City says it supports the National Parks

Sending a message to Congress, Whitefish City Council Sept. 18 passed a resolution of support for the National Park System.

“... it is the responsibility of Congress to maintain America’s national parks to ensure our natural places and our history is preserved and documented for future generations, and for the adjacent communities that rely on the direct and indirect economic benefits generated by visits to national park sites,” the resolution says.

Mayor John Muhlfeld said he was asked by The Pew Charitable Trust to join the more than 75 cities around the county that have approved similar resolutions.

Muhlfeld noted a listed of statistics as reason to support the resolution — there were 5 million visitors to national parks in Montana in 2016, $548 million was spent in gateway communities as a result and 9,467 jobs were created in the state from the tourism.

“Glacier National Park has a $148 million backlog of maintenance,” Muhlfeld said. “There were 600,000 visitors to Whitefish last year and 83 percent of those said they visited Glacier. This is an important issue for us.”

The National Park Service Legacy Act introduced in Congress in May would jump start overdue maintenance projects in national parks by providing investments that would go toward reducing the more than $11 billion backlog of maintenance in the National Park Service. The Pew Charitable Trust has been a supporter of fixing the parks.

City Council, through the resolution, said it “strongly encourages Congress to create a reliable, predictable stream of resources to address deferred maintenance needs in America’s National Par System.

The resolution notes that the national park service “manages more than 400 nationally significant sites and an invaluable collection of more than 75,000 natural and cultural assets that span 84 million acres across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. territories and insular areas.”

The city, in the resolution, notes that the National Park System preserves the diversity, culture and heritage of all Americans and serves as a living classroom for future generations.