There's at least one more "listening session" this week to discuss the list of "signature projects" to be proposed under the guise of the National Park Centennial Initiative. However, you need a special invitation to get into this meeting.
    Apparently, the top leadership of the American Recreation Coalition and the National Parks Conservation Association will be among the 50 or so folks who will join Dirk in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, on Thursday and Friday at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Center to discuss what will be included in the Interior secretary's proposal that is to be sent to the president by May 31.
    Even the Park Service is having a hard time getting in. The agency apparently had a pretty good list of its own folks it wanted to bring along, but was told it was inviting too many.
    Cynics of the process might wonder why this meeting has been scheduled, and why it's being held in tiny, out-of-the-way Shepherdstown, some two or so hours from D.C.? I mean, the general public was given only a few hours per session to submit its thoughts for how the Park Service's centennial in 2016 should be celebrated, and this week's meeting is slated for two days. And, presumably, behind closed doors.
    Of course, this is only the latest meeting ARC and NPCA have had with Dirk on the centennial. In the past the ARC has sent a delegation to meet with Dirk and Mary, a delegation that included industry chiefs from The Walt Disney Company, The Coleman Company, and park concessionaires.   

    One of the things that strikes me about this entire centennial initiative process is the herky-jerky manner in which it has been conducted. Just look at the chronology:
    * August 2006: Dirk marks the Park Service's 90th birthday in Yellowstone and announces the budding centennial initiative.
     * January 2007: Roughly five months go by after that announcement with no news, and then in mid-January Mary talks about an upcoming listening session tour.
    * February 2007: The president releases his Fiscal 2008 budget proposal, which includes more money for the Park Service and sketches out the $3 billion centennial initiative.
    * March 2007: In mid-month, two months after the listening session tour was first broached publicly and after last-minute scheduling give-and-take, the Park Service announces a series of 16 meetings to be held between March 13 and March 31. Of course, a week earlier Dirk and Mary held their own private listening session with the ARC contingent. Over the ensuing three weeks word gets out in haphazard fashion about many more regional meetings being held by the Park Service. 
    Now, as I understand it, when an individual park gets down to revising its general management plan, the process can take four or five years to complete. And yet this $3 billion centennial initiative process, one that calls for $1 billion in private funding, is being conducted without any apparent hard-and-fast guidelines over a handful of months.
    I'm all for improving the park system, but I'm decidedly leery of this process.