CONTROVERSIAL MONUMENT TUNNEL NONE OF PUBLIC'S BUSINESS, PARK SERVICE SAYS

WASHINGTON, April 29, 2003 - The National Coalition to Save Our Mall has asked Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton to block consideration of a controversial plan to build a tunnel and walled walkways around the Washington Monument.

The National Park Service is insisting the National Capital Planning Commission give preliminary approval at its May 1 meeting to the Park Service plan to expand the monument lodge at 15th Street and link it to a 500-foot-long tunnel through which visitors would enter the Monument.

"The National Park Service is rushing headlong with an ill-conceived plan that will do nothing to improve security, that will deface rather than enhance the Monument and ruin visitors' experience of looking out across the Mall as they ascend to the Monument's front door, as they have done for more than 100 years," said Judy Feldman, Chairman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall.

"The Park Service has refused to examine viable alternatives to its wasteful and destructive plan, has spent millions of dollars before a single spade of dirt is turned and has shut the public out of the process," Feldman said.

The coalition sent an 18-page letter to Norton April 24 listing deficiencies in the Park Service's proposal and formally asking that it be removed from the agenda.

The group advocates either screening visitors at the Monument entrance or at a remote location such as the nearby American History Museum. Either of these plans could provide immediate protection at less cost and with much less destruction of the Monument, Feldman said.

"More significantly, the Park Service needs to abandon its piecemeal approach to security. Instead of a tunnel here, Jersey barriers there, underground holding rooms somewhere else, there should be a unified plan for the entire Mall, one that preserves its historic open spaces which are the very reason for its existence," Feldman said.

"A simple perimeter retaining wall, like those in use at the Capitol, or a combination of walls and bollards at street level, could provide all the security the Mall will ever need - faster and at much less cost than the grandiose, jury-rigged schemes the Park Service seems determined to impose," she said.

More than a year after the Park Service first unveiled its proposal, it has now proclaimed it will not permit public review of its plans for an underground visitor's center and a tunnel., Feldman said.

In an April 15th letter to the Coalition, John Parsons, Associate Regional Director of the Park Service's National Capitol Region said, "the details are security-sensitive and will not be made available for public review."

"We have been misled for more than 16 months," Feldman said. "Contrary to what Parsons is now saying, this is the first time we have heard that no details of the proposed tunnel will be made public."

"The Park Service is violating the spirit and letter of the law when it simply declares by fiat that it alone will decide what the taxpayer is and is not competent to review," she said.

Feldman's group is among a number of organizations that have opposed the Park Service plan to herd Washington Monument visitors into a maze of tunnels and walkways. The Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a citizens planning and preservation group, has also argued against the tunnel plan.

"(Visitors) currently enjoy a breathtaking view of the city while they wait, outdoors, around the base of the Monument. In the future, they will wait inside and then be herded through a tunnel," the Committee said in a prepared press release.

The National Coalition to Save Our Mall, which fought a long-running battle against locating the World War II Memorial on the main axis of the Mall, says the Park Service plan is faulty on many counts:

It threatens rather than protects the Monument. "The Washington Monument's walls are made of 15-foot-thick stone masonry. It is not a likely bombing target. Its foundation, however, is vulnerable to being undermined by ill-conceived, hastily-planned underground construction on the Mall."
Far from protecting visitors, the tunnel would expose them to more severe injuries if a small blast were set off and would make it much more difficult for them to escape if armed terrorists somehow invaded the structure.
"The Park Service's proposal is a 30-year-old visitor's center plan that Congress never funded. Now the Park Service is trying to retrofit it as a security measure and is ramming it through and telling the public to get lost," Feldman said.

"The National Park Service, the agency charged as the Mall's steward, doesn't even seem to know what the Mall is all about," Feldman said.

"If it won't consult the history books, the Park Service could at least read the newspaper," Feldman said, citing a recent Los Angeles Times story on the controversies swirling around the Mall.

"The sublime emptiness of Washington's national Mall stands for nothing less than democracy. If the nation's politicians won't protect it, the public must," Christopher Knight of the Times wrote in the newspaper's April 20, 2003 edition.

The National Coalition to Save Our Mall was founded as a coalition of professional and civic organizations and other concerned artists, historians, and citizens in the spring of 2000 to provide a national constituency dedicated to the protection and preservation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation in the spring of 2003.

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Resources
National Coalition to Save Our Mall - www.savethemall.org
National Capitol Planning Commission - www.ncpc.gov
Committee of 100 - www.committeeof100.net
National Park Service -- www.nps.gov

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