State park fight highlights tension between state agency, local power
By Anthony Hennen | The Center Square
(The Center Square) — A fight between Chester County and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources over a state park continued Tuesday — with state legislators forming a firing line.
At issue is the future of Big Elk Creek State Park, a years-long controversy where DCNR created the park in 2022 for “low-impact recreation” but later announced plans to build campsites and RV facilities.
After a public outcry, DCNR officials backed away from development plans, but local residents remain wary of the state’s future plans. The 1,800-acre state park serves as a wildlife corridor and abuts the Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area in Maryland.
“To me and a lot of people in this room today, it appears there is a giant bait-and-switch,” Rep. John Lawrence, R-West Grove, said during a House Policy Committee hearing.
In DCNR’s 2019 announcement that it would acquire almost 1,000 acres for the park, it noted that no recreational facilities were planned or proposed. Not until late 2023 did locals hear of the department’s plans to build camping facilities, a change from low-impact uses.
However, a May 2022 email showed that DCNR had planned to develop the park. State Parks Director John Hallas described “a modern family campground with our full spectrum of site types, and camping cottage colony,” along with a visitor center and a park office, as part of the department’s plans to encourage overnight uses.
Public pushback made DCNR drop its campground plans, but trust in public statements is low.
“(DCNR Secretary Cindy) Dunn did not say a campground is off the table — she said it’s off the table for now,” Lawrence said.
Hallas, appearing before the policy committee, noted the park’s master plan would have the core elements needed for ecological protection, access and use, public safety, and outdoor recreation opportunities.
A testy exchange between Hallas and Rep. Craig Williams, R-Chadds Ford, was over who made the decisions in DCNR. The two argued over calling the park pristine land, the necessity of building park enhancements, and what’s an improvement.
After repeatedly asking who decided to develop the park beyond the original design, and talking over each other, Hallas said the decision was “department leadership (Sec. Dunn as well as myself) and the Wolf administration that provided the resources necessary to improve and enhance the state of the park.”
Hallas argued the improvements were similar to those done in the nearby White Clay Creek Preserve — “Which is why we don’t need it here,” Williams added.
But Hallas also pointed to added pressures on state parks across Pennsylvania — massive increases in visitors thanks to the pandemic, with overcrowding, overuse, public safety issues, and a ballooning $1 billion maintenance backlog of new and deferred projects.
Those considerations have pushed DCNR to look at expanding facilities in other state parks to disperse crowds.
“In our system of state parks, we went up approximately 27% between 2019-2020, we gained over 10 million visits that pandemic year,” Hallas said. “It put tremendous duress and stress on our natural resources and our staff that were dealing with the issues and challenges of heavy visitation.”
Those financial concerns led Rep. Torren Ecker, R-Abbottstown, to question DCNR’s expansion plans in general.
“I live in an area with a lot of state parks and forests. Something that I hear constantly from my folks is a lack of resources,” Ecker said. “Why are we building out new infrastructure, why are we adding to something if we can’t take care of the parks that we have now? Before we’re developing new state parks, we need to take care of what we have already.”
In the Big Elk Creek saga, the divide between DCNR and the public and legislature, as the department saw it, was a problem of what was expected.
“I understand there were expectations from (Rep. Lawrence) and the local community that had a thought of what was going to be there or not be there,” Hallas said. “The improvements to the park, the establishment of the park itself, was opposed to those expectations.”
Lawrence saw the divide differently.
“What’s frustrating to me is that it is not a thought I had — it is what DCNR said on the record, and nobody at the time said anything else,” he said. “There wasn’t a statement from DCNR in 2019 or 2020 that said ‘down the road, we’re thinking about X, Y, and Z here … it makes it difficult to believe anything that’s coming from DCNR.”
Though the fight over a state park in southeast Pennsylvania may seem small, it has statewide implications. As former state senator Andrew Dinniman argued in his testimony, it’s a question of who holds authority and power in Pennsylvania.
“Who runs this commonwealth? Is it the bureaucracy or is it the legislature?” Dinniman said. “The bureaucracy has replaced our elected officials.”
