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Editor’s note on August 4, 2020 – President Donald Trump has signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law.

Editor’s note on July 31, 2020 – Both chambers of Congress have since passed the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA). It now heads to the president, who has signaled his support for signing the bill into law.

Editor’s note on June 18, 2020 – Since this blog post was first published on May 22, the US Senate passed the GAOA, and a vote in the House is expected in the coming weeks.

“Congress has now passed two big landmark public lands and conservation bills in the last 16 months,” says RFF Senior Fellow Margaret Walls. “The John D. Dingell Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act created 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, five new national monuments, designated protected areas around several national parks, permanently reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, and more. Now, the Senate has passed the GAOA.

“In my view,” Walls continues, “the big news is that the bill makes a guaranteed $900 million per year available for new parks and conservation in the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Since the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act was passed in 1965, supporters have tried to ensure the funding was guaranteed each year. The bill finally does that by moving annual spending out of appropriations. The fund for the maintenance backlog in the GAOA is a good first step, but it does not address the real issue—that we are underfunding the National Park Service and other federal land management agencies. We need to come up with a permanent funding fix, or the backlog will continue to grow after this five-year fund is depleted.”

“America’s national parks are a resource with immense environmental and cultural value,” adds RFF Research Assistant Matthew Ashenfarb. “Like any resource, they will depreciate and degrade over time if our relationship with them is unsustainable. If we want to use the land as a resource, we must invest in its management as well.”

The numbers confirm our assumptions about the intrinsic vulnerability of gateway communities to the current recession. All of the towns have a greater share of jobs in tourism than the region as a whole. The percent varies across the communities, however. The smaller towns—Springdale (the smallest) and West Yellowstone—are more dependent on tourism than the others. In West Yellowstone, 37 percent of all jobs are in tourism-related businesses. Cortez is the largest and most diversified of the five towns, though it still has roughly twice as many jobs in tourism-related industries (as a share of total jobs) than the Mountain West region as a whole.

Gateway communities’ reliance on tourism also makes them less in control of their own destinies in returning to normalcy as the pandemic (hopefully) eases. Their economies depend heavily on decisions made outside their borders—by the National Park Service, airlines, tour companies, and individuals and families living far away, including overseas. (International visitors accounted for over 13 million visits to national parks and monuments in 2015.)

Can the Great American Outdoors Act Help?

Many national parks are reopening this Memorial Day weekend, albeit in a limited way. Like other parts of the country easing restrictions, it’s unclear what the reopenings will mean for public health, but they may throw a lifeline to local businesses in gateway communities. Nonetheless, many observers expect travel to national parks to be at historic lows this summer and communities near those parks to suffer as a result.

The GAOA has two parts: (1) guaranteed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which Margaret has written about in a blog post published in March this year, and (2) a new dedicated fund—the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Fund—to address the deferred maintenance backlog in national parks and other public lands.

Of the two components of the GAOA, the funding for the deferred maintenance backlog may have the greatest potential to bolster gateway communities’ resilience to the recession, especially in the short run. Deferred maintenance is an estimate of the cost of repairs or maintenance on roads, buildings, utility systems, and other structures and facilities that have been postponed for more than a year due to budget constraints. The National Park Service backlog stood at $12 billion in September 2018, and backlogs at the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Forest Service totaled $7.5 billion. The GAOA would create a fund from oil and gas lease revenues up to $1.9 billion per year for four years. That money could jump-start investment in a variety of construction projects, including overhauls of aging water infrastructure, repairs to visitor centers and campgrounds, and maintenance of roads and bridges. This would generate labor demand and—contingent on prompt funding—may help gateway communities rebound from a shortfall in tourism.

Much depends on the ability to commence projects quickly, but lessons can be drawn from recovery after natural disasters. Post-disaster construction has been shown to serve a key role for communities hit hard by hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters. The increase in labor demand boosts employment and earnings. One analysis found that the unemployment rate in Houston dropped from 5.1 percent when Hurricane Harvey hit in August 2017 to 4.5 percent just four months later. In fact, stories abound of labor shortages and wage hikes after hurricanes and wildfires—documented in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and in Santa Rosa, California, after the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Several peer-reviewed studies in the economics literature have confirmed these findings with careful statistical analyses. One study found that workers’ earnings in Florida counties hit by a hurricane went up by 4 percent after the hurricane because of rising labor demand. Another found positive long-run labor market effects from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Insurance payouts and disaster aid are essential for powering the economic recovery from disasters and driving these increases in labor demand. In the same way, the Great American Outdoors Act could help communities recover from the economic fallout generated by the pandemic. To be clear, the main purpose of the bill is to provide much-needed financial support for our chronically underfunded parks and public lands. In our view, the bill stands on its merits for this alone. But at this time of great need, it might also provide an economic boost in the rural communities that need it most.

For further reading on this topic:

• "Permanent Funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund: Three Next Steps"
• "Funding Conservation: Contrasting Approaches in Federal Programs"
• "Reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund: Three Key Issues"
• "Federal Funding for Conservation and Recreation: The Land and Water Conservation Fund"