The strange saga of the National Park Service and D.C.’s local parks.
. He has covered national and local politics for over twenty years and spent seven years as editor-in-chief of the. His Capital City column chronicles the inside conversations and big trends shaping Washington politics.
The latest eruption involves the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which stretches from Western Maryland to tony Georgetown. Unfortunately, the last mile of the waterway looks more like a muddy ditch than part of a vibrant neighborhood. Beltway philanthropists and the city government donated millions to reboot the space. But last month, the Park Service unceremoniously fired the nonprofit that had been steering the effort.
No matter. “We wanted too many changes, too many activations, just too much for the history,” the organization’s crestfallen executive vice president, Maggie Downing, told me this week. But mainly you own a bunch of puny spaces lacking so much as a swing set — and surrounded by neighbors who are often unhappy with Uncle Sam’s stewardship.
Not unreasonably, Park Service types interpret the mission statement to mean that job number one is maintaining the canal as it was during its brief heyday — in the name of the 336 million citizens of the entire country. Of course, that supposes that if the feds were to de-accession a traffic circle on one of L’Enfant’s famous avenues, the new owner would be a strip-mine or a tannery. Given the debate over federal lands in the west, it’s not an entirely crazy anxiety. Yet it doesn’t allow for the idea that maybe the new owner of all those neighborhood parks would just be someone a little more oriented toward running neighborhood parks.
Politically, getting the feds out of the traffic-circle biz also seems like a no-brainer. A lot of federal agencies, for instance, would be very happy to never have their name appear in a story like the one last year that chronicled: The Park Service’s banishment of Stonewall Bocce from Logan Circle, yet another part of the federal domain.
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