Report urges more funding to buy private lands within national parks to prevent development

Not all the land within the 391 National Park Service properties is federally owned, and two reports warn that private development projects could start appearing unless these lands are acquired, reports Tami Abdollah of the Los Angeles Times. "Millions of privately owned acres in National Park Service boundaries could be developed into luxury homes or commercial enterprises because the federal government has not allocated funds to buy out these lands, according to two reports issued this week," Abdollah writes.

According to a report from the National Parks Conservation Association, there are about 4.3 million acres of privately-owned land inside NPS properties. The park service identified 1.8 million acres as priorities, and said they could be purchased for $1.9 billion. While there willing sellers, there is little money, because "federal appropriations to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the primary source of the National Park Service's acquisition money, has dropped by more than $100 million in the last nine years, according to the report," Abdollah writes. In 1999, Congress set aside about $148 million for land acquisition, but in 2008, Congress set aside $44 million. (Read more)

Abdollah notes California's Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, where 46 percent of the recreation area's 153,000 acres are privately held, and Utah's Zion National Park, where a "mega-lodging and spiritual center" recently was built, as examples of at-risk properties. In addition to those, here are some other examples from the report, "America's Heritage For Sale":

• Gettysburg (Pa.) National Military Park, where about 20 percent of the land is privately owned.
• Valley Forge (Pa.) National Historic Park, where a hotel-museum complex is planned.
  
• Harpers Ferry (Va. and W.Va.) National Historic Park, where about 70 acres are for sale. The report said this land is where Thomas Jefferson once said, "This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic."
• Congaree (S.C.) National Monument, where 1,840 private acres are now home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker and could be a habitat for the recovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.