"By establishing a nonprofit trust to manage the Presidio's property, it gives us a blueprint for national parks that one day will be able to sustain themselves without government funds," President Bill Clinton announced last month.

He was in part referring to legislation he signed which turned over management of the Presidio National Park in San Francisco to the Presidio Trust, a quasi-independent public trusteeship charged with making the park sustainable (in the green and in the black).

Clinton was also referring to a new chapter in the history of public lands management: public, nongovernmental trusts. Since the early 1980s, a few scholars have argued for public endowment trusts to run our parks. These places are too precious to be spoiled by politics. In 1982, a colleague and I wrote "Endowment Areas: A Clearing in the Policy Wilderness." In 1984, we proposed park and wilderness management by endowment trusts as "the opportunity to link conservation with fiscal conservatism." In 1988, I asserted in the Wall Street Journal that, "to achieve ecological integrity in the parks, we need to buffer them from transitory political forces" using nonprofit conservation managers. And, just this last July in the Seattle Times, I again urged employing trusts to "ensure sensitive stewardship and freedom from shortsighted Congressional politics." Was somebody listening?

Public, nongovernmental "trusts" present sensible alternatives. Endowment boards, like those running museums, hospitals, and private schools, would operate under a legal charter to steward individual parks. After receiving a one-time Congressional endowment, each park's individual trust would be "on it's own". The board, established by local environmental groups, business leaders, and citizens, would promote ecologically sensitive economic activities as part of their trustee responsibility. Creative mechanisms such as a "Friends of Mt. Ranier" program could entice membership, dues, and democratic feedback from park lovers everywhere. Park trusts would free our parks from their precarious dependency on national politics, encourage long-term planning, and reintroduce accountability in management.

Other innovative policies are being discussed. Park supporters are beginning to see that the only way to ensure the long-term health of our parks, both financially and ecologically, is to make them dependent on their users and supporters -- not Congressmen in Washington or political appointees. Some advocate charging businesses that using parks' features in their advertising, ending decades of free lunches for Madison Avenue. Others advocate charging market prices for recreation in the park, and then letting the individual parks keep the bulk of the revenues. Park managers would then have the incentive guarantee their park offers what the public wants, protected from politicians plundering their budget. They would nurture the parks' highest values: scenery, preservation, recreation, and heritage.

No system is perfect, and some failures are expected. Not all parks created by Congress truly deserve that label. Parks like Steamtown (Penn.) and the Presidio face monumental challenges in paying their own way and proving their unique value. The Presidio Trust hopes to make the park self-sufficient in 15 years. This means cutting costs and finding $25 million in annual revenues to offset the federal subsidy.

But the reality of politics and parks probably won't let that happen. First, the Presidio Trust isn't independent of the government. The Park Service can still undertake construction on the land -- and it plans a whopping $611 million in improvements. More subsidies to the Trust permit it to borrow from the U.S. Treasury and use the Justice Department's legal services. Politics enter the fray because Clinton appoints the Trust's board members rather than having them elected by at-large supporters.

With subsidized rents, the costs of running the Presidio as a glorified office park may simply be too high. Office rentals today cover just one-tenth of the park's operating budget, and recreation fees on the 740 undeveloped acres are unlikely to cover the rest. When Trustees complain about the required restoration work, can Uncle Sam resist coming to the rescue? If a waiting list for renters forms, we predict that politically "correct" groups like the Thoreau Center for Sustainability will go to the head of the line.

It's unlikely that American politicians have the discipline and restraint to permit the Presidio to sink or swim on its merits. However, the Omnibus Parks bill puts us on the learning curve. Persistent failures, like the ecological and political problems so common with the National Park Service (elk overgrazing, fire buildup, decaying infrastructure and buildings, radical simplification of ecosystems, etc.), demand alternatives to the political Park bureaucracy.

There is a compelling need to divorce the national park system from federal budgetary politics. Clinton declared that our parks should "be able to sustain themselves without government funds," and he pledged to "put our national treasures beyond partisan politics and put the people of America, their future and their environment above that." Fiscal conservatives and environmentalists alike can support this movement and cheer our progress in harmonizing sound ecological and economic ideas.