Changes at Mt Rainier -- road closed Tues, Weds

"According to Park Supt., they were not." They were not - due to budget issues? I attended the public meeting in Enumclaw, and Randy King stated the closure was due to vacant plow driver positions and the needed LEO shifts to cover both early morning thru late evening. King stated MRNP did not fill those positions due to possible upcoming budget issues.

Did you hear something different?

In a face-to-face one-on-one conversation with me, and in a TNT interview, he said the closures were due primarily to vacant positions not  to budget issues.  Note in the meeting you recall he did not say he had a FY13 budget shortage but alluded to "possible" upcoming budget issues. I mentioned the sequester in my conversation with him, he shook his head no.  But what he did expound on was how they were monitoring visitation, feedback from congresspeople, and impacts on concessionaires--to me, that sounds more like a "test" of the feasibility of closure during the week in the winter, again not a result of inadequate budget.  Note that the savings from not opening are bound to be minor because they have to plow anyway to manage and protect infrastructure and they lose gate receipts.  He did not allude to any vacant LEO positions. 

The Park has been really weasely on this issue.  Not the early emphasis on how this would allow them to concentrate resources to ensure timely openings etc. and the situation has been worse.  This week is typical: closed M, T, W, opened at noon (might as well be closed for bc people).  What was done was to concentrate resources on weekends when the snowplay area was open to maximize visitation by snowplay kids & families and by sightseers.

BTW, Randy has  been quoted a couple of times saying they were trying to recruit a plow driver; they did fly an announcement in November.  And if he was reluctant to hire a full-time driver, he could always arrange an inter-park loan or an-interagency loan or bring back a retired driver part-time or hire a part-time/temporary driver or a hundred other ways to make do in a period of uncertainty.

Here is the official, in writing version, from the website:

"We are strategically deploying available park staff and resources to provide access to Paradise Thursday through Monday, the five days of the week with greatest visitation," King said.

Visitation statistics show that Tuesday and Wednesday are, on average, the park's least visited days, with fewer than 60 visitor vehicles coming through the Nisqually Entrance on a typical day. By focusing staff on fewer days, the park will be better able to provide access and services during times of greatest visitation, including more consistent road plowing and emergency patrols for visitor safety."

Now, that is in writing and published. No mention of vacancies or budget issues.

I'm not at all surprised that the story is altered based on what is perceived to be most palatable to the current audience. This also is nothing new.

Once I get done being pissed off about it, this whole situaiton just really bums me out.

I hate to say this but I believe this issue is going to get a lot worse.

www.nbcnews.com/travel/itineraries/loomi...cates-warn-1B8219074

I hate to say this but I believe this issue is going to get a lot worse.

www.nbcnews.com/travel/itineraries/loomi...cates-warn-1B8219074

"Failure by Congress and the White House to avert a budget sequestration by March 1 will force the National Park Service to reduce visitor services, shorten hours of operation, and possibly even close areas to the public, according to Park Service Director Jon Jarvis."

Possibly?  I'd bet on it, especially for our winter-phobic local bureaucrats.

"To help attain the 5 percent cut, parks were directed to immediately halt hiring permanent employees (though hires already in progress may continue). While they may continue planning for seasonal workforces, they were directed not to extend any offers. Non-essential travel is to be halted, overtime suspended, acquisitions of supplies and equipment are to be reduced, and on-staff employees who are subject to furlough should have their furlough periods extended to "the maximum length allowed..."

Travel is a huge overhead expense in the management ranks of the NPS.  All that community outreach and green Visitor Center designing and promotional filmmaking and international "sister" park advising takes a lot of conferencing while on expense account:   
www.schundler.net/Travel.pdf

"As others have pointed out, this is mostly about making a big show of being underfunded. The NPS could cut 5% from its budget without having a significant impact on visitor services or the rest of its mission. It could probably do it while improving operations overall. The problem is, it can't do it at a moment's notice while under the gun from congress. The only thing it can do short term is not bring back a bunch of its seasonal workforce, which is a bit like a fat man cutting off his arms and legs to lose weight. Since budget problems aren't exactly a surprise, the NPS needs to immediately start what it should have been doing all along. Get rid of under performing or nonperforming employees. In addition to personally being a waste of money, they are a huge drain on morale for the rest of the workforce. Stop encouraging employees to move between parks every few years, and stop paying for their moves. People who stay in a park long term are usually more effective workers, and the paid moves are just indefensible. Evaluate what programs and staff are really needed, with a bias toward retaining the field programs and reducing the back office. The tendency in a bureaucracy is for the upper ranks to be built up over time, and periodically they need to be cleaned out. In a given amount of money, increase the percentage defined as an operating budget, and reduce the amount doled out as project funds. Projects are commonly overestimated, then used to pay for basic operations. In addition to being short sighted and unethical, there are substantial unacknowledged costs associated with this. A huge amount of staff time is spent chasing and administering projects that are really just operations under a different name. The amount of clerk positions in NPS maintenance has leaped in recent years, usually at the expense of people doing the actual work. Also, project funds can't be used to hire permanent employees, so there are a lot of temporary and term people out there who are doing the jobs of permanents. Nobody who hasn't worked in government would believe how much pointless administrative effort on the part of supervisors and HR staff goes into just keeping those people around year after year. In short, a lot of money could be saved, but it will take major changes in how the NPS does business. Those changes seem unlikely unless they are imposed from outside the agency. This is all pretty obvious to people who see it up close, but nothing seems to change."
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2013/01/up...-hours-operatio22751

Park Service management has done a thorough job of brainwashing their employees and the public about how underfunded they are.  They're already spending millions just planning their celebration of the NPS centennial in 2016.  Expect much more of this propaganda as the sequestration deadline of March 1st approaches.  The NPS is a fundamentally dishonest organization.  They'll always say they need more money, but they'd really rather not show us their budget details.

"Some superintendents operate with very little or virtually no public oversight in the budgeting process; they make management decisions with very few public hearings and/or meetings; they 
offer no financial or accounting information on their web sites; and they make no attempt to 
make available the basic records and documents concerning how the park is spending its 
authorized funds, or the process by which it has made significant or even minor decisions. 
Decisions are made that may seem arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable, but citizens and park 
employees have to no way to challenge them or appeal them.  Occasionally, people are asked to 
write comments on an issue but then they are told to send them to the same superintendent 
whose decisions they are trying to question or appeal.”   
 
"One of the easiest ways to gauge how a superintendent is acting or how a park is being managed 
is to check how it responds to requests for information.  How willing is it to open its books and 
make available minutes of meetings, budgets and expenditures, and to make available any and all 
records and documents that should be made available according to the Freedom of Information 
Act?  Just as important, do they make the records and documents and financial information 
readily available without a formal FOIA request, or do they force requestors to go through a long, 
frustrating, and overly legal FOIA process to obtain the most basic information?" 
 
"Unfortunately, when tested this way, many parks fail.  Many superintendents and park 
administrators not only try to avoid any notion of openness and transparency, they discourage it, 
they frustrate it, and they work against it.  Often park employees say they just don’t give out “that 
kind of information”; they feel they shouldn’t give financial or managerial information to the 
public; and they act as if the Freedom of Information Act was never passed."

"The problem within many of our national parks may be getting worse. Because of preferential 
hiring policies, many of the leaders of the National Park Service increasingly are coming from 
among former military veterans and military officers accustomed to a chain of command style 
of leadership instead of a collaborative style of management; many were trained in an 
atmosphere where no one questions or challenges the decisions of officers or of those higher up 
the chain of command. "  

www.schundler.net/Monocracy.pdf

I used to really admire the NPS and the staff at MORA and I've become increasingly disillusioned over the last few years. My experience is that they do not want public involvement in the management process, and that any contact, including the public input meetings, is done out of requirement and at minimum standards. The decision to hold both of the meetings on the 30% winter closure in locations far, far from Puget Sound population centers (one was in Enumclaw of all the remote places) during work hours on weekdays is just one example of them checking the box, but utterly failing in the spirit of the rule.

And I also don't believe it will change until we, collectively, get organized and force change.