A February snowstorm exposed weaknesses in staffing at Yosemite National Park/NPS

Editor’s note: The health of the National Park System and the public’s enjoyment of that system depends on a strong and vibrant National Park Service workforce. Currently, though, the strains on the system seem to be reaching a breaking point, and action needs to be taken to reverse the downward slide.

When a particularly heavy snowstorm battered Yosemite National Park back in February, toppling countless trees, destroying guest cabins, and even leading to a fire in employee housing, the park’s response was crippled by a lack of staff.

“The Pacific West Region is a team, and as such, we need to help each other whenever and wherever we are able. Let's pull together to help one of our fellow parks,” read an email plea sent from the regional office to superintendents across the region. “Due to recent weather events at Yosemite National Park and a 40 percent vacancy rate of the Facility Management Division, we are seeking help with our spring opening activities.”

The help arrived, the park’s infrastructure was cleaned up and repaired, and the Facility Management Division is reported to be back to normal staffing.

But the weakness within National Park Service staffing exposed by that snowstorm was not an isolated situation. Across the Park Service there are numerous vacancies, safety issues created by a lack of staffing when there's not enough law enforcement staff, and overworked personnel, according to park staff that discussed the issue with the Traveler.

“I’m a division chief at a large park with over 12 years with the NPS, and this is by far the worst (Human Resources) crisis in my experience,” one Park Service employee said. “Parks like mine have 40 percent of our positions vacant, and it is only getting worse as hiring delays are now taking over a year.”

Even now, with summer roughly half over, some park system units still haven’t filled all their seasonal positions for the peak vacation season, according to Phil Francis of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. That said, the human resources problem is not new to the Park Service, he noted.

“I know on the Blue Ridge Parkway, when I left (as superintendent) in 2013, that we had a total of 80 permanent maintenance positions on our books, and only 40 were filled. Those were the positions that were in the field, not the ones at headquarters,” he said.

Could any major corporation run efficiently and successfully if it relied on hundreds of thousands of volunteers to function, if some units of its operations had 40 percent of its jobs vacant, and if it was hamstrung by insufficient funding that not only prevented hiring but also failed to keep up with inflation?

With an annual workforce of nearly 20,000 “full-time equivalents” and a physical presence that ranges from the western Pacific to the Virgin Islands, the National Park Service equates with being a major corporation. But it struggles with a concerning number of vacant positions in some parks, the absence of a full-time, Senate-confirmed director, missing permanent directors in three of its seven regions, numerous “acting” positions scattered across the system, and the reliance on more than 300,000 volunteers. Regarding vacancies of full-time appointments, here's a glance at some of them:

• Grand Canyon National Park has been a revolving door for acting superintendents since Superintendent Christine Lehnertz resigned earlier this year after a demoralizing investigation spurred by a subbordinate's fabricated allegations. An investigation exonerated Lehnertz, and top NPS officials welcomed her back, but she said she could have a greater impact on peoples’ lives elsewhere.
• Just this week the Park Service announced a yearlong acting superintendent for Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York state. 
• There’s an acting superintendent at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, acting public information staff at Park Service headquarters, an acting superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, an acting superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, an acting superintendent at Virgin Islands National Park, and the list goes on.

At the same time, while visitation and the number of units in the park system continue to grow, staff is shrinking.

“The Park Service has lost 14 percent of their staff since 2011. Meanwhile, visitation went up 14 percent," said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association. "The Park Service has lost a lot of staff, and it’s important for the public and Congress to know what those missing positions are.” 

The great number of “acting” roles “has to do with budget, and I think it has to do with the length of time it now takes to fill vacant positions,” said Francis.

Driving the hiring problem, Park Service staff told Traveler, is an overworked and understaffed human resources contingent. But there’s also a lack of funding to hire positions, and a 2016 review of Park Service HR practices by the Office of Personal Management led to recommended changes in practices that indicated the OPM didn’t fully understand the seasonal needs and practices of the agency, those interviewed said.

"The process is inefficient and many of the things HR requires hiring officials to do add little to no value but suck huge amounts of our time," said a superintendent.

A requirement that HR review “benchmark position descriptions,” which exist for the purpose of being available for managers to use without needing to be reclassified, annually slows down the hiring process, as the review can be lengthy due to limited HR staff. The job posting process and applicant review process can drag on, too, adding to lagging vacancies.

“Think of the HR crisis in another way - the time needed to do the work vs. the capacity,” a division chief said. “My guess is that it takes an HR specialist 8-12 hours to do the work to announce a position on usajobs.gov, and another 16-24 hours to review, rank, score, and vet the list of names for the hiring official to select. Some announcements with only a half-dozen applicants would take much less time yet others with hundreds of applicants would take longer.

“So if my HR person has 300 vacancies to fill by herself times 24 hours average time per announcement, that perhaps equals 7,200 hours of work which would take her 3.4 years to accomplish working 40 hours per week without taking time off. Consider that 450 parks, regions, and program offices need to hire thousands of people each year but only perhaps 75-100 hiring specialists are available. You get one hell of a backlog.”

A park superintendent acknowledged the problems those delays can create.

“It’s fair to say, if it’s taking a year to fill a job, when that happens, things are less effective,” the superintendent said. “Programs aren’t as productive, work might be missed, and opportunities are lost.”

How widespread the hiring problems are is impossible to say without calling each and every one of the 419 units in the park system. At the Park Service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, chief spokesperson Jeremy Barnum wouldn’t say how many vacancies exist throughout the Service.

“Simply providing the number of all vacancies does not indicate that a staffing problem exists,” Barnum said. “Vacancies take place for multiple reasons such as human need/action (employee gets a promotion to another location), location of the park unit including remote areas, cost of living, distance to nearest community, etc.

“Therefore, we are unable to provide a list of vacancies with a realistic, non-generalized characterization of why they exist as the conditions impacting each one of them may be varied and unique to each park, and not necessarily the result of a systemic challenge.”

Filling positions across the National Park System can be a challenging task for a variety of reasons. Most positions during the busy summer months (or winter months in places such as Everglades National Park, Padre Island National Seashore, Joshua Tree National Park) are seasonal, and have to be filled every year. Then, too, there can be issues related to housing and cost-of-living that make some jobs particularly hard to fill, said Barnum.

“An urban park may have difficulty attracting applicants due to a high cost of living, while others may face different challenges in recruitment due to the remoteness of their location,” he said. “The NPS works hard to attract highly qualified applicants to all parks by making employment opportunities attractive through the use of multiple hiring mechanisms and the utilization of hiring incentives. “

At Yosemite, spokesman Scott Gediman said the issue earlier this year in his park was tied to low pay.

"Finding housing for lower level employees is becoming more of a challenge. A lot of those jobs were on the entry level end of things and the salaries that go with these jobs are not conducive to the rents charged," said Gediman. "As you know, this is a nationwide problem."

The division chief who brought the HR matter to the attention of the Traveler, and who asked not to be identified for raising their concerns about it, said a key to the hiring problem is a lack of HR staff. Their park shares one HR employee with more than two dozen other parks. And that HR employee isn’t even located in the park.

Barnum disputed a shortage of HR personnel was problematic.

“The NPS has a dedicated team of HR specialists within the Classification Division of the Workforce and Inclusion Directorate and has recently successfully recruited a number of highly qualified, highly competent new classifiers who have made tremendous progress in classifying position descriptions and other key metrics that expedite the hiring process,” he said. “Turnover is almost non-existent with only one former classifier having left the division within the current fiscal year after that employee obtained a promotion at another federal bureau.”

Still, OPM's HR recommendations add layers of bureaucracy.

“There have been a whole bunch of rule changes or interpretations of rule changes, some which have been forced on us by OPM because of audits they’ve done where they’ve claimed we were misusing seasonal hires,” Big Bend National Park Superintendent Bob Krumenaker said. “An example of that is people can now no longer do two seasons in a year. The jobs are limited to six months. That’s not really that new, but it used to be different. And the latest thing is they’re saying all seasonals in a park must have the same six-month season. That simply doesn't match reality in the field.

“As this park gets popular, the shoulder seasons are growing,” Krumenaker added. “We can’t have seasonals staggered. I get it that they can only work six months, but if we had the flexibility we would have people overlap in the middle of the season and there would be fewer seasonals at the beginning and fewer seasonals at the end. But the total length of time that we have seasonals here might be eight months.”

One park where the HR system seems to be running smoothly is Yellowstone. Superintendent Cam Sholly said his department heads reported no problems filling positions this year.

“Overall, the HR team has done a terrific job supporting Yellowstone. The majority of the issues I've heard about have stemmed from delays with background investigations, something that has challenged us in the agency over past year,” Sholly.  “We have more seasonals on board now than we did last year at this time.  We have some gaps still that need to be filled, especially with visitor use assistants and laborers - those numbers are not substantial and we are working through them currently and have more seasonals being brought on nearly daily. “

At the same time, the Park Service realizes it has a problem with HR. A webinar for all superintendents is scheduled for August 12 to share information on actions and progress to improve and strengthen HR functions. A similar call was held in June, “and they were pretty candid with their problems, and they’re pretty candid about trying to fix it,” a superintendent told the Traveler.

 The webinars are expected to be an ongoing affair.

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