Congress approved a slight increase in funding for Park Service law enforcement for next year, US$3.6 million, US$746,000 of it for drug eradication efforts in California parks. But federal and state officials say they still lack the money and personnel to patrol vast areas in and around the state's parks.
"It's a US$2 billion or a US$4 billion problem, and we're throwing US$1 million at it," said Supervisor Allen Ishida of Tulare County, whose deputies seized 157,000 pot plants on public and private lands and made 28 arrests this year.
Representative Steve Pearce, the chairman of the national parks subcommittee, said it would be tough to find more money in the federal budget as Congress deals with rising deficits and is considering cutting many programs. He urged the Park Service to put more officers on drug eradication instead of "writing parking tickets."
Donald Coelho, the Park Service's chief of law enforcement, agreed that more money was not the only solution. He said a coordinated strategy by state, federal and local law enforcement officials ultimately could put a dent in the Mexican cartels' operations.
"Sometimes it takes time to work your way through an organization," Coelho said.
State narcotics officers and the Drug Enforcement Administration seized a record 1.1 million pot plants on public and private lands in California this year, up from 621,000 plants last year, through an aggressive campaign called CAMP, or Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. The street value of those drugs is estimated at US$4.5 billion.
But state and federal officials said drug growers were adapting quickly -- for example, planting smaller pot farms that are tougher to spot from surveillance planes and helicopters. Some growers have responded to drug raids in Sequoia and other parks by moving their farms to nearby Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management lands.
Without a more comprehensive plan, "we are just shifting the problem from one jurisdiction to another," Ishida said.
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