The National Park Service

At the close of the 20th century our treasured national parks were suffering from years of flat budgets and deferred maintenance. Administrators in Washington, D.C., and other regions could not even estimate accurately the total maintenance backlog, which the Government Accountability Office estimated at $5 billion in 1998, but has been reported as high as $9 billion. In 2001, the National Park Service embarked on developing an asset management program to inventory and assess the conditions of its structures, roads and other facilities, and then establish a program of rehabilitation and maintenance. Since then, significant strides have been made in reducing the maintenance backlog, and the National Park Service has set goals to quantify its success in this area.⁵