Missoulian - Merits of marketing state parks explained

WHITEFISH - Splashed across the cover of the latest issue of Montana Outdoors is a glossy photograph of a woman working her fly rod in morning light, the hatch rising like a cloud from bright sparkled waters.

“Montana's New Economy,” proclaims the headline. “Thar's gold in them trout streams.”

Which explains how Betsy Baumgart came to be addressing a crowd of state park managers from throughout the Rocky Mountain region - managers from Montana, Colorado and Idaho, from North Dakota, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

Normally, a conference of state park managers would feature speakers from, well, state parks. But Baumgart peddles tourism, as administrator of the Montana Promotion Division of the state's Department of Commerce. Today, commerce and parks are much the same thing.

Baumgart's job is to promote tourism, she said Tuesday, and tourists come to visit state parks, among other wild and scenic places.

There is indeed gold in trout streams - $2.81 billion worth in 2005, left behind by the 10 million or so tourists who made Montana a destination.

Those tourists, their dollars and their intersection with state parks - for both better and for worse - is the cornerstone of this year's Rocky Mountain State Parks Executives Conference, which opened Tuesday in Whitefish. Tourism is enjoying a newfound respect from economists and lawmakers alike, Baumgart said, and that could mean good times ahead for the budgets of long-neglected and overlooked state park systems.

The visitors who have made tourism Montana's fastest-growing industry, who support some 40,000 jobs, who pay $140 million each year into state and local tax coffers, “they come for our open spaces, our mountains, our lakes.”

In other words, for exactly what state parks offer.

“We have a common customer,” she said. It's no mistake that more than

6 percent of revenue from Montana's hotel bed tax goes into the state parks budget, or that tourism officials and park managers work hand-in-glove on all sorts of projects.

But while elevated political clout may help the bottom line at parks, the attendant elevated use could spell trouble for folks charged with conserving public lands.

The follow-up headline, inside this month's Montana Outdoors (which, by the way, is the official magazine of none other than Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the very department that oversees state parks), reads “Saving the golden goose: Will Montana conserve the natural resources fueling its economic growth?”

Hunters, anglers and wildlife watchers spend about $1 billion in Montana each year. Add in national parks and other scenic attractions, and the figure tops $2 billion.

But when it comes to setting public policy, “too often, fish and wildlife and their habitats aren't part of the discussion,” said Chris Smith, chief of staff at FWP.

The people who come as tourists, economists say, are staying to open businesses, tomorrow's entrepreneurs diversifying what was a one-horse economy pulled by resource extraction. The effect is profound, going well beyond trout streams with bankside Internet cafes.

American City Business Journal, for instance, recently named Bozeman as the top small city in the country for small-business vitality.

Of course, with that vitality comes more people, more congestion, more sprawl, more weeds, more of the stuff that will kill that goose and crack its golden eggs.

The solution? Protected places such as state parks.

“Many Montanans traditionally looked at environmental protection and enhancement as the enemy of economic improvement,” according to the Montana Outdoors piece. “Not anymore.”

Nowadays, Gallatin County can pass a $10 million bond to preserve scenic ranchland. Nowadays, Missoula can buy 1,500 acres of Mount Jumbo for open space and elk range. Nowadays, Lewistown can tap taxpayers to restore a famous trout stream.

“When Bob Dylan wrote the words ‘the times they are a-changin,' he could have easily been talking about our West.”

So said Pat Williams, a former Montana congressman and current senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. On Tuesday, he provided the keynote opening to the state parks conference in Whitefish.

“A historic threshold has been crossed,” he said. “We are no longer, as Westerners, what we were.”

What we were was gold and silver, later timber and beef, still later copper, more timber, more beef. What we are is that glossy picture of the woman and her fly rod, like it or not.

“The great transition has occurred,” Williams said, “and we have crossed the threshold from the Old West.”

The New West is thriving on conservation, restoration, high-tech and services. Doctoring and lawyering and banking have replaced logging and mining and ranching, to a large degree, as the service industry matures to meet the demands of an exploding population.

The transition was, and for some still is, “wrenching,” Williams said, but we cannot go back, not even if we wanted to.

Williams rattled off a long list of demographic and economic statistics, proof the Rocky Mountain West is booming (some call it the “Third Coast” for its emergent prosperity), especially in areas close to protected public lands.

Not a few of those lands are state parks.

The parks are that golden goose, Williams said, just as are national parks and wilderness areas and big scenic waterways. Those are undeniably the places with the strongest, most diverse economies.

But as Westerners well know, with any boom comes the potential for bust.

The New West, Williams said, “is now under assault, being loved to pieces, if not to death.”

Subdivisions are replacing sawmills, and while the economy is growing and diversifying, it still remains hinged on the one thing Montana has always had in spades: land.

Trash it with uncontrolled urban sprawl, ignore it with budgets that don't value state parks, spoil it with the zeal of a land rush agent, and the boom will surely bust.

Or, he said, nurture it with a studied eye toward what is driving this New West economy, and the boom becomes sustainable, harvesting a new crop of tourist dollars each and every year. The amenity economy can help develop rural areas (that's mostly where the parks are), can preserve historic and cultural treasures as well as natural places, can keep the open spaces open and can empower locals long rooted in place.

This is, Williams said, “a remarkable time of public decision making.”

Specifically, the public is deciding to protect its shared natural environment. State parks are part of that, he said, and the central role they play needs to be made clear to the lawmakers holding the purse strings.

“People are moving in huge numbers to the vicinity of these natural wonders,” Williams said.

And the state parks had better be ready, Baumgart added, “because it's a whole new world out there,” a world where tourism gurus are guaranteed to steal the show, even at a quiet conference of public land managers.

Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com

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