She's been in 48 out of 49 state parks. Now Nita Settina runs all of them.
Settina, who turns 44 next weekend, was picked last week to be the Maryland Parks Service superintendent, the first woman to oversee 134,000 acres of public land from Deep Creek Lake to Assateague beach at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
A mountain biker, paddler, hiker, angler and backpacker, Settina knows a lot about the territory. And as a 15-year veteran of the Department of Natural Resources, she is no stranger to the challenges facing parks and their employees.
Those problems were spelled out in a report released in November that said that after years of low budgets, state parks are "in a state of crisis."
In response, the O'Malley administration pledged an infusion of $21 million in Program Open Space money, with the first $4.2 million installment due in the Fiscal Year 2009 budget.
"I feel like we are turning the corner on a lot of this," she said in an interview shortly after the appointment was announced by DNR Secretary John Griffin.
When she entered Penn State, Settina aspired to a career making environmental documentaries for National Geographic. But the reality of spending years learning the craft while shooting industrial films left her cold.
She decided to pursue her love of the outdoors, and from that point on, her resume "became a tangled mess," she said, laughing.
She worked as a lobbyist for the Sierra Club and for four years at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. From there, she moved to DNR, where her most recent post was as executive director of the Maryland Conservation Corps, which employs kids to assist with conservation and environmental-education programs at state parks.
One of her priorities is improving the park experience for repeat visitors and making the facilities enticing to nonusers.
State parks attract more than 11 million visitors annually despite having some of the highest user fees in the country. The state Department of Business and Economic Development estimates that visitors to state parks and campgrounds each year spend more than $139 million and generate $13.5 million in tax revenue.
But general funds from the state budget have dropped from $28.9 million in 2002 to $14 million. The number of full-time employees has declined 25 percent over the same period.
