Dear Friends,

Make way for changes at National Park Trust.  And all of these changes have one thing in common -- they are intended to help us better protect America's parks. But why change?

First, the federal government's funding of parks is declining every year in every way possible. At our most recent 2006 Bruce F. Vento Public Service Award luncheon, award recipient Senator John McCain soberly stated that the "annual operating deficit estimated at 600 million dollars in a multi-billion dollar maintenance backlog has cast a long shadow over the glory of our national parks ".  Funds for land acquisition were the first to go.  Our current project at Rocky Mountain National Park depends solely on non-federal funds.

Second, the cost of park inholdings and new property has increased just as it has for all land. When NPT was established in l983, the average cost for an acre of land was several thousand dollars. Now, many parkland acres cost hundreds of thousands per acre; some cost millions per acre. When we finish buying "swamp land" in Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve, we will have paid tens of thousands per acre rather than the modest hundreds per acre that we paid a decade ago for a panther habitat in this same preserve.

Finally, some good news - over the past decade, there has been an increase in the number of locally based land trusts, partners we did not have when we first started working. 

NPT is evolving to meet these new challenges. We will place more emphasis on helping local land trusts, providing not only advice but also funds. We are committed to working on even more projects and we will need to rely more on the generosity and philanthropy of donors to achieve successes like the Virgin Islands National Park project.

We also are changing our organization.  Our board is more focused on long-term strategic issues, not just specific projects. Our staff has always been lean, but hard working and talented. And we will begin to introduce our new name, American Parkland Preservation, to better reflect our mission. In three words, our new name complements our original name and tells folks what we do -- we preserve America's parklands.

All of this depends, of course, on how well we keep you, our members informed and involved. America's parks continue to depend on you, the private citizen, for support. Each and every letter sent to policy makers, phone calls made to the media, and gifts made to NPT are critical and essential.