Is Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke acting for what's best for all Americans with his decisions?
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was so anxious to score a major infrastructure success project last fall that he drained a quarter of the National Park Service's construction budget to do that. Now we're left wondering what else is being drained of $12 million so a backcountry lodge in Glacier National Park can be rebuilt to serve a very, very select group of park visitors.
At the same time, a program that reaches out to millions of fourth-grade students is hanging in the balance because the secretary sees it as a money loser.
On the very day in March 2017 that he was sworn in as Interior secretary, Mr. Zinke took time to send a note to his 70,000 or so employees to tell them that "we have the distinct honor and responsibility of stewarding our Nation’s public lands and natural resources for the good of all Americans."
"As your Secretary," he wrote, "I pledge to adhere to the principles outlined by the President and in our ethics statutes, the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, and the Department’s supplemental agency ethics regulations. The first general principle outlined in the Standards of Ethical Conduct is that public service is a matter of public trust and I intend to continue to live that example here at the Department. Indeed, all fourteen general principles contained in the Standards of Ethical Conduct form the solid foundation on which we will build a stronger ethical culture within the Department."
But is the Interior secretary living up to his pledge and keeping all Americans in mind with his land-management decisions?
Today, little more than a year after he sent that letter, Secretary Zinke has tried to raise national park entrance fees for the general public while lowering royalty fees charged for energy companies producing from public lands, pushed the Park Service to open national preserve lands in Alaska to repulsive "hunting" practices, worked to overturn and shrink national monuments, and turned his back on many Americans (hikers, paddlers, and cyclists and other muscle-powered recreationalists) with his choice of members for his Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee.
To cozy up to President Trump, the secretary ordered that teams of Park Service law enforcement rangers rotate through the border parks (at unknown cost to the Park Service) of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Amistad National Recreation Area to help with border control, yet he seemingly has ignored the overcrowded and understaffed parks that are gearing up for the summer with, in some cases, not enough experienced rangers.
And while Secretary Zinke is thought to be ready to end the Every Kid in a Park program because of lost revenues at the entrance gates, he somehow has found $12 million to rebuild the Sperry Chalet in Glacier National Park's backcountry.
This is not to say the chalet shouldn't be rebuilt. It should be.
But at a time when there are so many needs across the National Park System (See Maintenance Backlog), not only do we wonder where that $12 million came from, but whether so much haste need be given to rebuilding a backcountry lodge that sleeps about 54 guests per night, guests who must hike at least 6 miles to reach, and then pay about $200 to spend a night. With a season of less than three months, that translates to fewer than 5,000 nightly stays. Are there not more pressing needs in the park system that could benefit many more visitors? (See Traveler's stories on the maintenance backlog in the parks here, here, and here.)
Would Bluffs Lodge be given an emergency allocation if it were in Glacier instead of along the Blue Ridge Parkway? Imagine what "margin of excellence" the Yosemite Conservancy could have provided with the $12.5 million it contributed to the restoration of the Mariposa Grove of Sequoias, or think of how much sooner rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park would have been able to replace their years-obsolete radio system if Secretary Zinke grew up in North Carolina or Tennessee. There are many other examples.
(As an aside, we wonder why the secretary, in boasting of releasing a "quarter-billion dollars" for infrastructure maintenance projects in the park system, counted in that total $35.2 million that's going not to infrastructure at all but to compensate a North Carolina county for the loss of a road that was flooded in 1943 to create Fontana Lake and Fontana Dam. Not only isn't that money going to national park infrastructure, but the deal was sealed not by Secretary Zinke, but by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2010.)
Mr. Zinke's Interior office staff and that of the National Park Service are not entertaining these questions. And that's unfortunate. Maybe his money shifting is all aboveboard...or maybe it involves removing funds from another needy area of the park system. The lack of explanation does not bode well for the former possibility.
Sadly, just two years after the centennial of the National Park Service, the agency and its wondrous parks have been turned into a political pawn, one not with a permanent director but rather an acting director who started out years ago in the Interior Department as a political appointee.
Really, Mr. Zinke, is all this being done "for the good of all Americans"?
Comments
(former?) NPS LEO--
I don't speak for NPT, and I haven't _ridiculed_ Zinke for this, but I can explain why I'm a lot less happy about details or deployments of LE Rangers & Park Police to the border in ORPI & AMIS this time around.
Simply put, previous surges in LE to ORPI were driven by circumstances in the park. 10-15 years ago, drug and migrant smuggling was so great that much of the park was closed to visitors, essentially all of it was closed to visitors at night, much of the back country was off-limits for even NPS staff. While those conditions were stopped by the vehicle barrier the length of the border and the fencing around Lukeville, and the large numbers of mobile CBP behind the barriers, the additional NPS LE Rangers helped with visitor and staff safety, and somewhat reduced natural resource impacts from Border Patrol activities in the park.
Even if the apparent slight up tic in border crossings in the past few months is real, I've seen nothing indicating any up tic in the parks, even from the very low levels of the last few years. Without vehicles it is slow and hard to cross the park south to north to where smuggler can be picked up by vehicles. The arrays of detectors make it quite easy for CBP to capture almost everyone as they emerge at the northern side of the park or wildlife refuge. This deployment announcement didn't claim any increase of incidents in the parks, nor did it claim any specific role for NPS LE, just supporting routine park operations and conducting missions supporting CBP objectives. It read as showboating that NPS can be part of the militarization of the border, too. [Does that risk a backlash against NPS LE in a few years, like the recent congressional proposals to eliminate all BLM LE staff?] I know less about the situation at AMIS, but again, the easier chokepoints for interdiction and prevention are not in the park or on the lake.
The other major difference is that the NPS budget has been cut over the past decade, including staffing levels at most parks. I know of several NPS units that are seriously short-staffed on LE Rangers, but can't re-hire positions or even get details even when they have the funding from lapsing other positions. We need NPS LE Rangers to conduct operations that support NPS objectives, and parks are often short. If the fundng is coming out of DHS appropriations, not DOI, and especially if the LE are 13-25pp seasonal/subject to furlough positions getting paid for their otherwise unpaid pay periods, NPS would be essentially unharmed by this initiative. But even followup media requests haven't established what budget is funding this initiative. That suggests that either NPS/DOI is paying, or that funding details have not been worked out before the announcement.
As I've traveled through several states and national parks in the past couple of months, I've had opportunities to talk with a whole bunch of people -- Americans and otherwise. In ALL but ONE of those contacts, I have heard nothing but disgust regarding t rump and what he's doing to America and our parks.
I hope that everyone who actually cares about our nation will turn out at the polls in November and begin the job of actually draining the cesspool he has created.
I saw a bumper sticker on a car recently that said it very well: AMERICAN SANITATION SERVICES = Let us pump the trump from your septic tank.
I've got to get one of those bumper stickers!!