The issue: Maintaining our capital city’s parks is not make-work, it’s necessary, and young people can do it

President Barack Obama’s jobs plan likely will have a significant public works component and that’s all to the good. The problem with government public works spending — roads, bridges, public buildings, water and sewer facilities, and flood control — is that it requires highly skilled labor.

THOSE PROJECTS do not help the young and unskilled. The national youth employment rate in July, typically the peak for youth workforce participation, was 48.8 percent, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in 1948. Presumably, most of the other 51.2 percent would have liked to have had a job too, if only for the summer.

The president is surrounded by a very fast-growing solution to that problem.

The national capital — and, whatever you think of “Washington” in the abstract, it is one of the world’s most beautiful cities — is blessed with a system of gracefully landscaped parkways, gently curving roads whose surroundings also double as parks.

There is the George Washington Parkway on the Virginia side of the Potomac River; its near-twins, the Clara Barton and the Cabin John on the Maryland side; and the rugged Rock Creek, whose often unruly creek flows the length of the District of Columbia before emptying into the Potomac.

Unfortunately, in addition to the many visitors the parks welcome, there are many they do not — nonnative invasive species that are killing the parks’ trees and shrubs by smothering them in unwanted vegetation. Whole trees and power lines have grown into phantasmagorical shapes.

THE PARK SYSTEM lists 42 unwanted species — kudzu, Virginia creeper, wild grape, porcelain berry, oriental bittersweet and the graphically named climbing tear thumb and the mile-a-minute weed, among others.

The National Park Service does not have the manpower or the money in its own budget to take care of the problem. Local conservation and garden clubs periodically try.

Why not turn the problem over to the capital area’s unemployed youths? The job would be demanding but it’s not make-work; it’s vital to the parks’ survival as an urban oasis. Show up and you have a job. And you get paid. Don’t show up and you’re out of a job and a paycheck.

It would underscore the brutal reality of hard times: If you don’t want your job, there are plenty of people who do.

The young workers could earn two essentials in the job market: a work history and a supervisor’s recommendation. And they would learn another workplace truth: It’s always easier to get a job when you already have one.

THE PROGRAM need not be expensive or bureaucratic. The pay should be competitive with fast-food franchises. The fact that someone is willing to do the work is proof enough that they want, and need, the job.

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