Florida’s national parks a boon to local economies

Everglades the best revenue generator of Fla.national parks

What’s a national park worth to the towns near it? Plenty in terms of money spent by visitors and local jobs created and sustained by that patronage.

Except for gas, bait, lunch and launch fees, locals going to Everglades, Biscayne and Dry Tortugas probably don’t spend much in Homestead, Florida City, Everglades City, Chokoloskee and Key West, but other visitors sow and the local economies reap.

Those are Florida’s three national parks, but the state has eight others in the care of the National Park Service — starting at the north with Gulf Islands National Seashore, rated as the leading economic generator. The seashore is mostly in Florida and partly in Mississippi, skipping over Alabama’s barrier islands.

Altogether, according to an NPS report, those 11 parks in 2015 drew 10,639,979 visitors who spent $643 million on their visits, supporting 9,922 jobs. The report scores a cumulative benefit of $934.9 million to the Florida economy.

Nationwide, the cumulative economic benefit of national parks was $32 billion last year. The most spending, 31.1 percent was on lodging, for which locals spent little.

After that came food and beverages (20.2 percent), gas and oil (11.8 percent), admissions and fees (10.2 percent) and souvenirs and other expenses (9.8 percent).

In Florida, the two national seashores, Gulf Islands and Canaveral, are credited with the most visitor spending, $112.1 million and $105.2 million respectively. They also support the most jobs —1,665 by Gulf Islands and 1,572 by Canaveral.

Everglades has the highest-rated economic impact, $150.6 million, with Canaveral and Gulf Islands practically tied for second place with $141.1 and 140.1 million respectively. Everglades is third in job support with 1,483.

The economic zones defined by the report’s authors, who are government economists, cover towns within 60 miles of the park sites. That makes for quite a lot of overlap, and for difficulty in apportioning economic activity to one town or another.

For example, Biscayne and the southern part of Everglades are both close to Homestead and Florida City, which are legitimately regarded as gateway communities, but a lot of greater Miami also is within 60 miles of both parks. Chokoloskee and Everglades City are Everglades’s gateways on the Gulf coast, but Naples is only 40 miles away. Big Cypress National Preserve is within the same territorial spread.

Nitpickers will notice that Dry Tortugas National Park isn’t within 60 miles of anyplace. It’s way out in the Gulf of Mexico, 68 miles west of the nearest town, Key West.

And it seems practically impossible to make a believable estimate of visits to Biscayne because the Intracoastal Waterway runs down the middle and it’s so near urban Miami that thousands of boaters can visit without spending anything obviously attributed to the park. Just the same, the NPS analysis gives Biscayne credit for $31.5 million spent by visitors, 445 jobs supported and a cumulative economic benefit of $43.9 million.

The NPS analysis was peer reviewed, meaning that the work of authors Catherine Cullinane Thomas of the U.S. Geological Survey and Lynne Koontz of the National Park Service, was critically examined for compliance with professional standards and approved by other economists before publication.

You can try that too, as well as learn many more details related to every park, by an online visit to go.nps.gov/vse, where an interactive tool will take you to this year’s visitor spending, jobs, labor income, value added, and output effects by sector for
national, state, and local economies, plus yearly trend data.

Context: President Barack Obama and his family visited Carlsbad Caverns and Yosemite National Parks in June. He had nice things to say about all the parks, and used his public appearance at Yosemite to talk about how climate change could ruin them.

Two days earlier, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell updated the government’s failure to maintain the national parks. According to a Bloomberg News report, she said the backlog of deferred maintenance has grown by $440 million in a year’s time and now stands at $12 billion. “Deferred maintenance” refers to upkeep projects that should be done routinely but are postponed indefinitely because the parks don’t have enough money. Jewell said the undone jobs cover a range from leaky toilets to crumbling roads to unsafe bridges.

Obama’s last two budget proposals asked for substantial amounts to improve the parks for their coming centennial celebration, but Congress has not approved the funding. During the president’s two terms in office he has put 265-plus million more acres of land and water under protection, without being able to get the National Park Service enough money to take care of them.