Seventy State Parks Set to Close

An utter shame that so many of these places are just going to be wiped out of a traveler's itinerary either for its natural beauty or historical significance.

And how can the state stop people from visiting these places? If the state owns them and does not wish to allow anyone to use or visit these places, then they should sell or transfer them to national oversight.

It is truly disgusting that we cannot manage our vast amounts of money generated by state revenues with any sense of logic. We bail out corporate criminals who have defrauded our citizens and yet take more and more away from those very citizens.

I suppose I should not be surprised these same corporations who spend BILLIONS in TV ads have not offered or proposed setting aside some of that money to sponsor and keep all of these places open and available.

This state, this nation is not going to hell in a handbasket . . . it's already there.

Horrible, disgusting and shameful. Fight every attempt to privatize these parks.

There goes the Tourist trade for California, just Disney and 6-Flags are left. No money for the State.

dou4now.

Nobody ever speaks about the toll the 911 Twin Towers attack has taken on our present situation. We - the US - has spent these trillions of dollars in war and security expenses because of 911. Now we are having to pay for it and this is the result: no money for daily living because we have to now pay for the war debt. Most money spend was from Bid Laden's attack and the attacks against the US in the few years prior. And then huge expense was generated by Bush's war against Iraq to get control of oil.

Only now, under Obama's rule, have we gone after Bin Laden. Hopefully now we can stop wasting money over there on wars and stop the bleeding so that we can pay for things like our Nation Parks, after school programs, social services for the poor and needy.

If the state's only option is to lease out on a short term basis for private contract operators, this is a better option than having to close them off to all use. It's the lesser of two evils. Maybe contracting out to local governments may be an option, but SB County is a fiscal joke now, so they wouldn't be an options. Maybe go with surrounding cities to take over operations.

We are going to see this in our SB County Parks soon. Closures, resident rangers getting the boot from there homes at Manning, Toro Canyon and Waller just to name a few. The current director has no clue on the budget with this department going from meeting budget targets to being over $600,000 upside down this year. Worse since Terri Maus Nisich was the absent director of parks

Schwarzenegger hiked the camping fees to $35/night (fairer and better would have been to charge a lesser amount, eg., $20, per adult); Brown now wants to close 70 parks. I doubt that any of the highly paid legislators take their vacations in campgrounds because that's the only place they can afford. Now, for many starting this fall, that will be out. This is wrong when there is such waste in the state as is shown by today's LAT story: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-...

Lowering prices would've brought more people in. Itsa no brainer but too complex for most of the economic experts in Sac.

From the look of some of these comments maybe California needs to cut funding to the parks completely and focus all of their efforts on literacy, sheesh.

so so so awful... i recognize a lot of parks in the SF Bay area... I wonder how they would keep the people out... so much for mt. biking and hiking in Marin...

So one quarter of the parks are closing from a loss of eleven million dollars. Somehow I doubt this is one quarter of their budget. At this rate soon we may have a state parks department and NO open parks.

That loss makes no sense because even as of 2009, State Parks brought in $1.67 out of every dollar spent on them..