Our Stories

D.C. Blog # 3: Advocating with Federal Agencies

Executive Director Bruce Matthews is in Washington DC for Trails Advocacy Week. He is blogging about his activities.

One of the key elements of Trails Advocacy Week this week in Washington DC is meeting with the federal agency partners who respectively administer or have key roles with the management of national scenic and historic trails. The 30 National Scenic or Historic Trails are variously administered by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, or the Bureau of Land Management. In the case of the North Country National Scenic Trail, we’re administered by the National Park Service (NPS), as are 5 other National Scenic Trails including the Appalachian. This is true even though the NCNST traverses 10 different national forests in its 4600 miles (soon to be 11 with the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont).
Trails advocates meet with federal agencies to advance our collective agenda. For example, topics we hope to cover in our NPS meeting include:
• Support of the Partnership’s Collaborative Landscape Planning proposal for federal Land and Water Conservation Funding
• Establishing greater trails-wide consistency in land & easement acquisition
• Growing the challenge cost share program
• Restoring NPS travel cuts
• Coordinating National Trails System 50th anniversary with NPS Centennial
With the Forest Service we hope to emphasize
• Greater consistency in trails management practices among the National Forests
• Support of the Partnership’s Collaborative Landscape Planning proposal for federal Land and Water Conservation Funding
• Trail maintenance backlog
• Increased accountability for the individual forests in spending their trails money
• Saw policy
Typically these meeting are choreographed, both by agency representatives who already know our agenda, and the trails community, which coordinate the leadership for each topic. Still, the voice of the national trails community is impressive when we speak as one, and we are generally taken seriously. The fact that the national trails are represented on the NPS Centennial Advisory Committee is directly due to outcomes from 2013 meetings.

In later blogs I’ll share our takeaways from these meetings.