A Conversation With the Smokies Superintendent

Cassius Cash has been superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since February 2015. Charged with guiding park policy and management, Cash has led the park through a period of unprecedented growth; annual visitation surged 28% between 2014 and 2022. During that time, Cash and his team have searched for solutions to skyrocketing popularity and stagnant funding—including the Park it Forward program that launched in March.

What is Park it Forward?

Park it Forward was generated out of an observation that for the past 10 years, from 2011 to 2021, our visitation has gone up over 57%. That’s pretty huge. Even as those numbers were going up, we noticed that our budgets were not doing the same. And so it really put us at a crossroad. In order to make sure this resource is around for future generations, we had to do something different. We came up with the Park it Forward program that now will require as of March 1 for visitors parking in designated spots more than 15 minutes to have a parking tag of some sort. You have the option of being able to buy a daily tag, a weekly tag, and an annual tag. The daily tag is $5, and the weekly for up to seven days is $15, and the annual tag is $40.

At what point after your arrival in 2015 did you decide that the park needed another source of revenue to continue fulfilling its mission?

It doesn’t take you long when you’ve been in this business to understand some of the challenges, and coming upon the Smokies it was definitely noticed immediately. This is not a new challenge. When you go in our archives, you will see some of my predecessors talk about the same issues. You can go back and trace that the staffing and underfunding was an issue in the Smokies way before my tenure here. We over the years have had to develop Band-Aids of trying to keep the ship afloat, if you will—cutting some positions here, cutting some programs there. So when you stitch all those things together over the years, like we have, we’ve come to a point now that we’re at a crossroads and we really had to think about future generations. And Band-Aiding from year to year is not a sustainable business practice. This resource is too precious to use hope as a strategy, to put my successors in a position they have to hope that they can carry us through.

How much annual revenue does the park expect to collect from the program, and how will it be used?

There’s a 40% gap in funding that we need in order to carry out our mission competently. Park it Forward is helping us fill that gap. Our fiscal year is Oct. 1 to Sept. 31—we predict in this first year, and we’re starting in March, that it should bring in over $5 million. Those dollars would be put towards trail maintenance, more employees to keep toilets clean, more employees to pick up trash, more law enforcement ranks to ensure that visitors have a safe experience, also to be able to respond in an efficient way to search and rescues or accidents. I foresee it being around $8-$10 million on average annual income from Park it Forward. There were also fee increases for our backcountry and campgrounds. When you look at the totality of those increases we could be easily talking about $12-$14 million annually coming in from all the fee sources that goes back into these services that visitors are enjoying.

As you look past implementation of Park it Forward toward the park’s future, what issues—and potential solutions—are top of mind?

We want to make sure that this historic program that we put in place is going to have the impact that I desired when we put this forward. So I think looking two or three years out, that’s going to be the focus. We’ve been working on things below sea level while we’ve been dealing with Park it Forward, about how can we have a better experience at Cades Cove. It shouldn’t take you three hours, four hours driving around an 11-mile loop. Traffic congestion is a huge issue. We will look at places like that—Laurel Falls, Alum Cave. That’s going to be the next chapter. But we want to be as measured in those efforts as we feel that we have been with what we’ve done to this point.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more information about Park it Forward, visit nps.gov/grsm/planyourvisit/fees.htm.