News Release

2018 Economic Benefits to Death Valley's Local Communities

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Visitors walking to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park.

News Release Date: May 24, 2019
Contact: Patrick Taylor, 760-786-3279
Contact: Abby Wines, 760-786-3221

DEATH VALLEY, CA – A new National Park Service (NPS) report shows that 1,678,000 visitors came to Death Valley National Park in 2018 and spent over $140 million in Inyo County and Southern Nevada communities. Despite the partial government shutdown over the December holidays, those numbers are both records and up from 1,294,000 visitors spending $107 million the previous year. That spending supported over 1,700 jobs in the local area.

“Visitors come to Death Valley from around the world and most of them stop in communities around the park to purchase food, fuel and lodging. In fact, every $1 invested in the National Park Service is returned 10 fold to the economy” said Superintendent Mike Reynolds. “Tourism is a key component of the southern Nevada and Inyo County, California economies and I’m proud Death Valley visitors, as well as staff, play a role in sustaining these communities.”

The peer-reviewed visitor spending analysis was conducted by economists Catherine Cullinane Thomas and Egan Cornachione of the U.S. Geological Survey and Lynne Koontz of the National Park Service. The report shows $20.2 billion of direct spending by more than 318 million park visitors in communities within 60 miles of a national park. This spending supported 329,000 jobs nationally; 268,000 of those jobs are found in these gateway communities. The cumulative benefit to the U.S. economy was $40.1 billion.

Report authors also produce an interactive tool that enables users to explore visitor spending, jobs, labor income, value added, and output effects by sector for national, state, and local economies. Users can also view year-by-year trend data. The interactive tool and report are available at the NPS Social Science Program webpage: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/vse.htm.
 

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