Shutdown would greatly effect tourism in Mississippi
WASHINGTON – It’s been 15 years since the last government shutdown and now President Barack Obama and the GOP have until midnight tonight to keep a repeat of what happened in 1995 and 1996, respectively, from happening again.
While Bloomberg is reporting that an extended U.S. government shutdown would cause increasing harm to the nation’s economy, with the Washington area – home to about 350,000 federal workers – bearing the brunt of the damage, the local effects of the shutdown would also be staggering.
One of the first casualties of the shutdown would be the Natchez Trace Parkway (NTP). Extending through three states, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, the 444 mile long parkway is traveled by some 40,000 people a day and is patrolled by park rangers.
Reporting some 250 accidents on the Trace each year, with a handful being fatalities, Trace officials said the lack of government funding wouldn’t halt the presence of rangers on the Trace, but would seriously limit the number of those on duty.
“It will decrease to a degree, but once again, we can’t shut the gates on the parkway,” Superintendent Cameron Sholly, of the NTP told WTVA. “So we’ll have the exact number of travelers, the same number of incidents. We want to make sure that our staffing levels are at a level that they can effectively handle whatever may happen on the parkway itself.”
Sholly said other services on the parkway would also have to continue, but again, with a substantially smaller workforce.
“We have water treatment systems that we’ll have to have maintenance people on to continue to monitor,” Sholly said. “We’re going to have garbage that continues to overflow in some of the trash cans that would need to be emptied. That becomes a public health issue. As far as the mowing [and grounds maintenance] goes, that’s more of a discretionary [thing.] [It] makes [the parkway] look good, that’s for sure, but that probably wouldn’t be something we’d bring people back for.”
The Natchez Trace Visitor’s Center, however, that gets about 15 million visitors annually, would be locked, as would other visitor’s centers throughout the state.
A lengthy government shutdown could prove detrimental to Mississippi, a state that relies heavily on tourism.
Even though a government shutdown is looming in the balance, typically, other federally funded services would continue including police, fire fighters, armed forces, utilities, air traffic management and correctional facilities.
One day before the shutdown deadline, the Associated Press reported that President Obama said he would sign a short-term measure keeping the government running even without an agreement to give negotiations more time to succeed.
While revealing nothing about what still divides them, Obama and the lawmakers, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., all said another late night of talks in the Oval Office had narrowed their differences over cutting federal spending and other matters.
Officials in both parties said that in the past day or so, Democrats had tacitly agreed to slightly deeper spending cuts than they had been willing to embrace, at least $34.5 billion in reductions.
Agreement on that point was conditional on key details, but it was a higher total than the $33 billion that had been under consideration.
It also was less than the $40 billion Boehner floated earlier in the week – a number that Republicans indicated was flexible.
Obama said he still hoped to announce an agreement on Friday but did not have “wild optimism.”
“I expect an answer in the morning,” Obama told reporters Thursday evening as representatives from the White House and Capitol Hill plunged ahead with negotiations well into the night.
Obama said a government shutdown would mean “800,000 families — our neighbors, our friends, who are working hard all across the country in a whole variety of functions — they suddenly are not allowed to come to work. It also means that they’re not getting a paycheck. That obviously has a tremendous impact.”
He said millions more would be impacted by a shutdown because “they’re not getting the services from the federal government that are important to them.”
“Folks who want to get a mortgage through the FHA may not be able to get it,” the president said. “And obviously that’s not good as weak as this housing market is. You’ve got people who are trying to get a passport for a trip that they’ve been planning for a long time — they may not be able to do that. So millions more people will be significantly inconvenienced; in some ways, they may end up actually seeing money lost or opportunities lost because of a government shutdown. And then finally, there’s going to be an effect on the economy overall.”
Economists said “the economic damage from a government shutdown would mount very quickly. And the longer it dragged on, the greater the odds of a renewed recession.”
“We’ve been working very hard over the last two years to get this economy back on its feet” Obama said. “We’ve now seen 13 months of job growth; a hundred — 1.8 million new jobs. We had the best report, jobs report, that we’d seen in a very long time just this past Friday. For us to go backwards because Washington couldn’t get its act together is unacceptable.”
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