DanielRon (Visitante)
| | Full-time staff numbers are down, too; as of June, the parks service had 12,600 full-time employees, which is 24% fewer staff than they had at the beginning of the year.
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Thatâs the lowest staffing level in over 20 years, according to Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
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Some parks, including Yellowstone, have increased their staff this year. But with low staffing levels at other parks unlikely to meaningfully improve this year, Kym Hall, a former NPS regional director and park superintendent, told CNN she worries park rangers and other staff could hit a breaking point later this summer.
âBy mid-August, youâre going to have staff that is so burned out,â Hall said. âSomebody is going to make a mistake, somebody is going to get hurt. Or youâre going to see visitors engaging with wildlife in a way that they shouldnât, because there arenât enough people out in the parks to say, âdo not get that close to a grizzly bear thatâs on the side of the road; thatâs a terrible idea.ââ
The National Park Service did not respond to CNNâs request for comment on its staffing levels.
Meanwhile, visitors are arriving in droves. Last year set a new record for recreation visits at nearly 332 million, smashing the previous record set in 2016.
Hall said the process of hiring thousands of seasonal workers for the summer takes months, typically starting in the previous fall or winter to fully staff up.
âEven if the parks had permission, and even if they had some funding, it takes months and months to get a crew of seasonal (workers) recruited, vetted, hired, boarded into their duty stations, trained and ready to serve the public by Memorial Day,â Hall said.
Compounding the staffing issue is the fact that many park superintendents, some of whom oversee the most iconic parks like Yosemite, have retired or taken the Trump administrationâs deferred resignation offers. That leaves over 100 parks without their chief supervisor, Brengel said.
And amid the staff losses, staffers normally assigned to park programming, construction, and trail maintenance, as well as a cadre of park scientists, have been reassigned to visitor services to keep up with the summer season. |
DouglasLen (Visitante)
| | âHire back park staffâ: Visitors feel the pinch of Trumpâs layoffs at National Park Service
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The visitors who trek to Americaâs national parks are already noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took office.
âIâve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,â one visitor to Zion National Park wrote in National Park Service public feedback obtained by CNN.
The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park. There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks they visited on their trip.
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âHire back park staff. We need them,â the visitor wrote.
At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up wilderness permits.
âMore staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,â that visitor wrote.
Americaâs most treasured national parks are getting crunched by Trumpâs government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS employees as part of wide-ranging federal firings known as the âValentineâs Day Massacre.â Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000 jobs.
But those numbers havenât materialized ahead July 4th â the parksâ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that about 4,500 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired. |