The results of the Visitor Spending Effects studies proved useful to individual parks and national programs informing their social programs design and highlighting opportunities for growth in gateway communities. But perhaps the most significant application of the findings emerged in late 2013.
“The economic significance of national parks was underscored with the closure of all NPS lands during the 16-day October 2013 Federal government shutdown. In response to the negative economic impacts that the park closures were having on many communities and local businesses, the Federal government granted agreements for six state governments to fully fund NPS personnel to reopen national parks in their states. Each dollar funded by the six states was estimated to have generated an additional $10 in visitor spending in gateway regions surrounding these parks during the remainder of the shutdown.” —Visitor spending effects: assessing and showcasing America’s investment in national parks, 2017
The Visitor Spending Effects studies have since then served as a touchstone for not only planning for potential shutdown or natural disaster situations, but also in estimating the loss in damages to such interventions in normal park operations.
Stars dance in the night sky above an Ancestral Puebloan ruin at Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico. Photo by Bettymaya Foott, NPS.
No matter how seemingly small or fleeting your program, project, land-use case may be, there is a way to find its value if you follow the path which the NPS has cleared. Cathy and her research team now advise researchers from other countries including Germany and Brazil on how to design similar economic analysis methodologies for national parks in their homelands. By folding raw data into carefully crafted economic and social analyses models, the NPS set a worldwide standard for estimating the seemingly intangible value that America’s protected lands contribute to the economy and how they sustain the economic and cultural health of the nation.