Not meeting expectations: trying to find performance and accountability in the LWCF.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) came under sharp scrutiny last year when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) dissected the performance of this program using a scalpel-like auditing instrument called the "PART Tool," which subsequently stated that the LWCF was ineffectual. The Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) assesses the effectiveness of federal programs by measuring their performance in four critical areas: program purpose, strategic planning, management and program results. It scrutinizes meaningful performance measures, which are intended to reflect performance outcomes, and then generates program performance ratings and uses that information to make budget and management decisions.

Congress established the LWCF in the mid-1960s to protect important natural areas and provide outdoor recreation opportunities for all Americans, as well as "to strengthen the health and vitality of the citizens of the United States." Funded by the royalty payments from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas drilling revenues, the LWCF has completed an astonishing 39,000 projects to date in virtually every community in America, ranging from local baseball diamonds and boating access facilities to open space corridors and large state parks.

In the 40-year history of the program, more than $3.5 billion in LWCF assistance grants have been matched by local and state funds, and local grantees agree to provide perpetual care and maintenance for recreational lands and facilities developed with LWCF grants. Approximately 62 percent of the total federal match has gone to local projects. In fact, more than 31,000 of these 39,000 projects, or 79 percent, are regionally based.

The LWCF is an important source of funding for parks and recreation across our nation because it provides outdoor recreational opportunities and protects public open space. In addition, the LWCF has become even more important to serving the recreational needs of Americans today with respect to current population trends, the need to rehabilitate deteriorating recreation infrastructure and the increasing demands for new resources.

However, even though the LWCF has long been a vital funding mechanism for state and local governments, the LWCF received one of the lowest scores from OMB ever issued in a program review. The poor PART scores came as somewhat of a shock to program leaders and grant recipients. OMB agreed with the relevance of the purpose of LWCF and acknowledged that the LWCF was efficient and effective in allocating federal grants to the states, but tellingly, concluded that the program lacked appropriate performance measures and thus could not adequately demonstrate that results were being achieved.

In response to this bucket of cold water in the face, the National Park Service (NPS) embarked on a soul-searching, top-to-bottom assessment of its mission, its goals and its performance to address the findings and recommendations. This reassessment will mean there will be a new direction and new expectations of how the states and local park and recreation departments report their accomplishments, and how they achieve their goals. The NPS assembled a LWCF Performance Implementation Team consisting of two interconnected groups, a work group and an advisory group. The work group's purpose has been to focus on the developing of meaningful and relevant performance measures as well as an effective reporting process for identifying program accomplishments and national results. The advisory group, made up of state and NPS personnel, will evaluate the performance measures and goals that were to be developed, and provide feedback on recommendations developed by the work group. The report is currently being drafted and expected to be released later this year.

"It's all about accountability and measuring results," says Joel Lynch, NPS outdoor recreation planner and chair of the workgroup. "We can't take for granted that the way we have always done business demonstrates the true success of this program. We must clearly show Congress, the administration and the public that we are accountable for program achievement and that we have performance goals and measures that demonstrate this accountability."

OMB recommended six actions for the Park Service to take in response to the PART findings that include: working with the states to identify performance measures, establishing baselines and setting targets for these measures, creating an effective reporting process to show national results, and preparing an annual report that uses performance measures to show progress nationally and at the state level.

The PART Implementation team quickly focused on one of the most important components of this national performance measurement initiative, namely, the national goals, which unify and define the broad, strategic objectives of the LWCF program. Developing a performance framework is an especially challenging task. This was difficult since the recipient, and not the federal granting agency, essentially define the LWCF priorities. Each state and each community is different, and each has different park and recreation needs and interests. The national goals and national performance assessment framework will allow each state the flexibility to focus on its individual needs while reporting accomplishments that will show the performance of the LWCF program nationally.

The Implementation team arrived at three proposed national goals. Each national goal will be supported by performance measures established at the local level:

1. Meet state and locally identified public outdoor recreation needs to strengthen the health and vitality of the American people;

2. Increase the number of protected state and local outdoor recreation resources, and ensure their availability for public use in perpetuity; and

3. Encourage sound planning and long-term partnerships to expand the quantity and ensure the quality of much-needed state and local outdoor recreation resources.

The participation of the states will be key to fulfilling the adoption and implementation of the performance goals and the specific performance measures. John Davy, director of the Division of Planning and Recreation Resources of Virginia's Department of Conservation and Recreation and one of the PART Implementation team members said, "The PART review made everyone at the state level take a serious look at the program and what it was accomplishing in their state. We know we're doing something good. We just need to figure out the right way to report it."

In addition to the report on annual and long-term performance measures for efficiency and effectiveness that are part of the federal budget process, will be an annual program performance report that will use the performance measures to show accomplishments nationally and at the state level. Each state will provide LWCF program summaries of its accomplishments for a national program report.

The PART review has prompted NPS to take a penetrating look at the LWCF in a way that it never has before in the fund's 40-year history, and the results have been credible. The formulation of national goals supported by true performance measures will go a long way to ensure that the Land and Water Conservation Fund "assist(s) in preserving, developing and assuring accessibility to ... present and future generations ... such quantity and quality of outdoor recreation resources as may be available and are necessary and desirable for individuals' active participation in such recreation, and to strengthen the health and vitality of the citizens of the United States."

For more information and breaking news updates, contact Rich Dolesh of the NRPA Public Policy office in Washington, D.C., at [e-mail] or [phone].