The
Origins and Role of the Missouri Parks Association
Building
a Constituency for State Parks: The
Susan Flader
http://parks.missouri.org/index.htm(for publication in The George Wright Forum, 17:3 (2000)
At a time of ever more constrained finances
and increasing demands on state parks, the support of a constituency with a
statewide focus on the health and integrity of a state park system as a whole
can be critical. This paper assesses
Missouri has been called "determinedly average" by one pundit and "the forty-something state" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a series of articles about its low tax effort and poor funding of education, welfare, and other public services in comparison with other states. Yet it has long been recognized as a leader among the states in natural resource conservation. Today the state has two highly respected resource agencies, but historically it won regard largely for its pace-setting, highly professional conservation department. Led since 1937 by a bipartisan commission, the department has been supported from its very inception by a strong citizen constituency group, the Conservation Federation of Missouri, and generously funded since 1976 by a one-eighth cent dedicated sales tax written into the constitution after a citizen-led initiative petition.
State parks, however, are a separate matter. The earliest parks had been acquired beginning in 1924 by a legislative diversion of 25 percent of hunting and fishing license fees, so upsetting sportsmen that when they organized in 1936 "to take fish and game out of politics" they provided for a conservation commission with responsibility for fish, game, and forests, but not parks. Parks, led thereafter by a park board, subsisted on meager public funding and grew modestly through the generosity of individuals and agencies who contributed more than 60 percent of park units and acreage over the years. Missouri's system, which includes historic sites as well as natural parks in the mold of the national park system, attained high quality in its representation of the natural and cultural diversity of the state, but it has been only middling among the states in number of units and acreage and until recently ranked very low in funding per capita.
When state government was reorganized in 1972, the more powerful conservation department, with its strong citizen allies, resisted being swallowed in a super environmental agency, so Missouri ended up with two agencies—the original conservation department and a new department of natural resources for state parks, air and water quality, and other environmental functions. Despite the ferment of reorganization, the 1970s were relatively good years for parks, with dynamic young leadership creative in utilizing matching funds from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to augment the system.
The crisis came in the early '80s when federal funding dried up and recession and inflation forced recisions in state support, leaving parks with a $7.7 million budget for 1982 that was only half what it had been in the late '70s. To many legislators and others, an obvious solution was to transfer parks to the conservation department, now well funded with its new dedicated tax, but citizens who had worked so hard for the conservation sales tax in 1976 were opposed to such a raid. Park officials were also concerned about dilution of the more preservationist mission and land management philosophy of the parks, and about what would happen to historic sites and other cultural resources in an agency that had no experience with or mandate to protect them. The matter came to a head at a statewide Audubon meeting when the director of the park division, an environmentalist with many personal friends in attendance, made a plea for citizen support of another alternative—transfer of a portion of the conservation tax to the department of natural resources to fund parks.
The resulting turmoil in the meeting revealed to many present their abject lack of understanding of statewide park issues and needs. Everyone in the room had visited individual state parks and some were even members of friends groups for particular parks or historic sites. But if they thought at all about the park division, they tended to view it as a poor cousin of the conservation department concerned primarily with providing for camping, swimming, picnicking and other mass recreation; they had little comprehension of the array and quality of resources preserved in the system as a whole or of the values at stake in the current crisis. In truth, the park division itself had not traditionally reached out to environmental groups, but rather to recreational user groups and local organizations interested in individual parks. Audubon and Sierra Club activists, like the national organizations of which they were a part, tended to focus on the U.S. Congress and federal land management agencies rather than on state government. On state legislative issues they usually worked through the Conservation Federation, which dealt with a wide range of issues but, when the chips were down, almost always supported the conservation department.
The contention and uncertainty in the meeting
finally reached a measure of resolution when Charles Callison, former executive
vice president of the National Audubon Society living in retirement in
Leaders of the association saw their initial challenges as twofold—to educate Missouri citizens and public officials about the nature and mission of the park system and to establish a consistent base of financial support. Fortunately, park officials had devoted considerable attention during the darkest days of the funding crisis to developing a clear understanding among park staff of the three-fold mission of the Missouri system—to preserve and interpret the finest examples of Missouri's natural landscapes; to preserve and interpret outstanding examples of Missouri's cultural heritage; and to provide healthy and enjoyable outdoor recreation opportunities consistent with its mission—and they had undertaken conceptual planning to lay the groundwork for a prioritized program of improvements should funds become available. But they had barely begun to communicate these efforts to the general public.
In a rush of enthusiasm MPA began laying plans with
park administrators for an ambitious color-illustrated book about the nature
and mission of the system with essays on the special contributions of each of
the 75 parks and historic sites, somewhat on the model of the early national
park portfolios that created the mystique of national parks as sacred places
back in the 1920s. They also began to work with legislators, especially on a
promising proposal for a one-tenth-cent sales tax to be split evenly between
parks and soil conservation, both programs administered by the department of
natural resources. The plan was obviously modeled on the state's conservation
sales tax, but it was more modest and combined an appeal to urbanites (parks)
with a program for rural areas (soil); at the time
In tax-averse
While the campaign for the parks and soils tax was underway, the Missouri Parks Association, now aware that its proposed book on the parks would be a long time in coming, sought to focus more public and media attention on the park system by hosting, in concert with a wide array of other cosponsoring organizations, what they billed as the "First Missouri Conference on State Parks." It was a three-day event funded in part by the Missouri Committee for the Humanities, complete with field trips to nearby parks and workshops on park resources and issues. Realizing the importance of a broader perspective on the values at stake in the Missouri system, MPA invited two nationally known experts on state parks—historian Robin Winks of Yale University and Ney Landrum, Florida park director and former president of the National Association of State Park Directors—to keynote the conference, taking them on a whirlwind tour of ten representative parks and historic sites with park officials before the conference.
After months of substantial public education and
media spotlight on the parks,
As it happened, there would be more new funds in
the ensuing years than anyone had contemplated. A state bond issue for capital
improvements that had been kicked around in the legislature for years at last
became available in 1985, after a change in administration, and parks (because
of shrewd decisions by officials in the depths of the funding crisis in the
early '80s) would ultimately reap nearly $60 million for visitor centers and
museums at a number of units, upgrades of water and sewer systems, roads and
campgrounds, and restoration of historic structures. Combined with more than
$13 million a year in additional funds from the sales tax, mostly for
operations, the
The aura of sudden wealth attracted an enormous
array of proposals for use of what became known as the "park barrel,"
the trough of riches at which it was supposed anyone could feed. Proposals
surfaced for urban storm sewers and for local parks, museums, golf courses,
swimming pools, zoos, and other projects that could not possibly meet the test
of statewide natural or cultural significance. But each was in the district of
some legislator who wanted his or her share, and MPA was kept busy in the halls
of the capitol explaining the mission of the system and the need to resist
diversions and use funds as the voters intended. Some proposals were more difficult
to fight than others because of the array of political forces lined up on their
behalf. MPA failed to turn back a $2 million diversion for an African-American
community center in
Proponents of sundry worthy causes came out in force when it came time to consider renewal of the sales tax—so much so that there were proposals to combine it with the conservation tax and increase the total in order to fund more programs. In an effort to prevent tampering with the conservation tax, which had no sunset, the conservation federation sided with certain urban interests to promote a legislative resolution enlarging only the parks and soils tax, a proposal that MPA feared would doom the tax to defeat at the polls. After two legislative sessions failed to enact a satisfactory resolution, MPA and several other groups, including soil conservation interests, decided to mount an arduous initiative petition campaign for simple renewal of the tax; it would require the gathering of well over 200,000 signatures of registered voters properly distributed across congressional districts in order to place such a measure on the ballot. Following yet another unsatisfactory legislative session replete with tension among groups working at cross purposes, the federation and other organizations finally joined the initiative petition campaign, and the measure was ultimately approved more than two to one by the citizenry. However parsimonious Missourians might have been with their state government, they were proud of their parks and willing to support them.
A year after reauthorization of the parks and soils tax, it was the featured case example of park funding in a major national study of state parks funded by the Conservation Foundation. Generalizing from experience with special funds in a number of states, the study concluded: "Perhaps the most important lesson is that an earmarked fund does not put a park system outside the political arena. . . . It is rather a fresh point of entry to raise the visibility of state parks, air information about their condition and future prospects, and build new alliances" (Myers 1989). Indeed, the Missouri experience suggests that parks are inevitably political because virtually every citizen and public official feels some sort of personal stake in at least certain parks or certain uses of parks; the challenge is to create a vision for the system as a whole guided by a clearly articulated mission that can provide a basis for assessing the myriad issues and proposals that arise, and to develop a constituency committed to defending that mission and advancing the vision.
In 1992, a full decade after the initial groundwork
for a color-illustrated book about the system, the ambitious project came to
fruition with the publication of a handsome, large-format volume, Exploring
Missouri's Legacy. The new book—coupled with the presentation of the
parks themselves through new visitor centers and museums, superb natural and
cultural interpretation, and upgraded facilities and stewardship—left little
doubt about the quality and integrity of mission of the
Because parks are so inevitably political and the
institutional environment within which they function is so dynamic, the
challenges for park systems and their constituencies never abate. In
In preparation for yet another initiative petition
campaign for renewal of the sales tax in the mid-90s there was discussion of
the advisability of changing the 50:50 split between parks and soils on the
grounds that soil conservation measures were now largely installed on
Facing lean operating budgets and a dearth of funds for capital improvements, park officials initiated a feasibility study for a foundation with a full-time executive director to promote and facilitate major donations to the park system. MPA has 501©3 charitable status and has done some fundraising over the years for its own projects, including the park book, conferences, and an urban outreach effort to bring inner city youths to state parks, but it does not have a salaried executive director and it has never raised funds for transfer to the park system; it is supported primarily by annual dues from about 1500 members. Discussions about the proposed new foundation inevitably raised the possibility that MPA might be restructured to take on more sustained fund-raising functions, but there were concerns whether its independent watchdog role related to park issues and the integrity and continuity of the sales tax might thereby be compromised. On the other hand, a new foundation, if it sought membership or annual gifts from ordinary citizens, could drain membership and support from MPA and imperil its vital functions.
The dilemma, not yet resolved in Missouri, has thrown into sharp relief the differences in types of constituency groups—park foundations dedicated to raising funds for system needs, such as the well known California State Parks Foundation; local friends groups devoted to particular parks, of which every state has examples; user groups focussed on camping, spelunking, ATVs or the like; professional associations of interpretive naturalists, historians, or park administrators; citizen organizations such as the Sierra Club, Audubon chapters, historical societies, or the Conservation Federation of Missouri, which may act on certain park issues but miss others; and statewide watchdog groups focused on the system as a whole, such as the Missouri Parks Association.
The experience of
References
Callison, Charles. 1953. Man and Wildlife in
Flader, Susan, ed. 1984. First
Flader, Susan, ed. 1992. Exploring
Missouri Parks Association. 1982-- . Heritage:
Newsletter of the Missouri Parks Association.
Myers, Phyllis. 1989. State Parks in a New Era;
Volume 2—Future Directions in Funding.