California state parks in disrepair

The images won't appear in any California State Parks brochure.

MacKerricher State Park: Fifty elementary-school kids arrive for their annual end-of-year camping trip, only to find the drinking water contaminated.

Mount Tamalpais: A trail near the visitors center greets disabled visitors and families with a 12- to 50-foot sheer drop-off and no guardrail.

Hearst Castle: The marble Neptune Pool at California's most famous state park leaks so much that stalactites have formed in a cavity underneath.

Look beyond the crashing waves and towering redwoods, and California's 278 state parks are a tangle of troubles. The nation's largest state parks system is weighed down by a $1.3 billion maintenance backlog, according to a review of park records by McClatchy Newspapers.

Park visitors already have dealt with abbreviated schedules and services. Now decay and neglect in the parks endanger the environment, artifacts -- and even public health, as the students and parents of Skyfish School in Redway recently learned.

"It's been a real hassle," said Mark Jensen, a parent and chaperone who had to keep 50 kids from drinking the water at MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg. "There were actually a couple kids who drank some before we could get the word out."

Much of the park decay exists because maintenance has been largely ignored for more than a decade amid slim and slimmer state budgets. Buildings and infrastructure, subject to constant exposure and heavy use, just get worse until they fail.

As a result, the backlog has more than doubled since 2001.

The operating budget for state parks -- which pays for day-to-day maintenance, law enforcement and administration -- stands at about $330 million this fiscal year. In 2001, it was $314 million. Adjusted for inflation, however, that reflects a 15 percent drop.

During those same years, California added 12 parks and 100,000 more acres of land to its system.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to leave the $140 million general fund subsidy intact this year, after he was criticized in 2009 for requiring partial closure of 60 parks and cutbacks systemwide.

It remains to be seen whether the Legislature will agree to keep the parks budget intact -- and status-quo funding will do little to shrink the mountain of untended maintenance.

Environmental groups think they have a partial solution in the recently qualified November ballot initiative that would levy an $18 annual fee on every California vehicle registration, raising at least $208 million a year. In return, residents with up-to-date registration would have free day use of all state parks.

Increasingly, volunteers also are stepping up to help care for California parks, going beyond their traditional work as tour guides and docents. In May, for instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held a statewide cleanup of some 10,000 city, county and state parks.

McClatchy's California newspapers wanted to examine the state of our state parks first-hand. A team of seven journalists fanned out in the first two weeks of June, visiting 42 parks as part of a summer-long effort. Readers are invited to help by posting photos of what they encounter in state parks during their summer travels at www.sacbee.com/stateparks.

Keeping up appearances

Cynthia Neville, 31, who recently visited Samuel P. Taylor State Park in western Marin County with her two young daughters, said the parks "look fine to me. We come for the nature -- not the bathrooms and picnic tables," said Neville, who lives in nearby Lagunitas.