Another prominent Washington waterwork, recently renovated under President Donald Trump’s orders to make the nation’s capital “beautiful” again, has turned an unseemly color.
The 13-basin cascading waterfall in Meridian Hill Park, also called Malcolm X Park, turned a brownish color Tuesday, mere weeks after it reopened to fanfare, leaving the National Park Service racing to clean up the water.
Coming on the heels of the troubled renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the fountain’s rusty pipes highlight the challenges and pitfalls in keeping up appearances for the District of Columbia’s aging national park infrastructure. Difficulties persist despite a Trump administration funding blitz to spruce up fountains and repair broken monuments in honor of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.
President Donald Trump, a real estate developer, has taken a keen interest in leaving an architectural legacy in the city, including directing more than $90 million in fees collecting from national parks across the country to rehabilitation projects in the nation’s capital.
The historic spending is advancing projects that have long sat on a deferred maintenance list for national parks that swelled to a $24 billion backlog. But it has also shown the high cost of care for historic properties in the nations’ capitol that fell into disrepair amid funding and staff shortfalls.
“Budget cuts and the push to privatize has reduced the NPS’ ability to do this kind of work,” said Jon Jarvis, who served as director of the National Park Service during the Obama administration. “More money is needed, and it’s up to Congress to increase the funds for the backlog.”
The Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, said Wednesday that the rust-colored water at Meridian was due to sediments released from two water lines that had long been out of service.
“The National Park Service continues to fine tune the fountain’s operations after the reopening of the Meridian Hill Cascading Fountain in May,” the agency said. “We expect the water to once again run clean in the next 24-36 hours.”
Workers with Cascade Fountains were cleaning up the rust-colored water Wednesday morning. A company by that name that’s previously done projects for the National Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Renovations to the Italianate cascades, costing $10.7 million, started in January as part of the National Park Service’s nearly $60 million effort to rehabilitate prominent fountains throughout the city.
The Meridian Hill Park waterfall had been defunct since 2019, when NPS turned it off due to planned upgrades to the park’s lower plaza during Trump’s first term. But the waterwork’s problems had persisted for years before that: It was shut down for weeks in 2016 due to a broken pump motor and in 2018 due to pipe breaks and leaks.
Since May, community members have been taking advantage of the fountain’s reopening to lounge by the water and meet up with friends. Their delight at the reopening was largely unfettered by the fountain’s new tawny hue.
Xavier White, who recently moved back to Washington after a few years away, remembers the fountain’s “changing colors” as a recurring problem before the cascades were shut down in 2019. The fountain was often “rusty brown, close to red” back then, he said.
Regardless, White is happy that the fountain is operational again. “It does suck that it is changing colors, but that’s what happens with temperature fluctuations, algae blooms and other things happen, but … progress is progress, one thing at a time,” he said.
The renovations in Washington have faced a mixed reception from parks groups.
Emily Douce, acting vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, said the fountain repairs are valid projects that were on a backlog of maintenance needs for the region. But the group was also concerned that the administration took millions of dollars from national park fees across the country to fund the repairs.
Ultimately parks need an increase in long-term funding from Congress, so that facilities don’t fall into disrepair and become maintenance challenges, Douce said, something the Trump administration has deprioritized in favor of visitor-facing projects and increased accessibility to parks.
“We want the visitor to have a great experience in these parks and these places, but we want to make sure that the resources are sustained and remain,” she said.
During the first Trump administration, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act, providing $1.9 billion a year for five years to go to public land maintenance. But the backlog GAOA was meant to address has grown from $18 billion in 2020 to roughly $35 billion today.
Jarvis, who disagreed with the Trump administration’s prioritization of Washington projects over the rest of the country, said the maintenance needs at national parks are high, noting that the agency operates more facilities than any other government agency outside the military.
NPS facilities are also old, and many haven’t seen a major investment since the Mission 66 spending effort in the 1960s, he said. Specialized work to repair or maintain old properties is also expensive and parks have lost some of that expertise due to budget and staffing cuts, he said.
“Roughly half of the backlog is roads, thousands of miles of pavement and gravel roads for public access,” he said. “Each year, without annual maintenance, these roads and other facilities decline, and the cost rises to near replacement value.”
An effort to reauthorize the GAOA that could blunt the rising backlog is working its way through Congress.
Burgum said the administration was supportive of that effort in an interview of the Katie Miller Podcast on Tuesday.
“We were looking forward to putting that bill in front of President Trump. When he signs that, then we can get going on doing exactly what we’ve been doing in D.C. across the country,” Burgum said.
Trump officials have proudly touted Trump’s laser focus on cleaning up the District of Columbia, which has been paid for by appropriating roughly $90 million in fees from national parks across the country, according to recent reporting by The Washington Post.
The spending spree followed Trump’s executive order last year directing the park service to remove homeless encampments and graffiti as well as prioritize sprucing up government monuments and buildings.
The agency is currently helmed by its longtime career comptroller, the senior official overseeing the parks finances, Jessica Bowron. The Trump administration advanced park concessionaire Scott Socha as its nominee for the Senate-confirmed director spot, but Socha withdrew his name from consideration earlier this year.
“President Trump has done more to make our nation’s capital a shining beacon than any other president in the history of this country,” the Interior Department said in a statement last month.
Burgum said on the Katie Miller Podcast that the improvements to Washington’s parks emerged out of Trump’s experience as a developer and Burgum’s own interest in historic properties.
“Every time he gets in a car, flies in a helicopter, he spots something,” he said. “We want to be able to fix things and fix them well and fix them faster.”
Burgum has often been the point man carrying out the president’s Washington renovations. It’s a high wire act as the secretary also been the mouthpiece arguing for the administration’s drastic proposed cuts to national park funding including a 40 percent cut to maintenance, while also requesting a $10 billion fund solely for Washington region monuments and repairs.
That District of Columbia fund, which Democrats have panned as a slush fund for Trump’s “vanity projects,” would have totaled more than three times the entire National Park Service budget. It’s also significantly more than the $2 billion backlog that the National Park Service has estimated for the region’s repairs.
Burgum told lawmakers earlier this year that he believed the NPS estimate of maintenance costs was overestimated in much of the country but underestimated for Washington.
In a letter to Burgum last month, Democrats questioned if spending in the district was siphoning off money for projects around the country that were a higher priority.
“Deteriorating roads, water systems, and other park facilities pose safety concerns for visitors and over time degrade the overall park experience,” the lawmakers, led by Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and the ranking member overseeing the National Park Service budget. “The redistribution of revenues to D.C. projects could mean multiple millions of dollars lost for individual national parks around the country.”
The secretary said Tuesday that the Meridian Hill renovation was among his favorites of the projects the Trump administration has tackled in the nation’s capital and is a testament to their successes: “People thought that was like un-repairable.”
