U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced nearly $21.3 million in funding approved to rebuild critical national park infrastructure in Wyoming.
The money will go towards the rehabilitation and seismic retrofit of the Mammoth Hotel Guest Room Wings at Yellowstone National Park.
This is part of $256 million going to a list of projects across the National Park Service to address dire maintenance and repair needs that contribute to the $11.6 billion backlog currently facing the nation's parks.
Roads, bridges, trails, water systems and visitor centers — even bathrooms, campgrounds and drinking fountains — are all part of this critical, but often unnoticed, infrastructure framework. In 2017, 330 million people visited the 417 NPS sites across the country. The NPS completed more than $650 million in maintenance and repair work in Fiscal Year 2017, but aging facilities, high visitation, and resource constraints have kept the maintenance backlog between $11 billion and $12 billion since 2010.
