Our national parks are 'America's best idea.' Firing 1,000 employees isn't. | Opinion
National park advocates worry that the firings will affect operating hours, programs, maintenance and simply protecting places from Acadia to Zion.
This typically is a busy month at Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, Florida.
It’s a beautiful and fitting time to visit this piece of our National Park System on the northern tip of Fort George Island, with a dirt road leading through a canopy of moss-draped oaks to a semicircle of tabby slave cabins and the oldest still-standing plantation house in Florida.
“We love to go out there,” said Linda Bremer, who lives in Riverside. “It’s a beautiful area and so full of history.”
But on Feb. 15, when Bremer and her husband took a friend who had never been to that part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, they pulled up and found a closed gate.
The sign said they were there during normal hours.
“So we're just standing there, wondering what to do, and another car pulls up behind us, and then another, and the people get out, and they're looking at it, too,” she said. “Eventually maybe eight to 10 cars pulled up behind us, and people were just wondering, ‘What in the heck?’ ”
One of them wondered: Is this related to what is happening in Washington, D.C., and, in particular, what had happened the previous day around the country?
On Feb. 14, the Trump administration fired about 1,000 National Park Service probationary employees.
This sparked staffing problems over the weekend at national parks across America. The Washington Post reported that at the Grand Canyon, after four of the employees who worked the main entrance were fired, visitors waited 90 minutes just to enter the park. At Gettysburg National Military Park, where the layoffs gutted a team that handled the rental of historic farmhouses, visitors were notified that their reservations had been canceled indefinitely.
"The firings add to persistent staffing challenges at the Park Service, whose workforce has declined by 15 percent since 2010, according to federal data," according to The Post. "Over that same period, the data shows, park visitation has increased by 16 percent."
Now this.
Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, a group that advocates for the parks, said “cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities.”
While much of the attention has focused on what this could mean for places like Acadia or Yosemite, particularly during the chaotic summer months, it has an impact across 433 NPS sites. Yes, including the one in our backyard.
Dream job for 'national park geek'
Susan Blanchard, a park guide, was one of the 1,000 employees who got an email on Valentine’s Day evening. She said she was one of five Timucuan employees on the list. She also said being a park guide was kind of a dream job for her.
“I am a self-proclaimed national park geek,” Blanchard said.
Blanchard, 61, has fond childhood memories of her father taking their family on trips to national parks all over the country. She did the same for her children.
She had spent 16 years as an elementary school teacher but was ready for a change when her daughter pointed out a job with the Jacksonville parks. She spent about nine months part-time at Huguenot Park, then more than five years full-time at Hanna Park. And when her husband pointed out a park service job in the Timucuan Preserve, she figured why not. Maybe her experience, between teaching and working in parks, gave her a shot.
“I had never even considered I could be a park ranger because they were so special,” Blanchard said.
So she was excited when she started as a park guide last September. She was enjoying the job, talking to people, telling them about the park. She was scheduled to work at Fort Caroline National Memorial last Saturday. The night before, she got the termination letter, via email from the Department of the Interior. She said another employee, who was hired the same time as her and was scheduled to be at Kingsley Plantation that Saturday, also was among those fired.
Beyond losing her job, part of what bothered her – and has bothered many others who have spoken publicly since being fired – was the reason given in the letter: “The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs.”
“Everybody got a letter that sounded like that: because you're not good enough, we're letting you go,” Blanchard said. “And of course, that's not true.”
Blanchard said she was willing to speak publicly, partly because she knows younger employees, hoping to have a long career with the park service, can’t easily do so: “I don't have anything to lose – What are they going to do, fire me? – but I sure as heck want to fight for all these other people, and I want to fight for the park.”
It should be noted parks across the country have continued to function since the firings. But park advocates worry that the firings will affect operating hours, programs, maintenance and simply protecting places from Acadia to Zion.
'A new National Park full of statues'
Meanwhile, the White House does want something fast-tracked and fully funded: a new national park, with 250 sculptures.
Earlier this month President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create “a new national park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived.”
This has been a goal of his since the end of his first term. At the time, Congress never appropriated money for what historian Michael Beschloss described as “some official, totalitarian-sounding ‘National Garden of American Heroes.’ ” But the president is pushing for it again – and it has been estimated that it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
So while we’re cutting park staff, potentially shrinking the size of some parks and risking damage to others, we’re going to spend millions to do this?
This is not how our national parks, starting with Yellowstone in 1872, became known as “America’s best idea.”
But it is an idea that is quite symbolic of where we are today, with a president who is more apt to see value in a gold tower or a golf course than the Grand Canyon, and with leaders who just might acquiesce and put statues in a garden ahead of people in parks.
Mark Woods is a columnist at the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, where this column originally appeared. He is also the author of "Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America's National Parks." Reach him at mwoods@jacksonville.com