The wear and tear on Florida's national parks and public lands, regularly hammered by increasingly intense hurricanes, throngs of visitors and cuts in funding, has fueled a ballooning statewide maintenance backlog that has swelled to $687 million in the last five years.
In South Florida alone, deferred maintenance work for three national parks and Big Cypress Preserve nearly tripled from $136 million to $346 million.
To tackle the growing to-do list, park supporters say Congress needs to re-up the Great American Outdoors Act, a measure passed in 2020 that funneled $9 billion over five years into projects from sewer repairs to seawalls, trails and housing across the U.S. Otherwise, they say the nation could lose ground on its costly effort to chip away at repairs across under-funded national parks and public lands.
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"Much of our parks and public lands infrastructure was built out many, many years ago at the very inception of our public lands," said Rebecca Knuffke, the senior officer for U.S. Conservation at The Pew Charitable Trust, which lobbied for the Act in 2020 and is again pushing Congress to fund the backlog. "We know just like in our homes, if you don't take care of maintenance it can become costlier to take care of over time."
With staff cuts, ongoing weakening in environmental protections and opening lands for mining and drilling, the nation's public lands have become increasingly vulnerable. Regular maintenance can help stave off problems. And over the last five years, funding from the Act helped repair places treasured by the public, from the docks near the old fort in the Dry Tortugas to eroding shores surrounding the Jupiter Lighthouse. Around the country, the money paid for more than 500 projects, Knuffke said.
But even with the funding, the nationwide backlog grew to over $35 billion from $20 billion. According to breakdowns by the National Park Service, Everglades National Park accounted for the biggest backlog in South Florida at $156 million, followed by Dry Tortugas National Park, Biscayne National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve.
Often, large projects like overhauling water and sewer systems in the remote parks can cost tens of millions. At Everglades National Park, the backlog of road repairs alone amounts to $38 million. In the Dry Tortugas, needed repairs to 11 buildings at the 19th century Fort Jefferson, constructed from more than 16 million bricks, totalled $33 million. In Biscayne National Park, which has 34 buildings, building repairs also accounted for the majority of the backlog at $60 million.
The money is needed to chip away at big-ticket items, Knuffke said, and not intended to replace annual funding by the U.S. Department of Interior.
"That tends to go towards cyclical maintenance, maintenance for every year that is the important funding to prevent the snowballing that we saw in the first place," she said. "So we need both."
So far, she said the measure has gained bipartisan support, with two-thirds of House members signed as co-sponsors and more than half in the Senate supporting it.
"Now what we need is for Congress to pass it out of the floor in both for the President to sign it into law," she said. "And we have a terrific opportunity in this 250th year of the United States to leave a legacy for future generations."
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