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UPDATE 2 | Interior Department Lawyer Named Superintendent Of Grand Canyon National Park

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A career lawyer, Ed Keable, has been named superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park/DOI

A career lawyer, Ed Keable, has been named superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park/DOI

Editor's note: This updates with additional comments from the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.

A lawyer with three decades of experience with the federal government but none on the ground in the National Park System on Friday was named superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, a highly unusual move for a park that has struggled in recent years with sexual harassment issues and internal dissension and seen a revolving door of acting superintendents.

Edward Keable, who has worked for the Interior Department's Solicitor's Office for 23 years, is to move to the park within 60 days, a release from the National Park Service said. 

National Parks Traveler has requested an interview with Keable, and Park Service staff was reaching out to see if he would grant it.

"What in the world qualifies him to be a superintendent?" Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, said after hearing the news. "In my experience, I have never known a person to be appointed to be a superintendent of a major park who didn't have significant National Park Service experience. Experience in smaller parks, experience in one of the disciplines found within a park, or something that gives them the special needed qualifications that a superintendent must have.

"This is extremely rare, and while I don't know this individual, on the face of it it seems improper," he added.

Later Friday, the Coalition issued a stronger statement opposing Keable's appointment.

Ed Keable is not qualified to manage and lead a complicated park such as the Grand Canyon. While Mr. Keable may possess the ‘passion’ and ‘leadership skills’ that Acting Director Vela referenced in his statement, it does not mean that Mr. Keable has the knowledge, skills, and ability to be superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the most high-profile, complex, and heavily visited national park operations in the System.

Individuals named to Senior Executive Service level positions have historically demonstrated significant skill in complex park management, earned through experience working in the field. Mr. Keable’s selection sets a terrible precedent and robs the National Park Service career workforce, who have decades of expertise working in national parks, of opportunities to lead the agency in senior superintendent posts.

In addition, Mr. Keable, who has worked closely with Secretary Bernhardt for years, will need to contend with efforts to develop a resort in Tusayan, just outside the gates of the park. Coming as no surprise to anyone following Secretary Barnhardt’s actions at the helm of Interior, Secretary Bernhardt’s former law firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, has been hired to lobby for its development. At this crucial time, when leadership is desperately needed, Grand Canyon needs an experienced and strong advocate, not a politically appointed superintendent.

On the heels of Secretary Bernhardt showing such disregard for NPS employees during the escalating pandemic by keeping parks open and putting their health and safety at risk, the decision to put someone with no national park experience in charge of a crown jewel of the National Park System is appalling.”

Former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, who had worked with Keable during his career, didn't dismiss the appointment out of hand.

"I know Ed and worked with him at DOI. He is smart and capable and a career public servant with experience in the legal aspects of public lands," Jarvis said in an email. "It is an odd choice for the superintendent of Grand Canyon, but if Ed has a good operational deputy and a strong NPS management team in the park, he should do fine."

In taking on the challenging task, Keable will oversee the 1.2-million-acre park's 350 employees and operations that range from river operations and lodging, dining, and outfitting concessions to air tours.

Another extremely hot issue he'll have to confront are efforts to develop a major resort just outside the park on the South Rim. Opponents to the project being pushed by an Italian developer have said it could see more than 2,000 housing units and several million square feet of commercial space reach to within a half-mile or so of the park, and could impact groundwater flows that feed the canyon's springs and hanging gardens.

Keable steps into a job whose last full-time superintendent, Christine Lehnertz, was temporarily removed from her job in the fall of 2018 after undisclosed allegations were made against her. Lehnertz eventually was cleared of any wrongdoing, but she refused to return to Grand Canyon and the Park Service, saying what she experienced convinced her she could better impact people's lives elsewhere. She resigned from the Park Service in March 2019 shortly after she was cleared. Today she leads the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

Lehnertz had been handpicked by former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis to move from the same job at Golden Gate National Recreation Area to the Grand Canyon in July 2016 to help the park overcome a long-running episode of sexual harassment.

The turmoil that swirled up around Lehnertz went back more than two decades. Reaching back to about 2000, life deep in the Inner Gorge of Grand Canyon at times reflected rowdy, sexually charged scenes from a frat party for some National Park Service employees, with male employees pawing and propositioning female workers, some of who at times exhibited their own risqué behavior. The behavior was largely ignored by park managers, including former Grand Canyon Superintendent David Uberuaga and even former Intermountain Regional Director Sue Masica.

But a group of 13 former and current Park Service employees in the early fall of 2014 wrote then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to complain and ask for an investigation. That investigation by the Office of Inspector General generated a tawdry list of inappropriate behavior, from male employees taking photographs up under a female co-worker's dress and groping female workers to women dancing provocatively and bringing a drinking straw "shaped like a penis and testicles" to river parties. The incidents, the letter to Secretary Jewell charged, "demonstrated evidence of 'discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment.'”

Since 2003, the OIG reported stated, there have been a dozen disciplinary cases taken in connection with employee behavior in the Grand Canyon's River District. The matter led Uberuaga to retire rather than take an assignment in Washington, D.C. 

Keable is well familiar with the sexual harassment issue in the park. Part of his role in the Solicitor's Office was working with the Office of Inspector General on its investigations, and providing legal advice regarding those investigations.

During a May 2016 hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that was "Investigating the Culture of Corruption at the Department of Interior," the attorney testified that, in his opinion, the Park Service was working to address the problem.

"I believe what they have done is they have looked at the IG report of the Grand Canyon and they are assessing how to address procedural issues to ensure that those kinds of situations do not repeat," testified Keable.

He also told the subcommmittee that, "I think the Park Service is taking very seriously the information in the IG report on the Grand Canyon and are very seriously addressing the issues highlighted by that report."

The allegations made against Lehnertz in 2018 that eventually led to her departure from the Park Service claimed she fostered a hostile atmosphere among the park staff and spent recklessly on renovations to employee housing. In the end, Interior's Office of Inspector General cleared her of all allegations, and in its report created a portrait of one of her accusers as determined not to follow her directives and even impede them. 

Regarding air tours, the Grand Canyon staff long has struggled to manage them. The problem seemingly was heading towards resolution in 2011 when the Park Service released a draft environmental impact statement that claimed a proposed air tour plan would boost the level of "natural quiet" in the park -- quiet that allows you to hear the murmuring of creeks, the roar of rapids on the Colorado River, the melodies of canyon wrens. But congressional efforts blocked the plan from taking effect, according to the park

While Keable's lack of on-the-ground experience in the park system has alarmed some Park Service veterans, David Vela, the de facto director of the agency, said the lawyer "brings excellent leadership skills and passion for our nation’s public lands to his new role."

“His experience at the Department of the Interior also provides a broader perspective that will be an enormous benefit to the park, employees, and visitors," Vela added in the Park Service release without elaborating.

Keable said in the Park Service release that he was "greatly honored that Department of the Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Deputy Director Vela have entrusted me to work alongside the dedicated employees at the Grand Canyon National Park to conserve this natural wonder for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of the American people and the whole world.”

The lawyer, who gained his law degree from the Vermont Law School, has served as the assistant solicitor of General Law for the Office of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior since March 2012. He has worked for the solicitor's office 23 years, according to the NPS release.

Comments

Sounds as if someone finally decided to scrub clean the management of a national treasure overly sullied by erratic, direspectful, and certainly morally challenged individuals. I wonder how land management concerns are improved upon by the indiscreet behaviors of the "supposed" professionals who can't seem to conduct their work with the understanding of just what they have been priviledged to have as employment. It appears to be an action taken that is long overdue. While the tendencies of people acting in this manner are not strictly isolated to Grand Canyon National Park, regulating overt displays of a sexual nature in a public area where families and small children visit should definitely be considered as an on-going matter of protocol in a bulleted list of mandated job requirements. Such slack disregard for  personal integrity has run amuck across all institutional and traditional venues and a growing number of the population has just honestly gotten fed up with "trash" and slovenly maintained ethics.

Perhaps it's a sorely needed breath of fresh air to have someone come aboard with absolutely no experience whatsoever and clean up the whole arena from the top down as he gets a "lay of the land", both environmentally in respect for the earth, AND the natural inclinations of the employees entrusted with the true priviledge of working as representatives of a place of wonder and amazing beauty. National Parks are crowning jewels of a continent, and their care must continually be kept with the highest of standards in these changing times and for future generations to come. To clean up an  environment and protect it always seems to demand taking care of people first! Too bad that animals and the natural world behave with more dignity than a percentage of humanity.

     


Well, when it rains, it pours.  Arizona has become a funny place, not funny in a haha kind of way, but funny in more of an eeuww sort of way.  Oldtime locals say "Nobody from Arizona is from Arizona any more" in recognition of the outside money and power that is now calling so many of the shots in that state.  For example, the NPS seemed almost willing to close national parks in other places in response to the COVID-19 situation; but, the DOI fought notably harder and longer over closing the Grand Canyon.  I suspect somebody, maybe an organized group of somebodies, with money and power wanted that park open for business and, in that case, the Trump Administration was relatively more inclined to listen  ...maybe just like they were relatively more inclined to reverse and remove protections for national monument designations not so far away from that park.

I'm not very familiar with Mr. Keagle.  He may have just been another loyal trooper who got himself a retirement position outside the high-priced DC area and can now sell his home there and live more comfortably in Arizona.  If so, I congratulate him.  However, one observer has commented that, in his experience, he had "never known" a person appointed superintendent of a major park without significant National Park Service experience and that Mr. Keagle's appointment "is extremely rare  ...seems improper" and, while such comments arouse my sense of caution, I believe we need to take a deeper look, if we're allowed to do so, at Mr. Keagle's background.  Let's look at few more current events surrounding the NPS and the Grand Canyon about which Mr. Keagle might have been or be expected to have opinions.

First, according to the article, Mr. Keagle has worked for the Office of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior for 23 years and served as the assistant solicitor of General Law for that office since March 2012.  That's a pretty high position and, in that position, he could have been expected to at least speak up about pretty much every controversial issue involving, well, general law.  Now, the issue of the NPS policy on electric bikes has been in the news again and I posted, as a comment to another NPT article, some questions about my understanding of the major steps through which this policy was developed. 

1.  David Bernhardt issued an order in August, 2019, directing the NPS to expand eBike access in NPS units with the emphatic assertion that this order "simplifies and unifies regulation of electric bicycles (eBikes) on Federal lands managed by the Department and also decreases regulatory burden."

2.  In December, 2019, more than three months later, a watchdog group with a long history of visibility into Interior operations filed suit charging that "the decision-making process was flawed  ...violated not only the Administrative Procedures Act but also" NEPA and that there was enough solid evidence to argue that "an advisory committee comprised of industry friendly representatives met regularly with Interior officials to  ...develop the new policy."

3.  Last Thursday, in April of 2020, more than seven months after Bernhardt issued his order, the NPS revealed that "more than 380 national parks have evaluated eBike use" in response to an already issued and implemented policy, that they're now ready to "define the term" electric bicycle and eBike, and that the NPS is just now, again more than seven months after Bernhardt issued the order, "seeking public input" on the policy.  The NPT article on this topic quotes one knowledgeable observer commenting that these actions, in the chronological order in which they occurred, appear in conflict with the Code of Federal Regulations.

So, I suppose we need to ask what Mr. Keagle, as the assistant solicitor of General Law for the Office of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior at that time, knows about this topic, what responsibility he felt to speak out or otherwise take a position on this topic, and what his position was on this topic, if any.

Second, it would be helpful to know whether Mr. Keagle, as the assistant solicitor of General Law for the Office of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior had any knowledge of or involvement with the scheme being pushed by the Italians, Stilo, and the interests around Tusayan to gain water usage and other infrastructure to support "more than 2,000 housing units and several million square feet of commercial space  ...within a half-mile or so of the park."  It seems certain, at least to me, that he would have and that his involvemetn would be pertinent to determing whether his appointment as superintendent is proper or just another one of the Trump Administration's rampantly criminal shenanigans.


  Thats what happens when an oil lobbyist is running our National Parks. But hey, some people thought putting someone in charge of our entire country with no experience was a good idea too, so I guess I've seen worse decisions made.


I wonder how many people would object had the new superintendent been a woman with no experience. Also, isn't "lawyer" being used in a pejorative sense here? Certainly, the headline to this article could have read: "Interior Department Names 23-year Veteran to Head Grand Canyon National Park." Does it matter that he never "directed" a park staff of some kind? He was in the Interior Department all those years. You mean none of the Park Service's mission rubbed off? And, come to think of it, what "experience" did Steve Mather have on founding the agency in 1915? None. He had been a miner. An executive is supposed to know people. If Keable doesn't, we'll know soon enough. God knows that "experience" cuts both ways in government.


Great choice. Neither Matger or Albright had direct experience within the parks system before being named to leadership. His experience makes him well suited to deal with the unique issues facing the park.


It's possible, not certain but possible, that there are less "direct" parts of his experience that may actually be driving the Trump Administration to think he's well suited to deal with the unique issues facing this park.  It is that possibility that makes some of us want to exercise greater caution  ...that and the fact that it's Arizona and the fact that so many folks who I don't recognize as regular commenters are suddenly so eager to come to his defense, again in these hopefully last days of the Trump Administration.  Some of us have already been more than once bitten by the Trump Mob and thus are now more than twice shy.

I'm sorry about the mix-up in the spelling of his name.  I used the spelling from an earlier update of the article; but, looking at how fast some of these supportive comments starting coming in, almost as if commenters were primed and ready to come to his defense, I now wouldn't touch Mr. Keable with a ten foot pole without a more substantive explanation of why he might have been chosen.

As far as any unsubstantiated, but nonetheless emphatic, assertions that Mr. Keable was chosen to clean up the sexual harassment and moral turpitude issues that have plagued Grand Canyon and finally get rid of the residual perpetrators who remain in place, I ask whether it is probable or even believable that an administration that still includes Betsy "boys will be boys" DeVos and is still headed by Donald "just grab them by the p***y" Trump would suddenly and genuinely experience such a belated epiphany so late in the game.

The more I dwell on this, the more I smell something that might indeed be rotten.


If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

 


Yeah, maybe; but, again, experienced observers have already noted that Mr. Keagle's appointment "is extremely rare" if not unheard of; his appointment sets a bad precedent for promoting qualified candidates with decades of field experience from within the agency; and, while there must be a reason the agency chose to go this route and the agency must have been aware that there would be questions about that reason, the agency does not seem to be focused on transparency or full disclosure regarding that reason.

What is increasingly clear is that, at about the same time that Bernhardt's former law firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, was lobbying on behalf of that development scheme being pushed by the Italians, Stilo, at Tusayan and at exactly the same time that the legal processes around that scheme were going to be heating up, Trump's first Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke presided over the temporary removal and ultimate resignation of the Grand Canyon's previous superintendent who Zinke's sidekick and replacement, Bernhardt, is now replacing with his own handpicked staff attorney.

I know that you are famous for your disregard for the public's right to know the reasons an official at your end of the political spectrum might have for making any decision; but, some level of transparency and full disclosure, at least when possible, are supposed to be hallmarks of our form of democracy and, under such suspicious circumstances, I would still like a more substantive explanation of why this attorney was chosen for this position at this time.  Frankly, I admit that, when it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, flies north and south with the seasons, and lives in a swamp mating with ducks; I do tend to wonder whether it's a duck; but, I would certainly be willing and would like to see more of any evidence that might point one way or the other.  Are you offering any such evidence or just engaging in another nonspecific defense of the Trump Administration?


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