It’s a complex topic, IMO, and not quite as simple as “it’s a national park, therefore all citizens are entitled to it equally”. National Park designation is a specific act of Congress that alters the allowable land use and management of an area, overriding its previous ownership, usage, and management.
Very often, National Park lands would have been used by the immediate community in different ways, whether for recreation, resource extraction, traditional tribal uses, ranching, private ownership, etc.
Designation will affect the surrounding communities in ways both good and bad. It will increase tourism, for example, while decreasing the ability for locals to easily visit — due to parking, fees, traffic, lotteries, etc. The local community often gets limited to no say in whether their favorite natural area becomes a national park; that’s ultimately up to Congress, and sometimes (often?) it is done against local wishes.
The example I’m most familiar with is the Redwood National & State Parks, which turned some former logging land into a designated national park and in so doing killed the local logging economy in and around the town of Orick, CA. At the time, Congress decided to help that community by providing financial assistance and retraining to laid-off lumber workers. A story about that here: KUOW - The tale of a distressed American town on the doorstep of a natural paradise and a retrospective from the GAO: https://www.gao.gov/assets/hrd-94-16br.pdf
The Indiana Dunes is a more recent example that was formerly a rarely-visited State Park with ample and cheap recreation opportunities for people in Indiana all the way to Chicago. Since its designation as a National Park, visitation has gone up quite a bit, though I moved away from the area right when that happened and I’m not sure how the increased visitation has changed the local community.
Here where I live now, in Central Oregon, the Cascade mountains & lakes (not a National Park but managed recreation areas in National Forest land) have gotten so explosively popular that many local favorite trails that were permit-free with ample parking just a few years ago now operate on a lottery & reservation system. The first year of the switchover was especially stupidly done: all the reservations were made available on the first day, and out-of-area visitors and bots had booked the entire year’s worth of permits within a few hours. The locals were pissed. They thankfully changed the reservation system for the second year onwards, but without weighting for locals, so the displacement effect is still there. Lands previously accessible to local hikers were made more difficult to access by a land use management change not of their doing.
True, it was on NF land so we were all paying for it, but even that alone has local impacts not borne nationally: local jobs, sure, but also less local land to develop or log for private uses. Even today you can still see the “checkerboard” interspersing of private and public lands dating back to the railroad days: Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands - Wikipedia.
I think “throwing the locals a bone” isn’t too much to ask when the federal government basically does something similar to eminent domain, but across hundreds if not thousands of acres, and in one stroke of a pen can completely change the land use of a whole area.
Don’t get me wrong… despite all that I’m still strongly for national parks and other public lands — they were my whole undergrad — but I think there’s a little room for nuance in how we handle local communities left in their wakes, that’s all.