A Look Back Before Moving Forward
By Chuck Anastas and Doug Pizzi
2021
Following a decade of chronic underfunding, the Legislature missed a golden opportunity to make a considerable down payment on easing the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR) $1.0 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Instead, lawmakers cut Gov. Charlie Baker’s proposed $100 million appropriation from the federal American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) to $15 million.
We thank all who joined us in calling for restoring the Governor’s figure in upcoming ARPA spending packages. With about $2.3 billion in ARPA funds remaining and billions coming our way from the approved federal infrastructure bill, the state certainly has the money to do right by our parks, which play a key role in helping us all cope with the pandemic. Other states are recognizing this and making these critical investments in their parks. On January 25, 2022, the State House News Service sponsored a webinar discussion with state Rep. Dan Hunt, chairperson of House Committee on Federal Stimulus and Census Oversight, which featured a robust discussion on park funding. Thank you to those who joined us there or sent in comments. We will have more to say on this at a later date.
No doubt the biggest park news of the past year is that DCR Special Commission wrapped up its report with an honest look at the agency’s decade of underfunding and provided clear recommendations for making the agency more responsive to the public and its important mission.
Key findings include:
- Net state tax dollar financing of DCR has fallen by 22 percent, and there are 300 fewer staff than in 2009.
- Massachusetts state and local funding for parks are the lowest in the country.
The DCR Stewardship Council moved forward with its oversight of the DCR budget holding three significant presentations on the operating, retained revenue, and capital budgets. The Council used this information to go, for the first time, to the Secretary of Administration and Finance before the Governor released the budget. Rather than merely reacting to the Governor’s proposal, the Council made funding requests upfront. As a result, the Governor’s budget included an additional $979,642 in the Commissioner’s Office budget, some of which we hope will be used for improved public communications, a DCR Stewardship Council priority.
In other good news, parking on Revere Beach Parkway is free to all – again. Administration and legislative pressure on DCR to earn additional funds to support state parks resulted in the agency moving last spring to install parking kiosks at the beach. The resulting protest prompted the Legislature to ban the meters on DCR parkways unless the local city council/select board agreed. The Legislature also mandated that money collected from those meters in operation be used for beach maintenance. This is a story of how state government’s reliance on retained revenue in the form of fees, leases, and other non-tax dollar income is a disastrous way to fund state parks.
The Public Lands Preservation Act passed the House. A bill that will protect our publicly purchased open space (Massachusetts Constitution Article 97 lands) from being turned into things like landfills now sits in the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, waiting to come to the Senate floor for a vote. This bill remains a priority for MCV. DCR should not have to stand alone in protecting state-owned lands from private takings. So again, we ask you to contact your Senators to get this bill on the Governor’s desk.
On a more somber note, Chris Redfern, executive director of the Friends of the Middlesex Fells, stepped up to comfort park users following the savage attack on a woman using a trail on Fells Park grounds. Mr. Redfern was a steady presence instituting group park walks and assuring users they could be safe in their state open space. If ever there was proof needed that DCR Friends groups are crucial to the quality of our parks, this was it.
2022
Gov. Baker released his FY23 budget this week, and in a major policy shift, eliminated the retained revenue account. We thank the Governor for reversing a decades long push to raise money for our parks system on the backs of its users. The budget proposal shifts the approximately $25 million budgeted in FY21 and rolls it into DCR park related budget accounts. While eliminating the $25 million in retained revenue doesn’t represent new funding, the Governor also adds an additional $7 million into DCR park accounts, a significant and needed increase.
For the second time in the last six months Governor Baker has stepped up and proposed important policy and funding changes for DCR first with his $100 million ARPA proposal and now with the FY23 budget. We now look to the Legislature to build on the Governor’s proposal by supporting the elimination of retained revenue while raising funding for DCR operations.
Now that the Special Commission final report is public, we anticipate some recommendations from the DCR Special Commission about our state park system. Underfunding DCR for more than a decade is the culprit causing our collective concerns that the state park system, 500,000-acres of protected open space, is teetering on collapse. MCV has spent the last three years analyzing the DCR budgets over decades and cataloging issues affecting our parks. We conclude that no matter what your complaint about your park, beach, playground, trail, bikeway, parkway, or forest, is that the funding DCR receives is wholly inadequate to carry out its essential mission.
In this election year, we all must let candidates and incumbents know that adequate funding for our open spaces is a priority. The pandemic has proven that access to green space, no matter how small, is essential to the public’s physical and mental well-being, and our 500,000-acre shared lands are critical resources in our efforts at climate change adaptation and resiliency, and environmental justice throughout the Commonwealth.
We pledge that we will expand our election coverage over the next year to highlight candidates who are talking about parks as a vital issue of our times. In addition, we will continue reporting on the Stewardship Council and begin monitoring the Legislature’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Agriculture hearings and the park issues they consider.
We urge you to ask your legislators to reenergize the Legislative Parks Caucus, which remained silent during the debate on the ARPA funding.
Topping the list of needs at DCR?
- More boots on the ground everywhere in the state. There are not enough personnel to cover this vast park system. Without them, our parks are not even safe, let alone sustainable.
- More personnel in DCR’s engineering and planning department and the lost $85 million in ARPA funds to begin to erase the $1.0 billion deferred maintenance backlog made manifest by the exponential use of our open space during the pandemic.
- A public communications office at DCR that can respond and communicate with the ever-increasing public demands on a range of issues affecting park operations and maintenance.
Ultimately, we will never have the parks agency we need until the Governor and the Legislature pulls us out of the basement of state park funding. The Governor is taking steps, now the Legislature must follow. We, advocates for our state’s shared natural resources, must not lose sight of the big picture. Solo projects funded and completed today will not receive proper maintenance in the future because the line is long when there is $1 billion of deferred maintenance. So, hold tight to your future dreams. Let’s get the funding right now.
Chuck Anastas is the Chair of MCV’s Board of Directors
Doug Pizzi is the Executive Director of MCV