Forum says fed becoming foe: federal focus moves away from funding state and local parks and recreation programming.

This year's National Legislative Forum touched on issues pervasive in the park and recreation field, including funding problems for state and local programs, adapting programming to accommodate the growing obesity pandemic and park and recreation agencies' role in food service programs. The three-day conference included opportunities for participants to meet with their legislators, but also equipped NRPA members with the knowledge to defend their programs against possible loss or termination.

The most important result of the Legislative Forum comes from the Day on Capitol Hill (see page 81), where forum attendees pay a visit to their representatives and senators. A highlight of the educational sessions is the Background Briefings on Legislative and Policy Issues. For more than three hours, hundreds of Legislative Forum participants packed the conference rooms at the Grand Hyatt Washington to listen to teams of legislative analysts and policy staff from Capitol Hill.

Their singular message? Do not rely on the federal government to allocate funding for state and local park and recreation programs.

Richard Healy, a staff person on the democratic side of the blouse Committee on Resources painted a bleak picture for fiscal year 2006. "You can shut down every agency in the federal government except for the department of defense and you would still have a deficit," he says. "But there's still a lot of money out there, and it's a question of competing priorities."

One of the priorities competing directly with state and local park and recreation agencies is the national park system, which has a looming maintenance backlog that the Bush Administration has promised to address during its second term.

Perhaps one of the most shocking news items that surfaced in the beginning of the Legislative Forum came from the Bush Administration's proposed FY 2006 budget, which proposes to permanently terminate all stateside appropriations from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Since the program began in 1965, it has provided more than $3.25 billion in matching grants, and helped complete nearly 40,000 projects.

One of the reasons for the termination proposal is an Office of Management and Budget 2003 audit that questions the LWCF's effectiveness toward accomplishing the government's goals. The audit, also called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), claims that the LWCF could not adequately measure performance or demonstrate results enough to warrant funding, according to administration budget documents. "I saw the PART process and frankly, in my mind, it was used as an excuse rather than a reason not to fund the stateside," Healy says.

Both Healy and his Senate counterpart, Senate Subcommittee on Interior Appropriations staff director Bruce Evans, say proving to the government that the LWCF's state assistance program is a necessary allocation is a difficult endeavor. When it was authorized by Congress in 1964 and later amended to tap Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) royalty and lease receipts, the reserve was not set aside as a permanent fund.

According to Healy, because of the scrutiny behind PART, and the tight budget enforced by the Bush Administration, federal dollars will be more scarce. He adds that providing justification for federal funding will be harder to establish because the administration will look for any excuse not to give funding for slate and local projects. "It's not like there aren't long-term objectives [in the budget]," Healy says. "It's just that you have to quantify it in the right manner."

The right manner means providing results-oriented presentations of your projects, rather than providing numbers of how many people participated and how many acres were renovated.

"Your challenge begins now, not just in the appropriations arena," Evans says. "It's very much a services sort of budget."

Challenges Ahead

Because the Bush Administration is intent on cutting the nation's budget deficit by half during the next five years, every budget cycle will be tight, the policymakers said during the Legislative Briefings. Kevin McCarty, senior director for Policy, Surface Transportation Policy Project, cautions park and recreation agencies not to rely on federal funding of their projects in the future. "You better find some more capital funding for your parks because it's not going to come from here," McCarty says, adding that although parks have always been considered an important asset by the government, they have never been considered a high priority for funding.

McCarty is also involved in advocacy for reauthorization of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, which, if reauthorized, would set aside 10 percent of its budget for transportation enhancement projects such as trails, biking paths, pedestrian pathways and scenic byways.

"The truth is the federal government's commitment to this is fairly modest," McCarty says. "We share ... the ideas that the current framework really works."

Many policy analysts believe that a reauthorization of TEA21 will be passed this year. Park and recreation advocates are keenly interested in how much federal funding will programs such as the Recreational Trails Program, Safe Routes to School and Transit in the Parks receive.

The promise of federal transportation enhancement funds for local governments was a welcome change from the first half of the day's programming. The discussions changed when talks centered on healthy lifestyles legislation such as the Senate-introduced Healthy Lifestyle and Prevention (HeLP) America Act and the improved Nutrition and Physical Activity Act (IMPACT), which passed in the Senate but is still being debated in the House.

"Nothing works as well as when we talk about kids at municipal swimming pools ... engaged in organized sports while they're getting their nutritional snacks and meals," says Ellen Teller, director of government affairs for the Food Research and Action Center. If IMPACT is passed, it would provide up to $60 million in federal grants to local and state governments to plan and implement programs that combine physical activity with nutrition education.

Teller sympathizes with the park and recreation field's potential financial rut, but did say that entitlement programs such as the child nutrition act were not as badly cut in the Bush Administration's proposed budget. "The good news is that the president did not propose limiting and restructuring entitlement programs"

But just because the president has not proposed cutting entitlement programs, does not mean Congress won't, Teller warned. In order to continue receiving funding for projects, detailed presentations must be sent to legislators regarding the program's results. "You've got to give these people a very, very crisp visual of what you're doing," Teller says.

Teller echoed what all the Capitol Hill panelists said during the legislative briefings. Providing testimony will become the No. 1 priority if supporters truly prove federal funding is an important national priority and a necessary component of capital operations budgets.

Bruce Evans from the Senate Subcommittee on Interior Appropriations says he would much rather go to the members of his subcommittee with evidence supporting the need for stateside appropriations of parks and recreation facilities. "You need to find those same stories that connect to those members, and we will do the very best to respond ... and we'll go from there," he says.