Olympic National Park needs cash

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Olympic National Park is so pressed for cash that officials plan to close the visitors center in Forks and eliminate most seasonal rangers this summer, and they agreed to keep the popular Hurricane Ridge Road open in April only after the city of Port Angeles promised to help foot the snowplow bill.

The plans were brought to light by the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA), a national-parks advocacy group, which is releasing a report today suggesting that chronic money shortages and rising expenses are forcing park superintendents across the country to make painful decisions on how to spend their money this year.

The report contends that officials overseeing the nation's 387 parks or historic sites are freezing jobs and cutting programs and asking staffers to make do with less — a trend some parks officials in Washington state reluctantly confirmed seeing here. They're hoping visitors won't notice much of a difference this year.

At Mount Rainier National Park, for example, Superintendent Dave Uberuaga said he is keeping a key administrative position vacant to free up enough cash to keep his summer seasonal work force employed.

At Olympic, Park Superintendent Bill Laitner said he's working with the mayor of Forks, Clallam County, hoping they can find a compromise to help keep the park's visitors center there staffed through the summer.

"In general, there has been a basic budget erosion over many years," said Holly Bundock, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service's regional office in Oakland, Calif., adding that it occurred under several presidents. "The current administration emphasizes maintenance backlog and security. We've made a commitment to focus on those areas, so those are funded, and we've had to shift resources to accomplish those goals. That may leave other areas in the park system weaker."

In this politically charged campaign season, some superiors have actually urged park officials to refer to changes they're making as "service-level adjustments," rather than cuts, and to notify agency headquarters about the most sensitive ones, "so that it won't cause public or political controversy," according to internal agency e-mails.

"We're tightening our belts this year," Bundock said. "And some parks may be making some adjustments, in some places."

While the National Park Service's budget, over time, has continued to climb, activist groups such as the NPCA have complained for years that the agency doesn't get the money it needs, and that annual budgets haven't kept up with inflation. The group points out in its new report that the number of full-time rangers nationwide dropped 16 percent from 1980 to about 1,539 in 2001 — even as 60 million more people visited national parks.

The NPCA has been especially critical of President Bush, who made national parks a priority during his 2000 campaign and promised to put more money toward a multi-billion dollar backlog in park maintenance. The administration has, but the agency still struggles with operational issues.
 
This year's crunch, for example, comes as park employees receive a 4.1 percent mandatory pay raise that park budget writers largely have to pay for by borrowing money from within the agency. Olympic's budget, for example, is about 90 percent staff salaries.

In its report, the NPCA claims the agency, over time, has lost critical personnel. Since 1999, for example, it has lost 172 interpreters.

In the case of Olympic, the hardest hit this year of Northwest parks, Laitner said he had decided to close the road to Hurricane Ridge in April — the popular destination's slowest month — until Port Angeles offered to help cover plow expenses.

As for the Forks visitors center, it gets only 17,000 visitors compared to more than 100,000 at Hoh, so Laitner believed he had to transfer two people from Forks to Hoh. "We tried to figure out the most efficient way to spend our money," he said.

Meanwhile, the agency's office in Oakland is reviewing all the park budgets to see whether some services can be restored with emergency funds, Bundock said.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company