Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and the Republican nominee for governor, has been thinking about national parks. Sources familiar with Blakeman’s thinking told The City Politic that he has floated national park status for the Adirondacks and Fire Island, and that he wants three things from it: the federal park ranger jobs, more tourist traffic, and investment in visitor improvements.
It is a jobs-and-tourism idea in hiking boots, and it surfaces nine days before the Nov. 3 election, in which Blakeman and his running mate, Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood, are trying to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul. It does not appear among the statements on his campaign’s press page, which run heavily to taxes, utility bills and crime. Taken seriously, as it deserves to be, the idea runs into two very different problems, one on each end of the state.
Fire Island already has a federal landlord
Washington arrived on Fire Island long ago. Congress created Fire Island National Seashore on Sept. 11, 1964, under Public Law 88-587, and the National Park Service has managed it ever since: a 26-mile patchwork of federal beach and locally governed summer communities, plus the William Floyd Estate, added in 1965, and the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness, New York’s only federally designated wilderness. (All of it lies in Suffolk County, not Blakeman’s Nassau.)
So on Fire Island the realistic version of the idea is a promotion, from national seashore to national park, and that has been done before. Congress turned Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore into a national park in 2019 and New River Gorge National River into one in 2020, each by statute. The title is the point. According to the Park Service’s 2024 visitor spending report, Fire Island drew 303,731 recreation visits that year, and visitors spent about $16.1 million nearby, supporting an estimated 122 jobs. Those are modest numbers for a barrier island on the doorstep of the country’s largest metropolitan area, and that gap is what the rebranding bet is about.
The Adirondacks are the harder sell
The Adirondack Park is a state creation, established by New York in 1892. Its roughly six million acres make it larger than Yellowstone, the Everglades, Glacier and Grand Canyon combined. Nearly half is state-owned Forest Preserve, and the rest is private: towns, farms, timberlands, camps, and about 123,000 year-round residents in 101 towns and villages. Since 1971 the Adirondack Park Agency has regulated development on both.
The Forest Preserve is protected by the “forever wild” clause, Article XIV of the state constitution, which bars those lands from being “leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private.” Turning any of it into a federal park would likely require two things: an act of Congress, and a constitutional amendment passed by two separately elected Legislatures and then approved by the voters. The private half of the park raises its own problems. The government would have to buy land, draw boundaries around communities, or both, in a region whose towns already live under one layer of state land-use rules.
Albany has heard this pitch before. In 1967 Laurance Rockefeller, then chairman of the State Council of Parks and brother of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, released a report by a former Park Service director, Conrad Wirth, proposing a 1.72-million-acre Adirondack Mountains National Park. Its selling points will sound familiar: state employees moving onto the federal payroll, capital improvements, and a projected tripling of visitor spending. The plan was dead by the end of that year. The fight over it helped lead to the creation of the Park Agency.
The federal weather
The money case is real. In 2024 the Park System logged 331.9 million recreation visits, and visitors spent $29.0 billion in nearby communities, supporting some 340,100 jobs, according to the Park Service. Park sites in New York State alone drew 18.7 million visits and $876.7 million in spending.
Rangers, though, are scarce right now. The National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, reported that the Park Service lost 24 percent of its permanent staff in the first half of 2025. The administration’s fiscal 2026 budget sought a $900 million cut to park operations and proposed turning some sites over to the states. Congress rejected the cuts in January and held operations flat at $2.88 billion. A Republican candidate who wants more federal rangers in New York would be asking Washington to go the other way.
Theater, and substance
There is an obvious bit of stagecraft in a Long Island Republican, running on fiscal restraint, imagining flat-brimmed ranger hats in the High Peaks. But the instinct is a governor’s instinct: find federal money, put it in places that need visitors, and let someone else pay the rangers. The test is execution. On Fire Island that means a bill and a sponsor in the Long Island delegation. In the Adirondacks it means a constitutional amendment, a deal with the region’s towns, and a better answer than Laurance Rockefeller had in 1967.
Featured image: Bruce Blakeman in 2023. Photo by Arthur Raslich via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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