Katherine Wonson
2024 Fitch Mid-Career Fellow
Getting Preservation Maintenance Right in the National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS) cares for over 26,000 heritage assets including some of our nation’s most iconic structures and landscapes. But ineffective maintenance planning for the nation’s largest steward of historic properties is a major heritage preservation problem hiding in plain sight. There is a tendency to celebrate the shared aspiration of effective preservation maintenance planning while glossing over the incongruities around its execution at the operational level. Because Facilities Management and Cultural Resources are distinct divisions at parks – many times even physically separated – the misalignment is not outwardly problematic as both ways of operationalizing maintenance planning can coexist in silos. A forced reckoning and reconciling of terminology, values, goals, and on-the-ground realities would help to expose the best from both strategies to create a shared method for implementing maintenance planning.
This project will explore the parallel universes of preservation maintenance planning in both management divisions; uncover gaps, shortcomings and misalignments between the two; and design a system for more seamlessly integrating the two approaches for improved preservation outcomes.
Preservation battles are won and lost every day through the routine, minute tasks required for proper maintenance of our heritage resources. Yet, so much of the attention goes to the major preservation repairs that result from ignoring maintenance needs. The term ‘preservation maintenance’ is admittedly unexciting to most, but it is critical for the long-term survival of our heritage assets and needs reevaluation by the nation’s lead cultural resources agency.
This project will make a meaningful contribution to the professional field of historic preservation in the United States by moving the conversation around preservation maintenance from one of high-level shared niceties to one of actual shared execution in the NPS. I will develop a model for preservation maintenance planning that leverages the systematic approach that facility management relies upon and combines it with asset-specific data from invaluable historic resource documents. The result of this fellowship will be an actionable plan to combine the two approaches and a training curriculum to help disseminate those best practices within our nation’s lead cultural resource management agency.