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By Bill Sherwonit
The Seward, Alaska, Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaims this coastal town 125 miles south of Anchorage as "The Gateway to Kenai Fjords National Park," and locals are quick to sing the park's praises when conversation turns to the topic. In fact, the community of 4,000 now so fully embraces Kenai Fjords, it's hard to imagine that Seward's residents once stood united in angry opposition to the adjacent 607,000-acre wilderness park along the Kenai Peninsula's southern edge.
The turnabout in local attitudes, along with the national park's pivotal role in Seward's transition from a resource-extraction economy to one dependent on tourism, makes this one of the National Park Service's grand success stories.
Many of the people who today sing Kenai Fjords' praises the loudest were once among its staunchest opponents. Pam Oldow is one. In the 1970s, she and other members of the Seward City Council and Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly passed resolutions opposing the proposed park. But the 30 years in between have changed her perspective.
"Oh, it's a great thing, one of the best things that ever happened to Seward," Oldow says. When asked why she initially fought the park, she admits, "It's hard to say exactly why-I think more than anything, it was fear of the unknown, a fear that the park would somehow hurt Seward."
Darryl Schaefermeyer has no problem recalling the reasons for his opposition. A resident of Seward for more than 50 years, Schaefermeyer is a former city administrator who now manages the Alaska Sealife Center. But in the mid-1970s, while employed by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), he worked on a plan to establish a national recreation area near Seward, in part, to increase development opportunities; a park seemed far more restrictive. Like Alaskans around the state, Schaefermeyer worried that the Park Service would lock up local lands, cutting off access and halting economic opportunities.
"You have to understand," Schaefermeyer says, "Seward's economy was horrible in the '70s. We were still suffering from the economic damage of the '64 earthquake, unemployment was more than 30 percent in winter, and the town had a very small tax base. We were worried that a park would hurt the economy even more."
Bev Dunham, a Seward resident for 58 years and founding publisher of Seward's weekly newspaper, the Phoenix Log, adds that a long history of distrust contributed to local opposition. "A lot of the old-timers, including members of my own family, had been involved in mining," says Dunham. "Years before, the Forest Service had gone in and torn down or burned old mining cabins all over the Kenai Peninsula [within the Chugach National Forest]. People feared the Park Service would finish the job and destroy what was left of our mining heritage. So naturally there was a lot of resentment."
Two things changed local attitudes: The Park Service staff assigned to Kenai Fjords became the best of neighbors, and the park helped to establish a new, thriving industry that put Seward back on the map-tourism.
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