On August 25, 1916 the National Park Service Organic Act was passed into law by the House and Senate of the United States. The newly created NPS was given a mission “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein” and to leave them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” A noble idea that has managed to preserve our national heritage.

But that is not an easy task considering that now our national parks, monuments, and historic sites encompass 83.6 million acres! The infrastructure within those acres include 27,000 structures, 15,000 miles of unpaved trails, 3,565 miles of scenic trails, 1,804 bridges and tunnels, 776 campgrounds, and 505 dams. These kinds of numbers require a great deal of money, manpower and time to take care of.

Unfortunately, those are the exact things that we have not been providing our national parks. The Obama administration has inherited a system that has a $9 billion backlog of repairs and maintenance to contend with. That is why on Earth Day this year Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that $900 million in stimulus money was heading for our parks.

This isn’t the first time that our parks have been used to stimulate the economy. In 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the 73rd Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act creating the Civilian Conservation Corp. This popular program had projects ranging from road building to picnic ground development and employed 3 million men.

The current stimulus money will not generate anywhere near those kind of employment numbers, and the funds allotted are only a tenth of what is needed. But they will still help. As Bill Wade from the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees notes, the stimulus money is a “drop in the bucket that will make a huge difference.”

As for whether or not the money will help rejuvenate the economy in general, there are differing opinions. Rep. Jeb Hensarlin (R-Tex.) said, “Clearly we need to improve our national parks… but nobody should confuse that with economic stimulus. I mean frankly that is just false advertising.”

But Jeff Olson, a spokesman for the NPS, seems to think that the money should be very helpful especially for local communities. “A road project in Wyoming won’t be bringing in a crew from Texas—it will use local people. This money will create jobs. It will role through those communities.”

The Department of the Interior is hoping that the new projects will provide up to 8000 new jobs in the next two years. Dan Wenk, the acting director of the NPS, says “It’s stimulus because we are putting people to work… but it’s also stimulus because we’re creating a better place… increasing the visitor experience.” So even with only 8000 potential new jobs, we should all benefit from the sprucing up of our national parks.