Great American Outdoors Act To Modernize Grand Canyon Infrastructure

Grand Canyon National Park’s 4.5 million visitors last year brought in an estimated $710 million in spending to the region supporting 9,390 local jobs, according to a new study by the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.

But that’s dwarfed by Grand Canyon National Park's $940 million in deferred maintenance, which does not include $9 million for the Horace Albright Training Center. That sum represents one portion of the park service’s $21.8 billion maintenance backlog at the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, according to the NPS infrastructure website.

A large portion of these backlog projects will be fixed in the coming years as Grand Canyon National Park starts a number of “generational projects,” said Robert Parrish, chief of planning, environment and projects for Grand Canyon National Park.

“We’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fix a number of systems in the park — water, wastewater (and) electric — that were designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s with a 25-year shelf life with the expectation that the park would have 2.5 million visitors,” Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Ed Keable said at a community meeting. “We’re 25-30 years beyond the shelf life, and pre-pandemic we were at 6.4 million visitors.”

Grand Canyon National Park outlined four main projects in the coming years on the South Rim: replacing and relocating the APS power substation in the village for $17 million, increasing the capacity of the heli-base and replacing the wastewater treatment plant for $40 million. These initiatives will also support the largest project - upgrading the Transcanyon waterline at a cost of $88 million including replacement of pumps at Roaring Springs.

The Transcanyon project will change the South Rim’s water source to Bright Angel Creek while the North Rim will continue to receive water from Roaring Springs. Water will be available year-round to hikers within the inner canyon once completed. The improvements come with a cost of trail closures with rim-to-rim hikers coming to dead ends and not being able to cross construction areas, as well as limited services and a temporary closure of Phantom Ranch.

Great American Outdoors Act

Funding for the Grand Canyon National Park projects is coming from the Legacy Restoration Fund, which was setup by the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020. The funds provide $1.9 billion a year for five years for maintenance of public lands infrastructure through revenue generated from energy development of fossil fuel and renewable energy on public lands.

While lauded as a bi-partisan achievement, Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, said tying funding for construction to fossil fuel development underscores a fundamental contradiction between discussions about improving Grand Canyon’s water use in the face of a dwindling Colorado River, while being partially funded by its main cause, fossil fuels.

“That’s a huge perverse incentive built into that legislation,” McKinnon said. “The industrialization from more oil and gas fracking will harm public lands, it will exacerbate the extinction crisis and in our region with aridification will hasten the demise of the Colorado River.”

Alicyn Gitlin, program manager for the Sierra Club, also recognized the public health risks of waterline breakages at Grand Canyon but would prefer the money come from sources outside energy revenue from public lands.

“If these costs were divided among all taxpayers they would be minimal, and probably cost less than the long term costs of healthcare and land cleanup that comes from oil, gas and coal extraction,” Gitlin said.

Read the full article from Williams-Grand Canyon News here.