DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The National Park Service has doled out about $250,000 in grants to add LGBTQ+ landmarks to the National Register of Historic Places even as it faces a multibillion-dollar backlog maintaining the public land it oversees.
Through the National Park Service’s so-called Underrepresented Communities Grant Program, which was designed to diversify America’s historical landmarks to include more racial and sexual minorities, the government agency provides grants for several other agencies and nonprofits to seek out “historic” LGBTQ+ locations and submit applications for them to the National Register of Historic Places, government spending records show.
While the Park Service focused on ensuring that the gay community is represented equitably among designated historical locations, however, it faced an estimated $23.3 billion maintenance backlog during fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service.
[The grant program is funded through the Historic Preservation Fund, which doesn’t use taxpayer dollars but revenue from federal offshore oil and gas leases to support a range of preservation projects, National Park Service spokesman Jordan Fifer said in an email Thursday to the Daily Caller News Foundation.]
[That money is separate from funds appropriated to the National Park Service by Congress for park operations and care, he said. A reference to this being a taxpayer-supported program was removed from this reprint of the article Thursday evening.]
One such grant paid out by the National Park Service went to the State Historical Society of Colorado, a nonprofit, to survey at least 25 different LGBTQ+ historic sites in the state and submit at least three nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, federal spending records show. The grant, disbursed in April, is worth nearly $60,000.
When NPS approves a landmark to be placed on the historic register, its owner becomes entitled to special tax breaks as well as access to many state and local grant programs.
The National Park Service also awarded Washington state’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation $75,000 in April to identify an “outstanding representation of queer history” and nominate it for the register, records show.
Additionally, the agency paid the state to “research and develop the first historic context statement to identify significant LGBTQIA2S themes in Washington.”
As NPS provides grants on LGBTQ+ inclusion for national landmarks, it was roughly $7.4 billion behind on road maintenance, $6.2 billion behind on maintaining its buildings, roughly $1.6 billion behind on keeping its water systems functional, and nearly $1 billion deep in a backlog on trail maintenance as of fiscal year 2023, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Many parks administered by NPS in Washington, D.C., for instance, are covered in trash. Until recently, some were occupied by large homeless encampments.
Michael Shepperd, who owns an outdoors store in East Tennessee, voiced concerns in a December 2017 essay that decaying roads and bridges near Great Smoky Mountains National Park could lead to fewer visitors and fewer customers for local businesses.
The National Park Service also issued $50,000 in grants between April 2023 and April 2024 to amend National Register of Historic Places applications for locations in New York City with links to the LGBTQ+ community, according to federal records.
The agency doled out $25,000 to help the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan resubmit its application, this time highlighting its significance to LGBTQ+ culture, and another $25,000 to the Jaffe Art Theatre in the East Village to resubmit its application to the register by emphasizing its importance to LGBTQ+ history.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose agency oversees the National Park Service, appeared at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City in October 2023 to celebrate National LGBTQ+ History Month.
“Tell me, in your own words, why places like this, like Stonewall, are so important to telling America’s story,” Haaland asked drag queen Pattie Gonia, a self-described “professional homosexual” and “queer environmentalist” who appeared with the Interior secretary for a social media post.
“I think it’s because queer rights are more under attack than ever, and I think if we don’t acknowledge the past, we are bound to repeat it,” the drag queen said. “So, at a place like Stonewall, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a place where so much discrimination and hatred occurred against the queer community, but it’s also a place where resistance and queer joy and queer liberation happened.”
The Stonewall National Monument includes a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn that was the site of a series of violent riots where homosexuals clashed with police officers in 1969.
The National Park Service paid out another $50,000 to a nonprofit in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to amend the National Register of Historic Places application of the city’s historic district to recognize its significance to gay history, according to spending records.
The agency has spent $7.5 million on its Underrepresented Communities Grant Program since 2014, with Congress apportioning $1.25 million for the 2024 iteration of the program, according to the agency.
The National Park Service didn’t respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s multiple requests for comment until it that the .
This article, originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation, was modified on the day of publication to clarify that the grant program does not use taxpayer funds.