The validity of the questions are undermined a tad by the author's choice to employ the Bush administration as a cite-worthy skeptic of plans to adopt Great Falls as a park.

Mr. Ad Hominem!

Look, I didn't say the argument lacked merits. I'm just saying why even bother mentioning Bush. His environmental record was distinguished only by how anti-environmental it was.

As the author, someone who has worked for the NPS... I didn't express my opinions as clearly in the article as I could have, for business reasons. This site is a good venue to address your criticism Josh. I tend to think that while Bush was awful for the environment, in the case of this national park, he was probably right.

Millions of tax payer dollars are going to be spent on this park, which is already decently protected from further development. While it might be significant historically, there are already parks like Lowell NHP in the Boston area which already adequately tell the story of America's industrial revolution.

A little more back story on this park... the sponsor for the bill in the House was the former mayor of the city where the park will be located. Not bad necessarily, but a pretty serious case of pork. Wouldn't it be great if any community that wanted a national park could have one? That's the question we have to ask ourselves.

I don't say that as facetiously as it sounds, because there are some advantages to having national parks in more places, and more geographically distributed (this is in fact why so many cities have sites)... the hope is that if people have their own park to value, they will value the idea of the larger system and its value to conservation and historical/cultural preservation priorities... the disadvantage of course is that it often amounts to a "bailout" for a community who couldn't find a way to protect its own natural/cultural resources.

Another problem which is probably the most serious is that other parks in the system are underfunded... in theory, if not practice, this would mean that the available funding for all parks is watered down. Why create more parks when the pre-existing ones are in bad shape?

So, even though the Bush Administration might have had other ideas than these, I think that they made some positive choices by protecting ocean areas instead of creating historical parks like this one.

Make sense?

The short video found at this link is worth watching... it definitely makes me even more skeptical of how the park is going to be valued: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/great_falls_in_paterson_become....

Sounds more like a local bailout to me the way people are talking.

One problem I see is that there already is a Great Falls in the National Parks System, and it's not that far away from this park:
http://www.nps.gov/grfa/index.htm

I didn't realize there are parks in the national parks that are not national parks (or national historic parks). This is just a park, and part of a parkway at that.

Interesting article, but CM you should have added a full disclosure addendum to your post.
You being good friends with the writer and all.

I'm going to get angry emails from my advertisers.