$280 million to improve roads in park
By MICHAEL MILSTEIN
Gazette Wyoming Bureau
Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyoming, and the National Park Service on Saturday announced a wholesale cure for Yellowstone National Park's failing roads: a $280-million road-repair package that starting this summer will overhaul virtually every disintegrating mile of the park's main highway network over the next 19 years.

"I think it will transform Yellowstone's roads from what they have been into something much more reliable," said Thomas, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks. "If we're going to have this park continue to be a first-class park into the 21st Century, obviously we have to do something about the roads."

Yellowstone's badly rutted and potholed roads have for many years been the major source of visitor complaints. An inventory 10 years ago rated 72 percent of the park's 329-mile road system from fair to very poor condition. Park managers last summer closed the popular mountain road over Dunraven Pass for several weeks because of safety hazards posed by gaping potholes and broken pavement, which under the new repair agenda would be rebuilt in 2001.

The schedule provides for the reconstruction of roads that park crews have long struggled to patch on a Band-Aid basis.

One of the largest bundles of cash ever allocated to one national park, the new Yellowstone road package grew out of a bill called the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, passed by Congress and signed into law last year. The bill nearly doubled national park road funding from $84 million to $165 million each year during the next five years, Thomas said during a Saturday press conference in Casper, Wyo., at which he displayed a flattened car tire and worn brake pads.

"What we're talking about here today is roads and axles and tires and nuts and bolts and those things that we hope are not strewn around the roads like they have been in the past," he said.

Original National Park Service plans called for distributing the extra money widely throughout the national park system, but during meetings with National Park Service officials including Director Robert Stanton and Yellowstone Superintendent Mike Finley, Thomas pushed to have more money funneled to Yellowstone.

"We finally convinced them that some of the parks are more dependent on highways than others, and I think caused them to agree that (the money) needed to go a little more into some of the parks rather than just spreading it among all of them," Thomas said.

Although the Transportation Equity Act provides for only the first five years of work in Yellowstone, Thomas said that now that a blueprint for the repairs is in place future highway bills would almost certainly supply funding for the remaining 14 years of work.

Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle said the repair schedule would improve park roads "much quicker than we had ever anticipated."

The 19 years worth of repairs in Yellowstone will consume nearly $15 million a year and will proceed in stages, eventually covering nearly every mile of park road that has not already undergone major repairs in the last few years. Among the first stretches of park road scheduled for reconstruction are those from Madison Junction to Norris, Fishing Bridge to Canyon Village, Canyon Village north over Dunraven Pass and Sylvan Pass to the park's East Entrance.

"We greatly appreciate the interest and commitment that Senator Thomas has provided to improve Yellowstone's roads," Finley said in a press release. "This comprehensive roads program will reduce congestion, enhance enjoyment and improve the safety for both local users and more distant visitors."

Although park officials have already completed an environmental assessment on its parkwide road improvement plans, they will also have to assess the environmental impacts of the road repairs in more detail. No expansion of existing park highways is planned, but Thomas said officials have agreed to consider wider shoulders in places to make more room for bicyclists who now must share lanes with automobile traffic.

Rebuilding some road segments will cost well over $1 million a mile, roughly the cost of a four-lane interstate highway. For example, plans call for relocating about three miles of the road that now runs along the bottom of the Madison River Canyon between Madison Junction and Norris up onto the canyon rim, where it will be less susceptible to mudslides that have sometimes blocked it during wet weather.

The cost? About $10 million, or more than $3 million a mile.

Such high costs forced officials to spread the repair over 19 years, which will also minimize the inconvenience to park visitors in any one year, Thomas said. Since the park road system includes two full loops, construction on any one length of road should not limit access to any of Yellowstone main attractions.

"It's not only preserving the natural resources of the park, but it's also part our economic growth here in Wyoming," Thomas said.