Lamar Alexander talks national park entrance fees, guns in Knoxville visit

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park could be getting some assistance with its maintenance backlog soon, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander said Friday. The senior senator met with the News Sentinel on Friday afternoon and spoke about the park and a number of issues in a wide-ranging interview.

Alexander praised Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposal to use excess revenues from energy development on federal land to help pay for the national parks’ maintenance backlog.

The Smokies' backlog alone is north of $200 million with nearly 80 percent of the work needed to fix roads.

The proposal, which made it into President Trump’s proposed budget, could help keep the park free of entrance fees like other national parks have.  

“That was the deal when the park was created, and it’s a matter of law. All of the other popular parks created in the west were carved out of land the federal government already owned, so the federal government (can) charge an entrance fee,” Alexander said. “The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was given to the country by the states of North Carolina and Tennessee and by a fundraising drive with children giving pennies and John D. Rockefeller giving $5 million.

“From a financial standpoint, (a fee) would be the right thing to do because Yellowstone and Yosemite get twice as much money to manage their parks every year as the Smokies does … but there’s a question of fairness, too.”

Park reorganization

Last week, the USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee reported a separate plan from Zinke’s office that would restructure the entire park system.

The large restructuring is needed, Zinke said, to cut red tape, to move federal employees closer to the parks and other natural resources they are charged with managing, and to preserve them for future generations.

On Friday, Alexander said Zinke is on the right track.

“The only (concern) I’ve had with it, and I’ve spoken with him directly about this, is it would cut Tennessee in half. And I want to make sure for the state agencies, especially the Wildlife Resources Agency and the Great Smoky Mountains Park, that that doesn’t create a problem for us.”

Alexander said he didn’t think it would necessarily be a problem, because the state operates on two time zones, for instance, but he wants to make sure.

On guns and gun control legislation

In response to questions about what should happen going forward after 17 people, most of them students, died in a mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school, Alexander said several steps should be taken.

More:Vigil, meeting planned at Knox church in wake of Florida school shooting

The first, he said, is Congress should approve effective background checks, like those that would be installed if the Cornyn-Murphy bipartisan bill passed. Alexander has co-sponsored the bill, and Trump has praised it in recent days.

“Making sure we have background information on everybody we should have and (make sure) they don’t have a gun — there’s a lot to be done there,” Alexander said.

He said bump stocks, the mechanism for guns to make them shoot like automatic rifles like what was used in the Las Vegas massacre, should be outlawed. He also said states could increase age limits for certain types of guns, but wouldn’t agree to additional bans on assault-style rifles.

Bottom line, he said, there is no easy solution.

“This is not easy. Immigration is easy, we know exactly what to do, we just haven’t done it … here, it’s not as easy to do.”

On Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the ORNL budget

Alexander said the laboratory has never been as consistently well-funded as it has in the past four or five years and he expects the labs to make out OK in next year’s budget, regardless of what Trump proposed.

As for planned layoffs at the labs, as was reported in January, Alexander said that happens but isn’t an overwhelming concern.

More:How does Oak Ridge National Lab determine who gets laid off?

“Oak Ridge competes for programs,” he said. “So sometimes other laboratories get programs or they finish a mission and move onto another one, so people who worked on it get laid off … no one likes layoffs, but that’s part of a laboratory that competes for different programs.”