Five years ago, 72,000 guests visited Chewacla State Park. In each of the last two fiscal years, the park has seen over 100,000 guests.
The difference between when he started 17 years ago and today is “night and day,” said Chewacla park manager Odell Banks.
Banks attributed the recent spike in attendance to a younger crowd using newly built trails for hiking and mountain biking.
Alabama State Parks Director Greg Lein said it’s tough to gauge exactly why people go to a particular park, but “when someone drives into the park with a mountain bike on the back of their car, you know what they’re there to do.”
Banks said the new trails help alleviate some of the decline in attendance usually associated with the colder, wetter months. Most of the trails can be drained within 15 minutes after it rains, which means bikers won’t have to wait long to hop back on them.
Last year legislators proposed a budget that would have gut much of the state parks fund and directed the money toward other state programs. This put 22 parks at risk of closure.
Amendment 2, on the Nov. 8 ballot, would constitutionally protect the parks funding from being redistributed into the general fund. Lein said even positive cash flow parks like Chewacla would benefit from its passage by providing a layer of protection for parks if they underperform in the future.
“If you have a park that is not necessarily operating in the black, there can be enough profit from the other parks ... [to] offset the losses,” Lein said. “If the money’s being transferred out the back door to other state programs, that’s not working anymore.”
If the state Legislature could direct revenue from state parks into the general fund, parks that don’t profit in a given fiscal year would be vulnerable to closure or further defunding.
Lein advised people who want to save the state’s park system to vote yes on Amendment 2. More important, Lein said, is to “get out and use the parks.”
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