Ocmulgee Mounds Bill Trades Preserve for a Park Title

H.R. 9416 had its first House hearing on July 1, 2026, as Georgia’s bid for a national park. The bill would drop one word, Historical, from Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Macon and leave the boundary where it is.

Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-GA-02) called that a “small, albeit meaningful, step forward.” The step is small on purpose. Earlier drafts that added a river preserve and required co-management with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation ran into the National Park Service’s objection to growing the federal estate. This version is built to clear that objection.

The July Hearing Moved a Thinner Bill

Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA-08) introduced the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park Redesignation Act on June 24, 2026, with 11 Georgia cosponsors. The Subcommittee on Federal Lands took it up at 10 a.m. on July 1 in room 1324 of the Longworth Building, the last item on a seven-bill slate.

Scott told the panel the mounds are “one of the most important cultural landscapes in the Southeast,” and he put them next to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. He also said the text “makes no changes to the park’s boundary” and is a “straightforward next step.” Bishop, speaking days before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, said the country should protect “the stories of the indigenous peoples who lived here long before July 4, 1776.”

Our bill today represents a small, albeit meaningful, step forward that will strengthen Ocmulgee and ensure that its cultural and religious sites are protected now and into the future.

Rep. Sanford Bishop, GA-02, July 1, 2026, House Subcommittee on Federal Lands

He posted the same remarks the afternoon of the hearing.

Today, Congressman Austin Scott (GA-08) and I testified before the U.S. House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands regarding our bipartisan bill, the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park Redesignation Act (H.R. 9416).

As our nation prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday… pic.twitter.com/ihX9EBkxNQ

— Sanford Bishop, Jr. (@SanfordBishop) July 1, 2026

The public argument still sounds like Georgia is about to gain a park from scratch. The site has been in the National Park System since 1936, and it has been a national historical park since 2019. What the July session actually advanced is a rename, plus a short list of tribal and wildlife clauses, of a unit the Park Service already runs.

What H.R. 9416 Would Change on the Ground?

Section 3 of the introduced text redesignates Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park as Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and treats every old reference in federal law and maps as a reference to the new name. The park would still be administered under the general laws that already cover National Park System units. A May 2026 map numbered 363/193026 would be the official sheet, with technical corrections allowed.

Fishing on waters under Interior’s jurisdiction would stay legal under federal and Georgia law. The secretary could close zones for safety or wildlife, but only after consulting the state. The bill says it does not enlarge or shrink Georgia’s authority over fish and wildlife, including on federal land. Hunting, fishing, and trapping on private land inside the mapped area would stay under existing state and federal rules.

HOW THE 2026 BILL DIFFERS FROM EARLIER DRAFTS

Gary Wheat, chief executive of Visit Macon, testified that the name alone would still change the east side of the city. Tracie Revis, chief executive of the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative, told the subcommittee the hearing was “extremely positive” and that redesignation is the hurdle that has to be cleared first, with preserve and co-management talks left for later acts of Congress.

Scott Trimmed the Preserve After Interior Objected

The skinny bill did not appear in a vacuum. Scott and Bishop spent 2025 pushing H.R. 2345, the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve Establishment Act, with Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock carrying S.1131 in the Senate. Those bills would have kept the historical park as the national park piece and added a preserve down the Ocmulgee floodplain through Twiggs and Houston counties, on the order of 25,000 acres in earlier descriptions, with hunting and fishing kept in the preserve.

The Park Service had already flagged that larger map. A 2023 special resource study found a much wider river corridor nationally significant and then said a full taking was not feasible, given private owners and state-managed land. At a December 9, 2025, Senate hearing on S.1131, NPS associate director Mike Caldwell said the agency’s concern was expansion of federal property, not the idea of a park. A House committee memo on the July 1, 2026, hearing states that Scott, working with the Trump administration, then limited the new House bill to a redesignation of the existing park.

That is the bargain. Advocates still talk about Bond Swamp, black bear habitat, and a corridor stretching miles south of Macon. The bill on the table does not add an acre of that. Local groups can keep buying land from willing sellers. Congress is not being asked, in this text, to take it into a new preserve.

133.88 Acres Would Enter Tribal Trust

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, removed from this river in the 1830s and now based in Oklahoma, spent years buying fragments of the old fields back. Older park-and-preserve bills would have made the Nation a full co-manager, sitting on land management and species work, not only on interpretation. Four other NPS units already have some form of co-management. Ocmulgee was being sold as the first such arrangement with a removed tribe that had helped write the bill from the start.

H.R. 9416 does not order that partnership. Section 5 says the secretary may seek memoranda of understanding or other legal agreements with the Nation and other interested tribes on natural and cultural resources. Section 4 keeps ordinary consultation under Executive Order 13175, directs a hiring preference for tribal members “to the maximum extent practicable,” and requires protection of, and access to, sacred and cultural sites for tribes with ancestral ties to the Ocmulgee River corridor.

WHAT THE NATION STILL GETS IN THIS TEXT

• Trust title: On the Nation’s request, the secretary would take 133.88 acres into trust within 180 days, land already held in fee and shown on a June 16, 2026, map as “The Muscogee Creek Nation – Fee.”
• Reservation status: That parcel would become part of the Muscogee Creek Indian Reservation and be run under ordinary trust rules.
• Gaming ban: Class II and class III gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act would be prohibited on that land.
• Optional agreements: Resource pacts with the Nation and other affiliated tribes are allowed, not required, and other tribes that ask for similar deals must be told promptly.

Revis has called the trust piece a win for Indian Country because the Nation had to buy the ground in the first place. It is also a smaller prize than the co-management chair the 2024 and 2025 bills described. The Nation remains the party with the longest claim on the mounds and the least statutory power in the bill that is actually moving.

Macon Is Selling a Park Label to Visitors

The Park Service already counts the mounds as a destination. The Great Temple Mound stands 55 feet, the largest earthwork on the property. An earth lodge used as a Mississippian council chamber still has its original floor, carbon dated to 1015. The park lists 8 miles of trails and more than 2,000 artifacts on display. A 1930s excavation, described as the largest archaeology dig in American history, put more than 800 men on the site and recovered 3 million artifacts. There is no entrance fee.

People still come, just not in Yellowstone numbers. NPS visitor statistics recorded 112,071 recreation visits in 2025, down 21.0% from 2024. Visit Macon’s hearing packet, prepared by Tourism Economics on June 26, 2026, leaned on the name anyway. National parks, in the studies that packet cites, draw more visitors than national historical parks. The Macon numbers attached to redesignation were $206.7 million in additional annual economic activity, more than 2,800 new jobs, and nearly $30 million in new annual tax revenue, described over a 15-year period. A hotel occupation tax that took effect in January 2026 is projected to raise $2.5 million a year for tourism infrastructure, paid by visitors.

THE PARK ON PAPER

• Current size: The July hearing packet described a 3,336-acre historical park on the east bank of the Ocmulgee, at the Fall Line between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.
• 2025 visits: 112,071 recreation visits, a 21.0% drop from 2024, per NPS figures.
• System comparison: Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, itself a 2018 rename of a memorial, remains the smallest national park at 91 acres.
• Macon tax bet: $2.5 million a year in hotel tax is already on the books, before any redesignation.

Those visitor forecasts were written for a brand, not for a new trail system. If Congress only changes the letterhead, Macon still has to fill hotel rooms with people who now skip a historical park they have never heard of. The 2025 slide in visits is the baseline that pitch has to beat.

Congress Already Renamed These Mounds in 2019

The pattern is older than this Congress. Congress first authorized a monument on the Old Ocmulgee Fields in 1934 and pictured about 2,000 acres. By the 1936 presidential proclamation, local buyers had assembled 678 acres. The monument later sat at 702 acres. In 1997 the Park Service named Ocmulgee Old Fields a Traditional Cultural Property, the first such designation east of the Mississippi River.

Scott and Bishop have been rewriting the name and the map since at least 2014. The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed March 12, 2019, turned the monument into Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park and expanded the authorized boundary from 702 acres to 2,800 acres, about 2,100 acres of new ground. On February 9, 2022, 906 acres moved to the Park Service after the Open Space Institute helped block industrial development next to the park. The July 2026 hearing packet then described the unit as 3,336 acres, a later snapshot that includes land added after the 2019 ceiling was set.

THE LONG ROAD TO A SHORTER BILL

1. June 14, 1934: Congress authorizes a monument on the Old Ocmulgee Fields, aiming at about 2,000 acres.
2. December 23, 1936: A presidential proclamation establishes the monument after locals finance 678 acres.
3. March 12, 2019: The Dingell Act redesignates the monument as a national historical park and expands the authorized boundary to 2,800 acres.
4. February 9, 2022: 906 acres transfer to the Park Service.
5. March 25, 2025: Scott, Bishop, Ossoff, and Warnock reintroduce park-and-preserve bills (H.R. 2345 and S.1131).
6. December 9, 2025: The Senate National Parks Subcommittee hears S.1131; NPS objects to expanding the federal estate.
7. June 24, 2026: Scott introduces H.R. 9416 as a redesignation-only bill.
8. July 1, 2026: The House Federal Lands Subcommittee holds the first hearing.

Gateway Arch followed the same legal move in 2018: a famous memorial became a national park by statute, with no change in boundary or mission. Indiana Dunes and White Sands took similar paths. The Ocmulgee file is that play run on a Mississippian mound group that the Park Service says has been lived on for thousands of years, with Mississippian construction around 900 CE, on land the source hearing materials call 12,000 years of continuous habitation and the ancestral homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

The Bill Has Not Had a Markup

Revis left the July session saying bipartisan support was “amazing right now” and that she hoped the bill would pass before the end of the year. Scott said he wanted it on President Trump’s desk. The latest House action is still the July 1 hearing. There has been no subcommittee or full-committee markup on the public record, and no Senate companion that matches this thinner House text has been queued as a substitute for S.1131.

On September 12 and 13, 2026, the park staged its Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. Mvskoke visitors posted from the mounds that week about stomp dance and a return to ancestral land. The gathering happened on a historical park, under a bill that would change the signs and put 133.88 acres in trust, and that still had not been voted out of committee.

If H.R. 9416 becomes law, Georgia will be able to say it has a national park. The preserve, the river miles, and the co-management chair will still be waiting on another bill, in another year, from a Congress that has already been told Interior does not want more land.