Well, I decided to dig into the Park Service budget for 2007 at

http://www.nps.gov/applications/budget2/fy07gbk.htm

Download the document whole and search it using Adobe Acrobat. Check out page 158. It says "Deferred maintenance for buildings only, based on condition assessments of park facilities performed in 2004, totals $8.549 billion dollars."

Billion dollars? Anyone care to explain that?

On page 201 is an interesting table. Compare Steamtown to the Statue of Liberty. Note the ratio of budget and visitors!

Were you able to dig out the line item budget for S'town?? If so could you please post a summary of the major items. The print is so small I can't read it. Thanks, Ross Rowland

No, I am too busy, but I posted what I found as a starting point for anyone interested in digging further. The information is there if you are persistent.

I deal with the DoD budget so I'll take a gander at it. Its got to be a spit in the bucket compared to what I'm used to. A billion here and a billion there....pretty soon you are talking real money.
J.R.

Ok, as far as I can tell the National Park Service (NPS) budget is roughly $2.249 Billion for fiscal year 2006 (FY06) which runs October 1 through September 31st.

The Steamtown NHS budget for FY06 is $5.174 Million and it looks like the visitor use is about 106,000 visitors in 2004.

By comparison, and on the same page, the Shenadoah National Park FY06 budget appears to be $10.615 Million. It had 1,290,812 visitors in 2004.

A couple of words of caution here with regard to these numbers. These were the requested budgets. What we need is the final numbers after this went through the rather ugly budget process of House and Senate committees, Congressional add ons (Plus Ups to me, Pork to those not in the business), and other adjustments.
J.R.