With the busy season at many national parks imminent, park advocates and gateway communities are worried visitors and park-related economies will suffer.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Many federal jobs that the Trump administration has eliminated are for government work done behind the scenes, but downsizing at the National Park Service affects people quite literally at the scenes. In the Southwest, people are taking notice even before spring break and summer vacations. KUER’s David Condos reports from Zion National Park in Utah.
DAVID CONDOS, BYLINE: This is typically the slow season at Zion National Park, but on a recent Saturday morning, there’s a long line of cars waiting to get in. Just two of the four entrance stations at the park’s main gate are open. Now, it’s unclear if that’s due to the National Park Service jobs President Trump cut. The White House isn’t confirming details about it, but Democratic lawmakers and employee groups say it’s about a thousand jobs nationwide. Zion National Park declined to comment. People around here are worried, though.
BARBARA BRUNO: Today is just a day in February, and look at the line. So it’s – we’re more concerned about the – not the big holidays, but the everyday kind of traffic and congestion that we might experience.
CONDOS: Barbara Bruno is the mayor of Springdale, the town closest to Zion’s main entrance. She says around a dozen Zion rangers lost their jobs, and the long line of cars to get into the park is backed up into town, where locals are protesting.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Take a stand, protect the land.
CONDOS: More than 100 people chant and carry signs against a backdrop of towering red-rock peaks. They’re upset about the firings, and worry about what that means for the future of public lands. Local business owner Jaechon Anderson organized the protest.
JAECHON ANDERSON: I truly believe that all Americans love the parks, and so we’re here today fighting for them, fighting for their future. Mother Nature doesn’t have her own voice, so she needs us right now.
CONDOS: Visitor numbers start rising dramatically in March here. Last year, nearly 5 million people came to Zion. On busy days, Mayor Bruno says the line of cars can block Springdale residents from their homes and make it hard for emergency vehicles to get through. She says firing so many workers also makes it hard for staff who remain on the job.
BRUNO: They’re beloved members of our community, and I feel for them. I think that they’re all sort of worried about what the future holds, and the park was already understaffed and underfunded.
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CONDOS: Inside Zion, Helena Parks is taking a photo. She’s visiting from California and says she’s a federal worker, too. Overall, she agrees with the job cuts.
HELENA PARKS: The new presidency comes in, they’re trying to do something good. Not everybody sees it that way, but it’s an action.
CONDOS: While losing park jobs is unfortunate, she says, it may be a necessary part of reining in the federal budget. But Bill Wade, the head of the Association of National Park Rangers, expects tourists to notice the reduced staffing, from shorter hours at visitor centers to dirtier bathrooms.
BILL WADE: When you use a broadsword instead of a scalpel to go through a thousand positions and indiscriminately terminate them, I just don’t see that as being the efficient way to do things.
CONDOS: A memo obtained by NPR says the Park Service has permission to hire a larger number of seasonal staff than in previous years, but Wade says…
WADE: I think it’s unlikely that all of those seasonals are going to be hired and onboard before the heavy-use season actually gets underway.
CONDOS: In the meantime, unions have filed lawsuits over how the Trump administration eliminated jobs, including at the Park Service. Now, many of the fired workers were probationary, meaning they were new to the agency or had recently started new roles there. One of them was Macie Monahan, a biologist at Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park.
MACIE MONAHAN: When I got removed from my position illegally, I was 10 days away from being off my probationary period. I was hoping and praying that it wouldn’t happen.
CONDOS: But then she got the mass termination email that went out on Valentine’s Day. It told her she was fired for poor performance, even though she says her reviews were positive.
MONAHAN: I wasn’t slacking off and wasting taxpayer money. I was out in the field for 10 hours a day. I was working in unstable weather conditions or getting down and dirty with some prairie dogs at times. You know, I’m out in the field doing hard work.
CONDOS: So getting that email hurt. She worries it’ll end up hurting the parks, too. Monahan says Bryce Canyon was already short-staffed relative to its millions of visitors, so she and the other rangers often worked above and beyond to keep it running.
MONAHAN: My passions are still there, and, you know, I hope and pray we can kind of get back to what we were doing before, eventually.
CONDOS: Until then, she’s not sure what will happen to the projects she was working on. For NPR News, I’m David Condos at Zion National Park.
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