On June 26, 2026, the National Park Service (NPS) officially invited the public to celebrate July 4th at Anacostia Park, “a vibrant community gathering space along the Anacostia River with expansive, open-air views of Washington’s July 4 fireworks,” the press release said. Moreover, the agency promised a fireworks display on the water itself, a first, as part of the semiquincentennial.

“Anacostia Park is one of Washington’s most beloved community spaces,” said Jessica Bowron, an NPS comptroller. “We’re proud to welcome neighbors and visitors from across the region to share in this July 4 tradition along the river.”

Imagine the excitement of Ward 7 and 8 residents, who for the first time would not have to trek across the city to the National Mall to celebrate the national birthday. The reality proved disappointing.

“Unlike across the (Anacostia) River, there was no free water, no water stations or anything provided for the public within the entire footprint from Nicholson Street over to Marion Barry Avenue,” wrote Tom Donohue, commissioner of Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 8A01 in a blog post. “Even the park’s permanent infrastructure failed our community; the existing outdoor water dispenser wasn’t working at all,” Donohue observed scathingly.

Donohue’s single member district covers the Fairlawn and Anacostia neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River in Ward 8, where the fireworks display was held in front of the National Park Police headquarters.

The few families attending struggled to the display along muddy, unilluminated paths. Much of the waterfront was fenced off, including the park’s popular bike trail. In contrast, just a few miles to the west on the National Mall, NPS rolled out the proverbial red carpet for attendees.

July 4th was yet another example of the Park Service’s many broken promises regarding Anacostia Park, whose basic facilities remain in disrepair.

Anacostia Park

Anacostia Park is the second-largest federal park in the DC park system after Rock Creek Park. Administered by NPS, it covers more than 1,200 acres. Divided into C, D, E and F sections, it stretches from the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in the south to Benning Road in the north. It was established on reclaimed mudflats in 1918 and hugs the shoreline of the Anacostia River for five miles.

The National Park Police headquarters and the offices of National Capital Parks-East (NACE), an administrative division of the NPS, are located in Anacostia Park Section C. NACE manages over 8,000 acres of parks and historic sites in both DC and Maryland.

Anacostia Park Sections D, E and F include:

• The Pirate Ship Playground

• The Anacostia Park skating pavilion, built in 1976

• River Terrace Park

Collectively, Anacostia Park serves over 155,000 residents of Wards 7 and 8 and, according to the nonprofit Anacostia Park advocacy group Friends of Anacostia Park, also welcomes more than 1.7 million visitors annually from across the city and the country.

Despite this, Anacostia Park’s facilities are decaying due to decades of deferred maintenance ‒ an accumulated $524 million in deferred maintenance and repairs across all NACE facilities, including Anacostia and River Terrace parks, according to an NPS infrastructure fact sheet published in 2025. Playground equipment is outdated and unsafe, toilets and lights are broken, gazebos leak, road and trail surfaces are crumbling, picnic tables are burned from discarded grill coals, and water dispensers, like the one pointed out by Donohue in his blog post, are often rusted and inoperable.

“We are intentional in our investments in parks east of the Anacostia River and committed to listening to park neighbors, engaging with communities and fostering vibrant and accessible parks,” stated Tara D. Morrison, National Capital Parks-East superintendent in a January 2025 NACE press release. “These efforts improve park amenities and strengthen the bonds we share with the community, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy their neighborhood national parks.” 

Despite Morrison’s claim, in River Terrace Park (this writer’s neighborhood) the single gazebo is slowly collapsing. Unstable flooring, missing roof shingles, chipped concrete and exposed electrical wiring are risks navigated for years by families who gather in the park weekly to celebrate reunions and birthdays.

The Promise

In February 2024, NACE leadership invited residents from across Northeast and Southeast DC to attend community engagement sessions intended to gather feedback for upgrades, repairs and improvements to Anacostia and River Terrace Park, in addition to 12 other NACE sites across Southeast and Northeast DC.

The federal Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF) allocated funds for repairs and upgrades, Superintendent Morrison explained to residents at the Langston Golf Course Clubhouse. Passed in 2020, the GAOA LRF, a bipartisan-backed law, allocated $1.9 billion over five years (2021 to 2025) to address deferred maintenance backlogs in national parks across the continental US and its territories. At the time of writing, over 396 projects have been funded, according to the Department of the Interior GAOA website.

The GAOA LRF would provide $11.8 million to address the backlog of deferred maintenance and repair across NACE-managed sites, according to an agency press release issued on June 6, 2023. Due to the extensive scope of work across 12 other sites, including River Terrace Park, Kenilworth Park, Fort Davis Park, Fort Dupont Park and the Parklands area of Shepherd Parkway, NACE would draw an additional $22,217,000 from the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund to rehabilitate urban recreation areas, according to a 2026 Department of the Interior fact sheet.

River Terrace residents present at the engagement session were cautiously optimistic about this news. Rusty playground equipment would be replaced, NPS representatives confirmed. Tennis courts would have their nets fixed and surfaces repaved. Fencing and lighting would be repaired and the brittle, sun-scorched playground equipment would be replaced.

NACE leaders promised to repair facilities but warned that no interim maintenance of damaged park facilities would occur until contractors had been procured. With funds drawn in FY 2024, the work would commence in late 2025 or early 2026.

It’s been over two years since the Langston Golf Course Clubhouse community engagement session, and there is no sign of the promised work being started, let alone completed. In the interim, and at breakneck speed, NPS awarded a no-bid contract for maintenance work on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and the Department of the Interior spent over $5 million on regilding James Earle Fraser’s arts of peace and arts of war statues on Lincoln Memorial Circle.

The repairs and maintenance that residents using parks east of the Anacostia River were promised two years ago are not happening in their neighborhoods but appear to be taking place in record time in parks across the rest of the city. According to a post on the Department of the Interior’s X (formerly Twitter) page in May, NPS staff had replaced over 1,000 benches across the National Mall and other NPS-managed land. The White House boasted that more than 20 fountains and 30 statues, in addition to 130 new trash cans, had been repaired, renovated or installed as part of President Trump’s Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful Act.

While a gargantuan, federally funded makeover of NPS land is underway using taxpayer money, it appears that parks east of the Anacostia River are being overlooked. For residents in Wards 7 and 8 it feels like a slap in the face.

Neighbors’ Frustrations

“I can’t even keep track of the conversations I’ve had and the people I’ve talked to, how many times I’ve been told it’s a priority,” said Devon Brophy, a River Terrace resident and chair of the River Terrace Community Organization’s (RTCO) Environmental Committee. Brophy also attended NACE’S community engagement session in February 2024.

River Terrace Park is less than a 10-minute walk from Brophy’s front door. As a practicing architect, Brophy has offered NPS ideas to improve River Terrace Park. She has documented the dilapidated condition of the picnic tables dotted throughout the park, many of which have been damaged by fire, and has sent this documentation to NACE chief of staff Michael Donato. Brophy has scores of emails that record six years of conversations.

At monthly RTCO community meetings (at which this writer was present) neighbors shared concerns about the park and NACE leadership’s lack of communication. They wanted to know when the long-promised work would take place.

Brophy recalls being told at the Langston meeting that the upgrades would kick off late 2025, early 2026. “I’m thinking that a project doesn’t take that long to get funded and it doesn’t take that long to design.”

As a contractor for federally financed projects, Brophy knows how long procurement and contracting can take when working through the federal government’s complex administrative systems. The recent news about warp-speed repairs and upgrades to western federal District parks has left her feeling angry and hopeless.

What Happened?

Searches on http://www.usaspending.gov and http://www.openomb.org for GAOA LRF spending for FY 2020 to FY 2025 yield scant detail on the use of this funding in and around parks east of the Anacostia River. An NPS FY 2024 Budget Justification Data Sheet lists just $46,327 spent in FY 2024 on the Rehabilitate Urban Recreation Areas project, a program aimed at addressing deferred maintenance across 12 NACE sites using money from the GAOA LRF.

At the time of writing, the GAOA LRF project tracking website lists the status of work on NACE facilities as “under procurement.” Of the original $11.8 million, only 38% has been allocated, predominantly for the planning, design and approval required for work on federal land, said Sharon E. Nichols, director of communications for Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). The remaining 62% is unobligated and can be used in FY 2026-27, Nichols confirmed.

Updates from NACE leadership on the progress of GAOA LRF-funded work have been difficult to obtain. “The Great American Outdoors Act-funded project to improve River Terrace Park will likely not see construction begin in the next couple of years. In the meantime, our maintenance team is working to address the work,” NACE chief of staff Donato stated in recent email correspondence with the RTCO’s environmental committee.

Stonewalling?

According to an NPS spokesperson, in response to a request for comment, “The design and planning of the River Terrace and Anacostia Parks project is ongoing. It is the priority of the National Park Service to ensure that stewardship of public lands is fiscally responsible and meets the public’s needs.”

In late June, this writer filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of the Interior regarding the use of GAOA LRF funds for deferred maintenance and repair at Anacostia and River Terrace Parks for FY 2024-25. The FOIA included a request for any documentation indicating that these funds were reallocated to other uses, which many River Terrace residents suspect.

No such records were available, the department responded. Future communications should be directed to the NPS, the department confirmed. NPS’s FOIA office subsequently redirected queries back to the department. Tammy Stidham, the NPS associate regional director for lands and planning, declined to be interviewed for this story. Why the stonewalling?

According to Scott Kratz, the founding director of the 11th Street Bridge Park and president and CEO of Building Bridges Across the River (BBAR), “Over the past several years, NACE has led a community engagement effort to rethink Anacostia Park, and it got some money to start doing some of that work. It wasn’t an insignificant amount. I don’t know where that money is and I don’t know what happened to the plans that came out of that community engagement.”  He added, “They had amazing plans. I imagine everyone’s kind of in defensive mode. Candidly, my assumption is that everyone is just crouched down.”

Was the Money Redirected?

Edward Stierli, the mid-Atlantic regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), whose organization played an outsized role in the passage of the GAOA in 2020, cited “a lack of transparency related to the funding for new construction projects underway in DC.” Stierli is hesitant to speculate on any reallocation of GAOA LRF funds from Anacostia Park to projects elsewhere in the city. “I think it’s a question that needs congressional oversight and a clear explanation for taxpayers and residents in Anacostia,” he said.

Given the start of construction on President Trump’s many vanity projects, such as the West Potomac Golf Course and the Garden of American Heroes, the source of their funding is a fair question, Stierli said. As is the status of deferred maintenance and repair across parks east of the Anacostia River.

Glimmerings of Hope

River Terrace residents have noticed sporadic repairs being made by NACE staff in their park over the last few months. The gaping hole at the bottom of the kids’ slide was repaired, and Cherry Pickers arrived at the basketball courts to fix burned-out floodlights.

In May, a maintenance worker arrived at the gazebo in River Terrace Park to replace missing roof shingles but quickly left after telling a local resident that the structure’s age and condition necessitated specialized attention.

Over in Anacostia Park, NPS workers were spotted repainting lampposts. NPS recently contracted to renovate the concessions facilities at the skating pavilion. The award carried no confirmation of start or completion dates.

While residents who use the beautiful green spaces east of the Anacostia River are happy to see progress, none of this work resembles the grand vision NPS outlined in its community engagement sessions more than four years ago.

“They talked a big game,” Brophy says of the meeting. “I was skeptical. The GAOA funding was fantastic, but NPS needed to do something with it.”

Matthew McClure is a resident of River Terrace in Ward 7. This article was supported by a grant from Spotlight DC: Capitol City Fund for Investigative Journalism. Spotlight DC encourages the submission for proposals by independent journalists. For more information, visit www.spotlightdc.org.

NOTES:

Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana) introduced the America the Beautiful Act last May. The act would extend and expand the National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund for eight years, with $2 billion in annual funding. The act is pending passage in the Senate.

To read ANC Commissioner Tom Donohue’s blog, visit www.anc8a01.com/blog/broken-promises-and-pitch-black-paths-what-went-wrong-at-the-anacostia-park-fireworks.

For more information on GAOA, visit www.doi.gov/gaoa-project-data.

The National-Capital-Parks-East-Deferred-Maintenance-and-Repairs-Factsheet is available at www.nps.gov/subjects/infrastructure/upload/National-Capital-Parks-East-Deferred-Maintenance-and-Repairs-Factsheet.pdf.

For information about Rehabilitate Urban Recreation Areas, visit www.doi.gov/gaoa-lrf-projects-action.

The NPS project page for Anacostia Park is available at www.nps.gov/nace/learn/news/restoring-recreation-areas.htm.

The NPS FY 2025 Budget Justification Project Data Sheet is available at www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/fy2024-pds-nps-508.pdf.

The NPS June 6, 2023, press release can be found at www.nps.gov/nace/learn/news/national-park-service-expected-to-receive-more-than-11-million-to-improve-parks-in-southeast-washington-d-c.htm.

For information on the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund, visit www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2026-04/washington-dc-gaoa-factsheet-2026.pdf.