By scrapping a controversial re-write of National Park Service management policies, the Department of the Interior has returned the agency to its historic role of preserving natural landmarks instead of maximizing their recreational potential. While this is a welcome turnaround, reaffirming the service’s mission without giving it enough resources to fulfill it shortchanges the millions of Americans who visit national parks, including Acadia, each year.

Last year, then Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Paul Hoffman drafted a new management plan for the park service. Most controversially, he wrote that recreation, including motorized vehicle use, should be a core mission. As an example, the draft would have allowed snowmobiles to travel over any paved road in any national park in the winter. The nation’s system of national parks was established to protect wildlife and natural and cultural resources. There is no mandate to provide recreational opportunities.

In announcing this week that the policy changes were being dropped, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne paraphrased the 1916 National Park Service Organic Act, the agency’s long-standing guiding principles. “When there is a conflict between conserving resources unimpaired for future generations and the use of those resources, conservation will predominate,” he said Monday.

The policy unveiled by Mr. Kempthorne retains language about protecting “peace and tranquility” and directs park managers to maintain clean air and water and not to allow activities that degrade park resources.

This return to a proven management policy makes sense. However, if America’s parks are to fulfill their mission of protecting natural resources while accommodating millions of visitors, they need adequate financial resources. According to a recent analysis by the Associated Press, national parks across the country are dealing with budget shortfalls by not maintaining buildings and roads and by laying off rangers. Some are even opening late to save money.

Acadia National Park has received small increases in federal funds in recent years, but they are more than off-set by congressionally mandated increases in pay for federal employees and by rising fuel costs. This year, fewer seasonal employees were hired and 13 permanent positions have been left vacant. Preventative maintenance has been shelved. There has also been no federal money in recent years for the park to buy land that Congress identified 20 years ago as being within Acadia’s boundaries.

President Bush, who has proposed that the government fund only 70 percent of park salaries and utility costs in 2007, has touted private partnerships as a means of boosting parks. Friends of Acadia has been a huge help to Acadia National Park. For example, the group established an endowment to pay for work on the park’s storied carriage roads and on hiking trails. The group, however, shouldn’t be funding basic work needed to maintain federal property.

The park service now knows what its jobs is. Lawmakers should give it the needed resources to do that job.