Economic Impacts of Restoration in National Parks

The National Park Service’s (NPS) Resource Protection Branch (RPB) works with parks under the authority of the System Unit Resource Protection Act (SURPA) and the Oil Pollution Act, among others, to conduct damage assessment and restoration activities for NPS resources that have been injured. Funds used for restoration support jobs in local economies across the Nation. This report demonstrates the economic impacts associated with RPB-administered restoration projects through an analysis of small-scale (less than $1,000,000 spent per project) and large-scale (more than $1,000,000 spent per project) projects. Using a national-level economic input-output model, direct and secondary jobyears, labor income, value added, and total economic output were estimated for a sample of restoration projects; impacts from these sampled projects were used to estimate average economicimpacts-per-million-dollars-spent on RPB restoration. In 2017 RPB administered 49 small-scale projects; expenditures for these projects ranged in cost from $200 to $800,000 and totaled $1,686,000 ($923,000 in cultural resource projects, $618,000 in natural resource projects, and $145,000 in facilities projects). Based on the economic-impacts-per million estimates, small-scale RPB projects were found to support an estimated total of 29 job-years, $1,963,000 in labor income, $2,690,000 in value added, and $4,458,000 in total economic output within the national economy in 2017. Economic impacts were also calculated for two large-scale projects: one a $3,900,000 (2017$) hillside stabilization project and the other a $5,574,000 (2017$) ferries (two) fabrication project.