On a hot summer Saturday, the parking lots at the state beaches fill up early. The most popular state park is Popham Beach with close to 190,000 visitors annually. Camden Hills draws the second largest crowd of more than 160,000, followed closely behind by Reid.

People come to Maine’s state parks for the breathtaking views and to dip their toes into the water. What they complain about most are the bathrooms.

“You can’t have 50 or 60 thousand people using vault toilets…and maintain the standard that people expect,” said Tom Morrison, director of the Bureau of Parks and Lands, referring to the situation that now exists at Two Lights Park in Cape Elizabeth. Vault toilets, for the uninitiated, are essentially fancy privies.

Two Lights is getting new flush toilets next year, but that will be about it on the list of $33 million in needed capital improvements at the state’s 33 parks and 12 historic sites because the money simply isn’t there. For the second biennium in a row, capital funds have been stripped away to allow for more urgent needs in other departments. And, like virtually every other department in state government, the parks bureau had its original request for an operating budget cut this year to fill a hole created by rising Medicaid costs and increased aid to local education.

“Education, human services, people who are incarcerated,” get the funding, said Patrick McGowan, commissioner of the Department of Conservation, which includes Parks and Lands.

“We have 2 million customers,” he said, referring to the number of people who visit the state parks annually. “But they want to shoot the goose who has laid golden eggs all over Maine.”

The department is in the process of launching a study through the Margaret Chase Smith Center to show just what economic impact the state parks system has on the tourist economy. It is hoped that such a study will help loosen state purse strings, but in the interim, the bureau is looking for more ways to generate money on its own.

A proposal that’s sure to be controversial when it hits the public’s radar screen is a plan to harvest some timber on state park land to raise $500,000 over the biennium. Cutting would occur on less than 3 percent of the state’s 100,000 acres, Morrison said.

State law allows only “demonstration” forest management projects on park land, so the cutting would be done in conjunction with educating the public about keeping a forest healthy or on undeveloped park land where the cutting would create an access road, trails and some parking visitors could use. Public meetings on the proposal will be scheduled this fall.

“Among a certain segment…this is going to raise eyebrows,” Morrison said, but given the budget cuts, “what would they suggest as an alternative?”

Along with the timber harvesting, the department is raising money by adding power and water hookups to 100 of the 900 campsites the state owns. The state will charge a higher fee – possibly $8 to $10 more – for those hookups and hopes to net $55,000. Fees for using freshwater beaches also have gone up $1 a day, to raise $132,000. The alternative, Morrison said, was to eliminate coast guards at the inland lakes.

The most popular freshwater lake in the state park system is Sebago Lake, drawing around 120,000 visitors annually.

The state also reduced – from 15 to 7 percent – the percentage of fees collected by the state parks that is divided among cities and towns that host the facilities. That means a loss to municipalities of around $230,000.

On the cutting side, the department has decreased holiday pay by $94,000 per year, overtime by $22,000 and capital funds by $389,000.

“We have zero dollars in our budget again for the second biennium for capital,” Morrison said, and money from dedicated accounts that was originally earmarked for making improvements to parkland facilities is going to operating expenses.

The bureau gets between $600,000 and $700,000 from the sale of loon license plates and another $500,000 from a per gallon royalty charged to Nestle’s – the owners of Poland Springs – for the water they pump out of Range Ponds.

“The original concept was they were going to provide us a means to address these capital projects,” Morrison said. “We have had to take those monies and use them for operations and maintenance.”