The fall colors have peaked and the elk are bulging in nearby Yellowstone National Park. About 3 million people a year visit Yellowstone. The end of this tourist season gives a reprieve to the park's crumbling infrastructure.

This spring ground water penetrated leaky sewage lines and threatened to overflow a treatment pond. Park crews pumped more than 7 million gallons of treated sewage into a nearby meadow. The Wyoming Dept. of Environmental Quality cited the Park Service for the discharge.

Many of the national parks and monuments suffer from neglect. The system is marked by deteriorating roads, buildings, sewage treatment plants, and unstable ecosystems.

Overcrowding and congestion compound problems More money is not the answer, for the huge bureaucratic overhead absorbs nearly half of the $1.6 billion annual Park Service budget.

This sorry situation is the predictable result of political management. Congress gets more publicity and votes from creating new parks than from prudent management and maintenance. As a result, sensible priorities are ignored as powerful members of Congress earmark funds for questionable pet projects. So Steamtown, a railroad museum in Pennsylvania gets priority over treating sewage in Glacier or Yellowstone National parks. Likewise restoring unused bath houses in Hot Springs, Arkansas, trumps roof repairs and modern fire sprinklers in Independence Hall, America's greatest shrine.

Nation parks are one of America's best ideas. Such places clearly merit preservation--but that implies serious reform. The fundamental problem is not one of bad people but rather institutional arrangements that frustrate good intentions.

There are three way to organize society and generate cooperative behavior. To dispense justice and protect the weak from the strong, government has an important role. For commodities and the provision of commercial services, the market process has no equal. For many other public purposes, for hospitals, schools, research institutes, and parks, non-government endowment boards, have accomplished a great deal and hold great promise.

Endowment boards successfully manage independent schools, hospitals, and museums. Board members have fiduciary responsibility for their organization's mission. In the case of parks, the boards would be charged to prudently manage for highest values: habitat, preservation, recreation, scenery. An endowment board with regional and national members could ensure sensitive stewardship and freedom from shortsighted Congressional politics.

Creating mechanisms for collecting payment from various park beneficiaries is a key step. User fees, gifts from membership organizations, concessionaire contracts, and corporate sponsorships all have potential. Endowment boards generating and managing these funds should foster more support, sensitivity, and responsibility than the current political bureaucracy.

Apart from its novelty, the proposal's main stumbling block is fear of commercialization. As the Olympics have shown us, we should guard against "Disney-fied" parks, no Timex Old Faithful or Rainier Beer Rainier National Park. To succeed the endowment boards must be alert to the threat of crass commercialization.

Here as with other environmental issues, we face trade-offs not perfect solutions. No single set of arrangement is perfect, or even preferable, for all circumstances. However, endowment boards, with their membership drawn from environmental, community, business, and science leaders, have incentives to seek subtle, tasteful sponsorship and wide public support. If trustees fail to honor a binding mandate to foster values specific to each park, then they suffer reputational and other losses. Given the observed trajectory of ecological and infrastructure decline, the threat of commercialization seems less serious than the current slide in services and sustainability.

The endowment idea is gaining acceptance. For example, federal officials recently announced "New England's premier park", Acadia, will become the first national park to have its trails permanently maintained by a private endowment. Tristram and Ruth Colket of Pennsylvania donated $5 million to the new Acadia Trails Forever, a joint restoration project of the National Park Service and the conservation group, Friends of Acadia.

National parks are failing to deliver the quality or stability park-lovers demand. Support and management of our national heritage must come from the people who appreciate and benefit from those parks. When parks must pay their own way through fees and friends, we'll see more responsible stewardship. The parks are too precious for a precarious dependency on politics. It is time to try trusts.