A centralized state park authority gave disparate park interests one louder funding voice

Evidence

Moses, not interested in parks, had given the report scant attention, anyway. But now he asked the philanthropists to complete the study under the aegis of the New York State Association. He toured their parks with them, urged them to make recommendations for their development, delicately urged the more conservative of them to think in terms of improved roads and enlarged accommodations. And he urged them to start thinking in terms of a unified state park system that would be a formal part of state government. They need not worry about losing control of their beloved parks to faceless bureaucrats in Albany, he assured them; control of each park could be left in the hands of the men then administering it, and to insure that future appointments to the commissions would not become involved in politics, the commissionerships could be unpaid jobs. But if there was a single state body controlling parks, the demands for funds from the different sources interested in parks could be funneled into it and focused, so as to put more heat on the Legislature. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 731

Categorization

• XREF: Caro’s familiar Moses pattern of consolidating diffuse power centers into one controllable agency, recalling his earlier consolidation moves described throughout the biography. — connects to: Landowners’ resistance made large regional parks seem financially and legally impossible — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 691; Fragmented private park administration made the legislature unwilling to fund them. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 729; In the 1920s most U.S. states lacked a single state park — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 58
• DEFINE: Shows the tactical rationale behind Moses building a unified state body: concentrated political pressure beats fragmented requests.