May I remind you that you were the first to engage in an ad hominum attack (perhaps you ought to read your own posts).
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding between what a National Park and a National Heritage Area are.
I'm going to make this simple.
A National Park consists of government owned land where the NPS controls how the land is used.
A National Heritage Area consists of public and privately owned land. The NPS only has a say on land that it owns. It has no control over state or locally owned public land and it has no control over private land.
The Heritage Area managing authority cannot condemn, seize or control any private land within the Heritage Area. It can purchase land with a willing seller if it can raise the money but it cannot use any of its Federal Heritage Area operating funds to buy land. Since Heritage Areas get little or no other Federal funding, then it basically eliminates the use of Federal $$$ for land acquisition.
The job of the managing entity is to try to interpret and preserve what it can in a Heritage Area. This is done by working with state and local governments and private property owners. However, the managing entity has no final say on what is done with any public or privately owned land.
For instance if we want to see a battlefield preserved but we can't buy it or convince the owner to preserve it, then we can't do anything else. If the owner wants to bulldoze it and build a mall, then they are free to do so. The private property owner has the final say as regards their property.
I know that doesn't fit in with the tin foil conspiracy theories about NPS/UN control of the world but that is the way it is in the real world.
As for trying to steal private property, that is a total crock. We can't steal anything. If we want it, we have to pay market price for it and the owner has to be willing to sell it.
The managing entity for the Heritage Area is a private not for profit organization made up of citizens from all walks of life. They make no money by being on the Board of Directors. Their job is to come up with ways that make the Heritage Area self sustainable. This means that they have to raise private money to make it work. The money is raised at the local level and if the Heritage Area was such a burden on local communities, landowners, businesses and governments, then it would die pretty quickly from lack of support.
The heritage Area must respond to the needs and wants of the local population or it cannot survive.
These are the facts. You can believe otherwise but you are just plain wrong.
Some people have discovered that adding the words “nationally significant” to their area or region can result in millions of federal dollars funneled through National Heritage Areas (NHAs). What was once a regional or local project with community involvement can be partly underwritten by the government and overseen by the Nation Park Service.
NHAs raise legitimate questions about the role of the federal government. To begin with, the potential scope of heritage areas is enormous. Forty-five million Americans now live within the 27 existing NHAs. Although the National Park Service does not control what happens in these areas—supposedly, decisions are made by “management entities” composed of local groups—the agency provides money and technical expertise, as well as publicity and prestige, to these community projects.
NHAs move the federal government into one more aspect of private life. They provide justification for local governments that want to adopt cultural-heritage-related zoning laws and other land-use restrictions. Although “designation as a National Heritage Area does not involve Federal regulation of private property,” according to the National Park Service (2005a), it gives local preservation interests the backing of the federal government. A heritage area “benefits from national recognition due to its association with the National Park Service through the use of
the NPS arrowhead symbol as a branding strategy,” says the National
Park Service (2005b). If the local management group does not meet the standards of the federally approved management plan, funding will diminish or cease. This creates an incentive to bend to the wishes of the National Park Service.
Despite such worries, NHAs are not a land grab—yet. Some, however, worry because the National Park Service agency has been taken to court numerous times for trying to restrict the freedom of inholders and persuade them to move out of the park boundaries .2 For example, a family that owns 410 acres within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska has been suing the Park Service since 2003, trying to maintain access to its property.
Indeed, one goal of National Heritage Area proponents may be to add national parks. The management board of the Rivers of Steel NHA in Pennsylvania has announced that it wants to create an urban park, the Homestead Works National Park. The location would be on land currently designated for heritage use (Rivers of Steel 2005). This action would seem to undercut the stated claim that heritage areas “allow the Park Service to fulfill this mission [preservation of historic and natural resources deemed nationally significant] without having to acquire or manage more land” (NPS 2005b).
A redeeming feature of heritage areas is that they form only a minute portion of the federal budget. Currently, each heritage area can receive no more than $1 million per year, and all such funding has a sunset date between ten and fifteen years after funding starts. Funding is supposed to be seed money, matched by local private funding. In 2003 congressional testimony, however, de Teel Patterson Tiller, acting associate director for cultural resources for the National Park Service, admitted that “to date, self sufficiency has yet to be achieved with any NHAs, and the first four NHAs established have sought and received Congressional extensions of their funding” (Tiller 2003). The dissipation of taxpayer-funded government resources may be small, but it may still be wasteful.
Creating “heritage areas” is not an inherently bad idea. The preservation of truly significant areas or historic sites opens up possibilities for research, education, and tourism. Around the country, private museums, historical societies, and state and city governments are doing just that. If they are supported by members of the local community, they can achieve the same results as NHAs—without losing local autonomy, wasting federal resources, or risking attacks on private property.
http://www.perc.org/publications/percreports/june2005/ntl_heritage_areas.php
HERITAGE BILLS INTRODUCED, 108th CONGRESS
http://www.cr.nps.gov/heritageareas/LEG/introbills.pdf