A mission restored.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Most people expected Dirk Kempthorne's main job as the new secretary of the interior would be to keep a steady hand on the tiller and continue the dismal policies of his predecessor, Gale Norton, for the remainder of George W. Bush's presidency.

With less than a month on the job, it's impossible to know if Kempthorne's final legacy will be any less bleak than that of Norton. But already there is at least one hopeful sign that the new secretary may steer his department away from Norton's policies favoring commercial exploitation of public lands and back toward its traditional direction of responsible stewardship.

On Monday, the department reversed a controversial proposed national parks policy that would have shifted the long-standing management focus from preserving parks for future generations to commercial and recreational use of parks for today's generation.

A draft of the new policy, which is to become final next month, emphasizes that whenever there is a conflict between preserving and using natural and historical places, conservation will remain the parks' top priority.

That's a huge improvement over Norton's original proposal to stand on its head language in the current "National Park Service Management Policies" manual. That language refers to the 1916 law that established the Parks Service as beginning with a "mandate to conserve park resources and values" for the enjoyment of future generations.

While Norton's policy changes would have opened the door to greater use of off-road vehicles, the new draft says the parks should aim for the most stringent clean air standards, preserve their solitude and keep lands eligible for wilderness designations free from snowmobiles, ORVs and other intrusive devices.

The new secretary did Americans - present and future - a gigantic favor by tossing Norton's proposed changes overboard. He also provided beleaguered Parks Service employees with a much-needed morale boost and a reminder that our national parks are just that - national - and not to be regarded as piggy banks for commercial interests.

Kempthorne's next challenge on the parks front will be to persuade Congress and the Bush administration to provide the money that's needed to properly staff and operate the nation's 390 parks and to repair their deteriorating infrastructure.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office confirmed recent studies by park advocacy groups that the parks system is severely underfunded and that irreplaceable natural and cultural resources are at serious risk.

Kempthorne should remind his former colleagues in Congress that decades of underfunding have left the parks in precarious shape.

At Gettysburg National Military Park, for example, four out of 10 historic buildings are in poor or serious condition. At Alaska's Denali National Park, interpretation programs and ranger presentations have been cut by 50 percent over the past five years. At Yosemite National Park, officials say their operating budget is one-third short of what's needed for basic operations, including law enforcement. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is urging Congress to cover just 70 percent of the park's anticipated payroll and utility costs for next year.

For now, Kempthorne has made a promising start by making it clear that parks are treasures that should be preserved for future generations, not degraded by commercial interests.