“I just really don’t understand why they’re attacking working-class Americans who never took these jobs to get rich. Why us?”
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plan to eliminate thousands of seasonal positions from the National Park Service (NPS) appears to have been reversed, following sustained pushback from advocacy groups.
The Department of Interior this week sent a memo to NPS officials authorizing 7,700 seasonal workers this summer, an increase from the 6,300 seasonal workers that provided services in the country’s national parks properties in previous years.
Although an increase in staffing levels appears to have been authorized, many parks, including Yosemite National Park, were already deep in the onboarding process for the upcoming summer season, normally onboarding workers throughout February and March.
The restorations also do not include the 1,000 permanent probationary employees who were also affected by the staffing cuts. Many of those positions were critical to park operations. In a telephone town hall Wednesday, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said that the firings violated the law and lacked “respect and dignity” for the workers—dozens of whom worked in Alaska as park rangers and scientists.
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Senator Murkowski expressed grave concern over the impact of the staffing reductions to Alaska’s upcoming summer tourism season, saying that even with prospective rollbacks of job cuts, workers may not choose to reapply. “What I’m hearing is a real, legitimate, drop in morale. People are looking and having conversations and saying, ‘Why would I even want to go back?’” she said.
“It makes me kind of feel like we’re going back to the summer of COVID, when our tourism just got brought to its knees,” she said on the call. “If we don’t have the workers that we need, it could be a tough time for us.”
Alaska’s national parks receive significant summer tourist traffic, including Glacier Bay National Park, Denali National Park, Kenai Fjords National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and Katmai National Park, in addition to several others.
Many of the impacted parts of the NPS in other states are in rural areas with skeleton crews already stretched thin.
Officials on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i are facing virtually impossible positions following some of the federal staffing cuts, as outlined in an article by SF Gate. On the island’s north shore, the Kaua‘i National Wildlife refuge complex has lost four of its 14 workers, including its only biologist. The NWR complex includes the Kīlauea Point, Hanalei, and Hulē‘ia refuges. While only Kīlauea Point is the only site open to the general public, the lack of a staff biologist complicates construction work at that site and ongoing bird conservation efforts at all three.
The biologist’s work at the Hanalei NWR, in particular, was critical to recovering threatened and endangered bird species, including the vulnerable koloa maoli or (Hawaiian duck), ‘alae ke‘oke‘o (Hawaiian coot), threatened ‘alae ‘ula (Hawaiian moorhen), ae‘o (Hawaiian stilt) and near-threatened nēnē (Hawaiian goose – also the state bird of Hawai‘i).
NWR workers also maintain the irrigation ditch that canals water to the taro fields in the wildlife refuge. The taro produced in the fields produces more than two-thirds of Hawai‘i’s stock of poi, a food source provided for elders and others in need in Native Hawaiian communities.
Kristen Brengel, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association told the Los Angeles Times the rollbacks were “definitely a win”, but that the NPCA would keep working to return the NPS to full staffing. “We need to keep pushing until we restore all of the positions for the park service, and get an exemption from the park service in general,” she said.
Other workers questioned why the government’s cuts were focused on relatively low-paid workers who maintain public parks lands for access to the citizens who own them. Yosemite Park worker Olek Chmura was interviewed by several news outlets after an online post went viral. Chmura, who made about $40,000 a year to clean park bathrooms, was a probationary full-time worker whose position is not currently planned for restoration.
“I just really don’t understand why they’re attacking working-class Americans who never took these jobs to get rich,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s just extremely confusing. Why us?”