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Right-wing “environmental research” group uses falsified data to justify Utah land grab
Busted: Right-wing “environmental research” group uses falsified data to justify state land grab
Last week, a well-known conservative think tank, Utah’s Sutherland Institute, released a report that claimed state parks are more efficiently managed and more popular than national parks across the West. The report, which was co-written with the right-wing Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), relied almost entirely on state park attendance data to draw its conclusions. The report got major coverage from the Deseret News, complete with a headline claiming “States manage public lands for recreation better than feds.”
There’s just one problem: Sutherland and PERC used erroneous numbers throughout their report.
The report cited statistics from the National Association of State Park Directors 2014 annual report (you can see the visitation data on page 19). When those numbers made it into the Sutherland report, however, they changed: PERC and Sutherland gave Oregon’s visitation data to New Mexico, Utah’s numbers to Oregon, and Washington’s to Utah. Washington received visitation data from Wisconsin—a state which wasn’t included in the Sutherland/PERC report.
The result of this four-state switcheroo gave Utah, which happens to be the focus of much of PERC’s research, a ten-fold increase in annual park attendance—35 million instead of 3.5 million. (You can read PERC’s original report, complete with bad data on page 35.)
PERC used that erroneous data to invent a metric, “state park visits per acre,” to bolster its claim that Utah state parks are wildly more popular than national parks or state parks in neighboring Western states (see page 26). By this invented metric, a small city park in just about any town in America would outcompete America’s finest national treasures, like Arches and Grand Canyon National Park.
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Last week, a well-known conservative think tank, Utah’s Sutherland Institute, released a report that claimed state parks are more efficiently managed and more popular than national parks across the West. The report, which was co-written with the right-wing Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), relied almost entirely on state park attendance data to draw its conclusions. The report got major coverage from the Deseret News, complete with a headline claiming “States manage public lands for recreation better than feds.”
There’s just one problem: Sutherland and PERC used erroneous numbers throughout their report.
The report cited statistics from the National Association of State Park Directors 2014 annual report (you can see the visitation data on page 19). When those numbers made it into the Sutherland report, however, they changed: PERC and Sutherland gave Oregon’s visitation data to New Mexico, Utah’s numbers to Oregon, and Washington’s to Utah. Washington received visitation data from Wisconsin—a state which wasn’t included in the Sutherland/PERC report.
The result of this four-state switcheroo gave Utah, which happens to be the focus of much of PERC’s research, a ten-fold increase in annual park attendance—35 million instead of 3.5 million. (You can read PERC’s original report, complete with bad data on page 35.)
PERC used that erroneous data to invent a metric, “state park visits per acre,” to bolster its claim that Utah state parks are wildly more popular than national parks or state parks in neighboring Western states (see page 26). By this invented metric, a small city park in just about any town in America would outcompete America’s finest national treasures, like Arches and Grand Canyon National Park.
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