By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 24, 2007

The plan to replace deteriorating signs on the Mall made the list, as did money for Assateague Island in Maryland and the house in Virginia where Stonewall Jackson's arm is buried.

A sculpture at a sacred site for American Indians in Wyoming made it. So did a plan for a swamp boat in South Carolina. The effort to return trumpeter swans to a park in Arkansas is there, along with a project to bring an endangered turtle back to a Texas seashore.

These and dozens of other projects at parks across the country made the National Park Service's first Centennial "eligibility" list yesterday for potential funding in fiscal 2008. Making the list doesn't guarantee that the projects will go forward, Park Service officials said; Congress must appropriate money. But the list indicates programs that the Park Service says are ready to be launched and have worthy goals and private partners willing to match federal dollars.

The list is the first from the National Park Centennial Initiative, a Bush administration proposal in which $100 million a year in federal money is to be allocated for the park system in the next decade, along with twice that in private donations. The goal is to generate as much as $3 billion by the time the Park Service marks its 100th birthday in 2016.

The money would exceed the Park Service's annual budget of $2.5 billion, officials said. Parks across the country submitted 376 proposals, which officials said were screened at four levels by teams of evaluators.

"We certified only the very best proposals that had engaged a partner committed to providing at least a 50 percent cash match," Park Service Director Mary A. Bomar wrote in a report to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Kempthorne said in a conference call yesterday that he has $301 million in matching pledges, which he said he hopes will induce Congress to do its part.

The proposals were boiled down to those that made the eligibility list -- 201 projects at 116 parks.

A proposal's failure to make the list does not mean that it is dead, officials said. Parks can refine plans and reapply. "This was not a competition that eliminated anyone," Park Service spokesman David Barna said.

Several sites in the Washington area made the list.

The National Mall and Memorial Parks made it with a $2.2 million program for a system of interpretive signs. Many of the current signs are weathered and more than 20 years old. The project's matching partner is the Trust for the National Mall.

National Capital Parks-East, which oversees 13 sites from Capitol Hill to the Maryland suburbs, made the list -- in cooperation with other area parks -- with an $800,000 watershed education program. The Alice Ferguson Foundation is the project's matching partner.

In Maryland, Assateague Island National Seashore made the cut with three conservation and environmental projects totaling $1.29 million.

In Virginia, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial National Military Park landed two projects on the list -- the largest a $496,500 program to restore the first-floor interior of Ellwood Manor. Ellwood is known as the place where the amputated arm of Jackson, a Confederate general, was buried after he was mortally wounded at the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.

Projects on the list from other parts of the country include the $1 million Circle of Sacred Smoke project at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, a granite sculpture commemorating a Lakota Nation legend at a Native American prayer site.

Also on the list are a $22,000 plan for a swamp boat at Congaree National Park in South Carolina, an $8,000 project to return the trumpeter swan to Buffalo National River in Arkansas and a $666,000 effort to return the endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle to Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.

"This is the launching of an absolutely new era of revitalization for the national parks," Kempthorne said.

Bomar added: "Shame on us if we can't get this done."