WHAT WE DO

   The critical staffing shortage in America's national parks is reaching crisis proportions. Across the board, the lack of staff is affecting the Park Service's ability to enforce laws, educate the public, and protect the wildlife and historic buildings and artifacts found in the 387 sites of the National Park System.

Law Enforcement & Homeland Security

   According to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, there were 1,841 commissioned permanent rangers and 616 seasonal rangers in 1980. By 2001, the number of permanent commissioned rangers had dropped 16.4 percent, to 1,539, and the number of seasonal rangers had dropped 23.9 percent, to 469. During the same time, visitation to the parks has increased by more than 60 million people and the number of units has increased by 54.

   A shortage of law enforcement rangers has a direct impact on park resources. From 1997 to 1999, Redwood National and State Parks recorded 186 incidents of vandalism, arson, burglary, and theft, including theft of old-growth redwood trees. In 1998, the Department of the Interior concluded that the law enforcement program at Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada was one of the most under funded in the nation. Not coincidentally, Lake Mead's archaeological sites and historic structures have suffered increasing theft and vandalism. This past January, the National Park Service was involved in a well-publicized raid on a ring of poachers that have been looting Shenandoah National Park of its black bears and ginseng for years.

   The Park Service's on-the-ground law enforcement capacity has been further eroded by the demands of homeland security. The agency has estimated that it spends $63,500 each day that the nation is at orange alert. This diverts funds from the parks' operating budgets, and when rangers from parks such as Rocky Mountain and Shenandoah are sent to guard dams and icon parks, their positions remain unfilled.

   According to the Park Service's 2003 Annual Report, "the [Park Service] construction appropriation as well as operational funding will continue to be impacted by the need to improve security... The National Park Service was forced to use almost $8 million in fee receipts for the increased security requirements demanded by three Code Orange periods in FY 2003. This displacement of lower-priority needs is likely to continue in future years and will adversely affect already-strained park budgets, which have been absorbing unfunded increases in operational costs over the past several years."

Public Education

   The number of park staff on hand to tell the parks' stories, positions the Park Service calls interpretive rangers, has also dwindled dramatically. In 1999, there were 1,847 full-time equivalent (FTE) permanent interpreters in the national parks and 843 FTE interpreters among the part-time ranks. Five years later, the parks are staffed with only 1,791 FTE interpreters and 727 FTE part-time interpreters-while the park system has grown to include nine additional parks. This is a loss of 172 permanent and part-time interpreters in our parks, resulting in approximately one interpreter per 100,000 park visitors. Although this is an admittedly crude measure of capacity, it illustrates the enormous challenge that the Park Service faces in sharing the nation's stories and treasures with visitors. Based on the Park Service business plans completed to date, funding for educational programming is facing a 50.1 percent shortfall in parks across the system.

   According to NPCA's recent State of the Parks® report, staff shortages at Shenandoah National Park mean the park is not able to offer visitor services, including education programs, to 50,000 wintertime visitors. The park's Loft Mountain Information Center is closed two days a week during the peak park visitation season and closed from fall through spring. Visitor services have been lost each year because of persistent staffing shortfalls, and a visitor center may be closed two days a week in the spring because of budget erosion.

   Budget cuts at Yosemite National Park have reduced the number of popular ranger-led public education activities, such as daily walks and memorable campfire programs. This month, there are no ranger programs in Yosemite Valley three days out of the week. The number of interpretive rangers on staff is at the lowest level in more than a decade.

   At the 185-mile-long C&O Canal National Historical Park, spanning two states and Washington, D.C., only one person is available for each of the park's four visitor centers. When one of these individuals calls in sick, the visitor center is closed, leaving tourists without a resource from which to learn about this historic canal system. There is a two-year waiting list for local schools to participate in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area's educational programs in Southern California. According to the park's business plan, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia must deny three of every four requests by school groups for ranger-led programs. At Yellowstone, the world's first national park, a funding and staffing shortfalls require the park to turn away nearly 60 percent of all school groups looking to participate in a weeklong, hands-on educational park program.

Resource Protection

   The limited number of park staff available to monitor and protect natural and cultural resources is also affecting parks throughout the system. Although the Natural Resource Challenge, supported by both the current and prior administration, has funneled money directly into natural resource monitoring programs and invasive species management teams, there is no equivalent system-wide program supporting the protection of cultural resources. Two-thirds of the parks in the National Park System are cultural and historic sites, but many of these parks lack the expertise to study and protect the archaeological and historical treasures within park boundaries. The Park Service's Cultural Resources Management Assessment Program Report, printed in 1997, suggested that an additional 3,300 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) were needed to adequately protect cultural resources within the national parks. Based on the Park Service business plans completed to date, funding for cultural resource management is facing a 50.2 percent shortfall in parks across the system.

   Denali National Park's archaeological sites, likely to hold clues to a better understanding of how and when the Americas were populated, are unexamined, unprotected, and unappreciated by visitors because the park doesn't have a full-time archaeologist and adequate funding. Grand Canyon National Park has recorded more than 3,940 archaeological sites and artifacts that tell the story of the park's 10,000-year-old human history. However, because of limited funding and staff, only 3 percent of the park has been adequately surveyed, compromising the protection of important sites yet to be discovered.

   Additional staff is needed to combat invasive plants and animals that are overrunning native vegetation at Valley Forge National Historical Park in Pennsylvania, altering the historic landscape. Although Grand Teton National Park provides habitat for several endangered or threatened species including Canada lynx, wolverine, grizzly bear, and peregrine falcon, the Park Service cannot afford staff to monitor the species.