By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:48 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- After spending $2.9 billion in two years on a backlog of maintenance in national parks, the Bush administration can't say how much fixing up remains to be done.
``We've really got to get an honest handle on what the maintenance backlog is,'' Donald Murphy, deputy director of the National Park Service, told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.
Murphy said the Park Service won't have a close estimate until a couple years from now, when it expects to complete an inventory of manmade structures in the national parks.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton gave President Bush a report last week that she said represented significant progress toward reducing the backlog -- and included a first-ever inventory of park facilities. She said the administration had spent $2.9 billion to help reduce an estimated $4.9 billion maintenance and repair backlog.
The report was intended to show the strides made since Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, when he accused the Clinton administration of leaving the parks in poor condition and promised to push for $5 billion on maintenance over five years.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, a member of the Senate national parks subcommittee, asked if the figures trumpeted by Norton meant that the maintenance backlog had been reduced to $2 billion.
``No, I wouldn't start down that road,'' Murphy said, explaining it was simply a comparison of two figures, based on the latest information available.
But it was not the latest. The Park Service used information collected in 1993 to estimate the maintenance backlog was $6.1 billion as of January 1997. The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found the proper figure should have been $4.9 billion, since the other $1.2 billion was for building new facilities. In January of this year the GAO cited figures provided nearly a year earlier by the Interior Department that put the backlog figure between $4.08 billion and $6.8 billion as of February 2002.
The effort to compile a new inventory was begun under the Clinton administration after a 1998 GAO report faulted the Park Service for lacking any systematic means of tracking needed repairs and maintenance.
``The park maintenance backlog knows no party line,'' Thomas Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, told the subcommittee Tuesday. ``It has accumulated through Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses.''
Barry Hill, who directs the GAO's natural resources and environment team, testified Tuesday that ``up to now, the maintenance backlog is just a best guess -- it's a moving target.''
``There's really no accountability for the money that's being invested,'' Hill said.
Murphy insisted that didn't mean the agency was using smoke and mirrors; in two years the Park Service tackled 900 projects, including 325 to rehabilitate buildings, 186 to improve water, wastewater and sewer facilities and 60 to upgrade fire safety. An additional 500 projects were under way this year, he said, and 400 more are planned for 2004.
The projects ranged from $16.5 million to repair cracks at New York's Federal Hall National Memorial to $4.1 million for a new visitor center that better protects underground resources at California's Lava Beds National Monument.
"The projects are real projects, there is progress being made,'' Murphy said. "What we don't have is a clear inventory of the total scope.''
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