Fremont, Calif. — Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced a proposed $56.5 million increase Monday for the National Wildlife Refuge System, an 18 percent hike needed to cover maintenance and renovation of aging facilities.
"It certainly looks like the refuge system needs a sustained effort to improve the resources," Norton said while touring the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. "It's important to take care of the land entrusted to us."
The San Francisco refuge would receive $1.1 million under the proposed budget that starts Oct. 1.
Standing outside a visitors center overlooking salt ponds and marshes, Norton said the increase would cover maintenance and renovation of building boardwalks, trails and levies at the 538 refuges across the nation.
The proposed increase would be the largest in the past seven years. The budget this year was $319 million.
Some Republicans and Democrats in Congress last year urged hundreds of millions more for the refuges' budget.
Norton's announcement came less than a week after she concluded that oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska would not compromise America's international treaty obligations to protect the refuge's polar bears.
Some environmentalists said the increase wouldn't do enough.
"It is window dressing," said Adam Werbach, a former head of the Sierra Club and founder of an environmental media company. "It is looking at popular parks that people see, but it is not seriously considering the ecology. The Bush administration is assaulting places that are far away from the public eye, while dressing up the ones in people's back yards."
Since passage of the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act, the budget has increased steadily. The current refuges budget is 6.4 percent larger than the previous year's $299.7 million.
But the nation's wildlife refuges still have a backlog of maintenance projects totaling $600 million, said Pat Foulk, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It's not a solution, but it's a shot in the arm," she said of the proposed increase.
Joelle Bufa, a wildlife biologist at the seven Bay Area refuges, said educational signs are discolored, the wood in the visitor center is rotting and "boardwalks in the marsh are getting rickety and leaning one way."
The refuge system turns 100 years old in 2003. Norton said poor maintenance is bad for wildlife as well as human visitors.
"You need to have more trails so people won't wander off into the habitat," Norton said.
Refuges are established for many reasons, including public education, bird and wetland preservation, hunting, and protecting certain endangered species.
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