A few days ago, Russell Contreras, a reporter with the Associated Press’ Albuquerque bureau, filed a story last week about the imminent demise of the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program.
Because AP stories fly all over the globe and are picked up by dozens of news outlets, I thought I’d better address some of the issues within it.
The gist of the AP’s story is the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program will sunset shortly after it awards its last cost-share grants this year. The fact the program is ending has been duly reported by Route 66 News for a long time.
But a few lawmakers in Congress are growing uncomfortable with the prospect of the program coming to a halt:
“Failing to reauthorize this funding would do real damage to the ‘Main Street of America,’ hurting small businesses that have been left behind and leaving landmark locations to fall into disrepair,” U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, said in a statement.
Udall said that’s what he co-sponsored a proposal with Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, that seeks to designate Route 66 as a National Historic Trail. The bipartisan bill would amend the National Trails System Act and include Route 66 in an effort to help revitalize cities and small towns along the historic corridor. That bill is moving through Congress.
U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-Albuquerque, who is a member of Laguna Pueblo, said she remembers traveling along Route 66 as a child to visit her grandparents.
“The Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program is responsible for injecting economic activity into our City by preserving places like the El Vado Motel and the iconic neon signs that run up and down (Albuquerque’s) Nob Hill,” Haaland said.
Haaland said she’s working with colleagues to look into “legislative options to provide a sustained source of funding for preserving Route 66.”
Haaland’s comment is the first inkling I’ve heard that Congress wants to do something other than the Route 66 National Historic Trail legislation, which still hasn’t been introduced to the current session, despite what the AP story states.
A similar article by the Joplin Globe that predates Contreras’ provides details on why the odds of extending the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program are slim:
Kaisa Barthuli, program manager with the National Park Service for the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, said the expectation is that the program will sunset on Oct. 1, unless additional legislation passes.
When asked how the NPS is gearing up for the program’s shutdown, Barthuli mentioned several approaches, such as collaborating with the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, an organization made up of members of the eight states the highway passes through.
“We are developing a retrospective of accomplishments for public release, bringing a number of projects to completion, and working with the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership to look at how the partnership may continue to support preservation initiatives,” she said in an email interview with the Globe. “This includes a Preservation Working Group, a Vintage Motel Task Force, a Neon Sign Task Force, a Green Book Task Force, among others.”
The odds of the corridor program extending are slim, according to officials, as it was originally meant to only last 10 years when it was established by Congress in 1999. However, lawmakers extended the program for another decade in 2009 because of the public’s interest in the program.
Things in Congress suddenly could change, and lawmakers could pass another 10-year extension of the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. But given the fact the original program was supposed to last just a decade will make lawmakers reluctant to extend it a second time.
The only reasons the first extension in 2009 went through was because the U.S. was in the midst of a severe recession and, most importantly, no substitute program was in place. The Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership now is operating and seeks to set up preservation-minded mechanisms in the next year or so.
Regardless, this could be an interesting year or two in the Congress. With Route 66’s centennial looming just a few years from now, lawmakers might feel prompted to do something if faced with the prospect of no Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program by the end of the year. Stay tuned.
(Image of a Route 66 shield on the highway in Adrian, Texas, by Thomas Hawk via Flickr)
The Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program seems to have done a good job over the years that it has existed. But other groups seem to have sprung up over that time. Is it a case of too many irons in the same fire? I presume some of the newer groups are privately funded, some state funded, some federally funded. So, plenty of opportunities for overlap and pulling in different directions – as I have seen from what appears on this forum. The coming centenary could be seen as a distraction for what should be uninterrupted funding for what is, after all, an asset to the USA as a whole as well as to the individual states through which the original Route 66 ran. Do some heads need banging together?
There are no other groups right now doling out cost-share grants. They are too cash-strapped to do so. Maybe by next year Route 66 Road Ahead will have the ability to to do, but it’s not guaranteed.
In that case, the federal government should realise the value of the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program – locally and nationally – and make it an ongoing scheme. But having seen what happened when Trump’s budget ideas resulted in weeks of federal shutdown, the logic of a perpetual Route 66 preservation scheme would most likely be lost on Washington.
Every time I see a newly built piece of Route 66 infrastructure (plazas, museums, street furniture, etc.) funded with local tax dollars, I think about how much further that money would have gone in a cost-sharing program for neon restoration, facade improvements, and lots of other small bets that directly preserve and improve the places that bring people from all over the world to see Route 66. I wish more local and state governments would emulate the effectiveness of the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program.