you loud and clear," she said. She suspended most foreign travel and cut domestic travel by 10 percent. Other trips will be replaced by teleconferencing.

Will that assuage Congress? Perhaps. If nothing else, it should keep the Park Service off "The Fleecing of America."