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Years of inadequate budgets have taken a toll on the National Park Service workforce. These personal stories illustrate just how important Park Service employees are to the experiences of visitors. Park staff bring history to life, protect wildlife, study archaeological sites, restore historic buildings, keep visitors safe, and more obviously, keep campgrounds and restrooms clean and well maintained. For these reasons, Park Service staff are loved and appreciated. Likewise, their presence is sorely missed when they are absent from the parks.
The following statistics can help us understand the problems that these stories highlight.
- There are 19 permanent staff positions at Great Smoky Mountains National Park that will remain vacant due to lack of funds. Positions include a Supervisory Resource Management Specialist, maintenance positions, and resource educators. The lack of adequate resource educators means that there are less than two rangers available to engage the two million people who visit the Cades Cove area of the park each year.
- Everglades National Park currently has 41 unfilled positions - mainly affecting law enforcement and scientific research. For example, a shortage of patrol staff has resulted in hazardous waste dumping, poaching, smuggling, and disturbances of archaeological sites.
- Although Indiana Dunes National Seashore's annual operating budget has seen increases, it has not kept pace with the park's growing needs and size. Over the past four years, the park has lapsed 23 full time equivalent positions, impacting the experiences of visitors and the park's ability to protect native plants from the invasive plants that are overrunning the park's fragile ecosystem.
- C&O Canal National Historical Park needs an additional 150 full-time equivilant employees. For example, currently 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, 185-mile-long canal system.
- Crater Lake National Park has about $245,000 less to spend in 2004 than it did two years ago. As a result, only 14 seasonal rangers were hired this summer - down from 21 in 2002.
- Wyoming's Devils Tower was America's first national monument. Here, the number of seasonal employees has dropped by 10 percent since 2002, and the park's natural history association is now funding two interpretative positions in the park.
- Compared with the 130 seasonals in 2001, Olympic National Park was only able to support 25 seasonal employees for visitor education, safety, and park maintenance this summer. Olympic has over 60,000 backpackers each year exploring its 900 miles of trails, but its backcountry rangers, vital to enforcement and visitor safety, have been cut by 50 percent.
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