MARYVILLE, Tenn. – With no end in sight to the federal government shutdown, Blount County Mayor Ed Mitchell is offering local resources to keep open parts of the most-visited national park in the country -- though he's having trouble getting the feds to agree.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which serves as a major draw for tourists to this east Tennessee community, has been closed since Oct. 1, when the federal government went into a partial shutdown.
The national park overlaps nearly one-third of Blount County. And it's in that area that Mitchell wants local volunteer firefighters and sheriff's deputies to manage roads and public safety. He said the plan would allow visitors to continue hiking, fishing and sightseeing in the park, at no cost to the federal government.
"We had everything covered," Mitchell said. "We had sat down and we had worked it out to where we could have opened those gates and it could have been business as usual for that area and for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Blount County."
Mitchell outlined his proposal last week in a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. The mayor said he had yet to receive an official answer to his specific request.
