Changes at Mt Rainier -- road closed Tues, Weds

Road not open, clearly. Working plows were visible on camera in the AM (so much for saving THAT money.) Dozens of school districts (including Seattle, Bellevue and Northshore) have vacation today still. Look at the Stevens Pass cameras and the fairly full lots there to see how many families would have been out and about for winter recreation today had Paradise been open.

Oh, and the weather's great today. Tomorrow the weather will probably be all fogged in and there will be low visitation. [Edit: well I am wrong about the Thursday weather, another nice day after all, but still ...]

NPS: You Are Doing It Wrong.

In these troubled times, our local NPS leaders are falling back on Franklin D. Roosevelt's proven technique to reassure the masses.  Starting this Wednesday, there will be weekly "Fireside Chats" in Longmire to enlighten us on the intricacies of National Park management.   The first program is to be on Wilderness; I might even have to attend to hear the party line on how helicopters and chainsaws are the "minimum tool":
blog.thenewstribune.com/adventure/2013/0...eside-chat-programs/

"This confusing duplicity is nothing new.  The National Park Service (NPS) did not support the inclusion of national parks in the Wilderness System when the Act was signed in 1964 and the agency has never demonstrated a commitment to the Act. NPS Historian Richard Sellers has written: 'Although many of the National Park Service’s rank and file enthusiastically supported the wilderness bill, the bureau’s leadership seems to have drifted from outright opposition to reluctant neutrality.' The NPS has made this shift by conveniently writing inordinate flexibility into its management standards."  wildernesswatch.wordpress.com/category/national-park-service/

That's when they bother to write them down at all.  Olympic NP has yet to produce an approved Wilderness Management [now Stewardship] Plan during the decades since Wilderness designation there.

Future chat topics might include "A Fat Contingency Fund Depends On Not Filling Critical Vacancies" and "Keeping Your Budget Secret"   

When I first spent the winter in 1974, I recall being surprised how many locals used the shorthand phrase 'those crooks' rather than the tongue-twisting 'Mount Rainier National Park management'.  I was a typically idealistic new NPS employee and originally thought of it as just a culture clash like the college towns I'd previously resided in.  It took a few years to realize the locals were referring to a long and consistent pattern of nepotism and favoritism in hiring and contracting by the park.

I should have figured it out sooner.  The first roommate I met in Longmire seasonal housing was the son of a DOI bigshot who ran the Border Patrol in Texas.  My first day on the job, I learned I was a last-minute replacement for Tom Erlichmann, whose father was in a bit of a political pickle called Watergate.

Olympic National Park had this petty corruption down to a science when I worked there years later.  Most of the various shop foreman in the Maintenence Division were from the same local high school clique.  They avoided the national OPM register and hired seasonal laborers off an obscure 'Student Hiring Authority' register that only their kids, relatives, and friends knew to get on.  Similarly. the road foreman's brother almost always seemed to submit the winning bid on surplus sales and small contracted jobs.

The first park superintendent I ever spoke with was William Briggle.  He rode up the old Tahoma Creek trail, tucked his flask quickly into his hip pocket when he saw me, and began bellowing that his horse was slipping on the cedar boardwalks and that they should be covered in gravel.  I was happy to direct him further up the trail to where my boss was working.

Briggle had previously been superintendent at Glacier Nat'l Park.  His outrageous antics there fill a couple chapters in Michael Fromme's Re-Greening The National Parks.  He had the road crew spray chemical defoliants rather than use mechanical or hand brushing; his denials were exposed as lies when purchase receipts were produced.  He fired the entire trail crew and the Resource Management ranger for questioning his idea to build boardwalks around the new Visitor Center at Logan Pass.  The snowpack broke and twisted the boardwalks; ground squirrels moved in underneath, and the tourists created multiple braided and parallel paths avoiding the damage and photographing the squirrels.

MRNP's Administrative History must have been running short of whitewash when it described his tenure here: 
"In 1983, an operations evaluation team interviewed 23 employees on the subject of employee-management relations. The team found that there was a significant employee morale problem which appeared to stem from the management style of the superintendent and the administrative officer. The interviewees made two principal complaints. First, the superintendent's method of giving employees direct and specific orders, by-passing intermediate levels of supervision, had a demoralizing effect on some lower level supervisors and employees who complained of being "caught in the middle" between their supervisors and the superintendent. Second, and more seriously, some employees complained of mistreatment by the superintendent, "management by intimidation," and "flagrant personal assassinations." Perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of how mercurial and subjective the problem of management-employee relations could be, the operations evaluation team did not recommend any specific action to the regional director, and none was taken."    www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/mora/adhi/chap18.htm

A fellow seasonal laborer bragged about pulling a drunken Briggle's vehicle out of the ditch after an annual park Christmas party in the 80's.  He was trail foreman within a few weeks and a Maintenance Supervisor within three years.  He used to also brag that he was "untouchable", and apparently was, until he finally got a month's suspension for flying his wife and her skis to Camp Muir.

Briggle was trying to be the first in NPS history to achieve fifty years 'service', when he retired suddenly after 48 years because a subordinate was brave enough to file sexual harrassment charges against him. 

Following Briggle was Jon Jarvis, one of the first NPS superintendents with a background in science and resource management rather than the traditional law enforcement track to NPS management.  I had moved on to a permanent job at Olympic, but heard from friends that he spent very little time in the park. 

His deputy, Dave Uberuaga, was criticized for conflict of interest in selling his Ashford residence to the owner of RMI for three times it's value, a transaction that many saw as a bribe.  Jarvis whitewashed the original internal invesigation as superintendent, then Uberuaga assumed  the Rainier superintendent's job.  Jarvis became pope of this cult, then covered up the Inspector General's subsequent report as NPS Director.    The Seattle Times endured years of FOIA delays before exposing the scandal in 2011:   
seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2016356020_rainier02m.html    
Author Ron Judd said he was only able to put the story together because the NPS had failed to black out the Whittaker's names on one document.  Jarvis subsequently promoted Uberuaga to superintendent of Grand Canyon, where there are concessions worth fifty times those at Rainier to be shaken down.

Jarvis' tenure as NPS Director has been a stormy one.  He has pushed an agenda for corporate "partnerships" that many see as a sellout of National Park values:
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/01/pe...ate-partnerships9370

He has also failed to correct past incidents of corrupt and unaccountable NPS management & law enforcement ruining peoples lives; here are two prominent examples amoung many:
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/review/201...ell-trading-post8015
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/review/201...-worth-fighting10009

An agency that thinks its budgets & documents should remain secret is fundamentally dishonest, no matter how many good people work in the ranks.  The Park Service was riddled with posers and ethically-challenged managers during my career.  It appears to me that things have only gotten worse in the past decade and that this is an organization that has its own self-serving agenda. TAY 'moderates' should keep this history of dishonesty and numerous public closures in mind when MRNP next turns up the heat in their long-running campaign to boil our access frog.

It's not just me who has a low opinion of NPS management.  Their own employees continue to rank their job satisfaction near the bottom amoung all federal agencies in management catagories :

"Overall, the agency's cumulative score of 61.3 placed the Park Service 166th out of 292 agencies surveyed for the 2012 report.

Looking at how the Park Service compared to other federal agencies in specific areas paints a gloomy picture for life with the agency.

The results show the agency's employees struggle to find a balance between work and personal life (the Park Service ranked 280 out of 290 agencies surveyed in this category), and don't view the Park Service's approach to strategic management highly (258 out of 290), and don't hold their immediate supervisors or senior leaders in high esteem (235 out of 290 for both) when compared with other agency scores.

The survey also placed the agency low compared to other federal agencies in teamwork (265 out of 290), training and development (254 out of 290)...

The Park Service's high-water mark, so to speak, in the survey came the first year, 2003..."

www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/12/na...ederal-agencies22574

Mount Rainier is not alone in having a history of toxic management.  Olympic National Park has the unenviable distinction of being sued by their own cooperating association, Olympic Park Associates:  rdpayne.drizzlehosting.com/opa-news.html#gmp    Scroll down for the full story.  Summaries here:
www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2006/08/...tchanges-wilderness/
www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2006/04/...ilderness-violation/

www.freehurricaneridge.blogspot.com/   has detailed  ONP management's resistance to, and sabotaging of, weekday road openings at Hurricane Ridge:
"Due to political pressure from Representative Norm Dicks on Bruce Schaeffer, the Comptroller of the NPS, a trial period was established in 2010 and 2011 to weigh the demand for weekday access. Local ONP officials begrudgingly cooperated.

ONP officials determined the cost to keep the road open four additional days would be $325,000 and the NPS happened to have $250,000 they could appropriate from another source, if the local community could raise the additional $75,000. This was done for the past two years, including about $50,000 of personal contributions, and community fund raising parties.

Despite this show of community support, ONP was not able to start seven day a week access the first year until after the New Year. Both years the road was late to open (it is supposed to open at 9 am) or closed 50% of the time. The average late opening was 10:15 am. There were about 70 days of no new precipitation both years, and the road opened on time about 70 days.

By the standards of those that donated their hard earned cash to give to the Park Service in exchange for more access, the Park did not fulfill their end of the bargain.

The result of the the two year trail period was an average of 5,500 more people during the formerly closed days, and a total increase of 9,318 people per year over the previous two years. This represents a 35% increase.

This increase was not enough for ONP; they declared the trial period a failure..."

I hear the gold-plated trail bridge currently under construction in designated Wilderness near Staircase has cost overruns that have pushed the pricetag from $1.1 to $1.5 million, so far.  I think the contractor is the same one doing the Elwha dam removal; sounds like the historic NPS cronyism is alive and flourishing.  Four hundred grand would more than keep Hurricane Ridge open full time for a winter, even for the profligate Park Service.

ONP was given jurisdiction over the former reservoir site of Lake Aldwell outside the park for 'rehabilitation'.  The NPS had a couple million to throw themselves an invitation-only party for high-rollers celebrating the  start of the Elwha dam removal project, but they now claim to have no funds to even study adding this culturally important location to the tiny Elwha reservation.

Relevant editorial and comments www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2013/01/gu...-business-usual22681 ] from National Parks Traveler]:

www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2013/01/gu...-business-usual22681

"Great article. I have a suggestion for how to improve the NPS and get it ready for the 2016 centennial. My suggestion will improve the low employee ranking AND save money. It's called STOP PROMOTING INCOMPETENT AND POOR PERFORMING NPS EMPLOYEES. I could provide 5 examples for every year that I have worked for the NPS, of this phenomenon. The Park Service is no different from the Catholic Church. Someone is abusing a park, we will just transfer them or promote them to some where else. Instead of holding upper management accountable, people are just shuffled along. This concept of not dealing with problem children has led to the low rankings, poor morale, and poor management of national parks. If you want to have a more effective, more protected, and more efficient NPS for the 2016 centennial, quit playing whac-a-mole with poor management. If you don't dump the moles, they're just going to pop up some where else. If you are a poor superintendent in the lower 48, than you are going to be a poor superintendent in a cushy new job at Katmai National Park. The demise of the Park Service will not be from what ever political party is in the White House, it won't be from a lack of funding, and it won't be from a lack of visitors, it will be from the enemy within. The call is coming from inside the house, NPS. The enemy is you."

"Mundsy is correct about the biggest problem facing the NPS. The agency seems to be run by, and for the personal and professional aggrandizement of, an incompetent and corrupt itinerant manager class. They come to a park for a few years, change everything around so they can document their “leadership,” then move on after 3-5 years, at taxpayer expense, taking an entirely undeserved promotion and leaving a shambles in their wake. In some ways the NPS is divided between local staff who are focused on a particular park, and transient staff focused on the NPS as a whole. In general, the parks function because of the locals and in spite of the transient managers.

If there is any accountability for management, I haven't seen it in 20 years in the NPS. Nobody has ever come to me, or any other field employee that I know of, and asked what I think of management's job performance. I have seen managers utterly destroy the program they are supposed to be running, and just continue to move up as if nothing had happened. The NPS has a super accelerated Peter Principle thing going, where people move far and fast above their level of incompetence, based entirely on connections, sucking up, and not rocking the boat. The rot seems to be working its way down, as incompetent yes men hire incompetent yes men, to the point where we even have them in the field now.

There needs to be a serious accounting in this agency. It needs to be done by an outside organization that doesn't have connections to NPS insiders, and that has some kind of dispensation from OPM for expedited firing of permanent employees. After cleaning out the Washington and regional offices, they need to go park to park, talk to everyone, and decide who stays and who goes. A lot of expertise could be lost, but if it was done well, it would mostly be the dead weight. It would be traumatic, but the NPS would come back much stronger.

After that, there needs to be continuing oversight to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Competent, ethical, dedicated managers need to be hired, and encouraged to stay in their jobs. Hiring needs to be reformed so good people can move up. The NPS needs to stop paying employees to move, unless a position really can't be filled locally. Park operations need to be audited regularly, on the ground. The patronage networks must be prevented from forming again. Upper managers need to be told to stay away from Congress. End the Bevinetto Fellow program, and when someone's career track doesn't appear to reflect their abilities, investigate. This kind of oversight would be a drag on an organization with good managers, but it is absolutely necessary with the current crop. Maybe someday we will get to the point where we have a self sustaining, well functioning agency, but we are nowhere near that today."

I agree that NPS priorities are warped, and seem focused on political and financial gain for the agency and its highest managers, at the expense of the parks themselves. I disagree that resource preservation should be formally placed above visitor services, not because I don't think it is important, but because in practice it already is, and I think the balance needs to move back toward the visitors a little bit.

Where I have worked, nobody in authority speaks for the public. Visitor services and public safety have almost collapsed. The ranger division is a shell, and roads, trails, and campgrounds are falling apart. The one division that is thriving is resource management. They dominate the planning process by sheer numbers, and tend to have tunnel vision. Since they see no value in visitor services, even the most temporary, insignificant “impact” of a project is too much.

The idea that the NPS should expand its scientific capacity sounds good, but if it means expanding what it currently has, I don't think it is really a good idea. Currently there is a great deal of research being conducted by park staff, sometimes for the graduate work of permanent RM employees, with large crews of seasonal employees doing the field work. I think research is better left to the universities. They are better at it, and have a large supply of cheap, qualified labor. NPS resource management should focus on environmental protection and compliance, and project work like invasive species removal. Hire competent generalists for planning and compliance positions, and maintain relationships with universities. Make small grants and logistical assistance available for graduate students willing to do specific research the park needs.

"The NPS is an agency funded by the public, and it gets its legitimacy from serving the public. There is certainly infrastructure that could be removed or abandoned, but biologists should not be deciding what the public needs. Their instincts could run toward making the parks into research reserves where the public is not really welcome. There has to be give and take. Roads, trails, and campgrounds are expensive, but they allow the public to enjoy the parks, and without them, public support for parks and the NPS would rightly fall."