The Brief

Some seasonal employees at Yosemite National Park worked for as long as six weeks without pay this spring and summer as park supervisors scrambled to manage hiring amid federal budget cuts, workers told NPR. The employees said they are now receiving hourly wages but have not been paid for the work they were asked to do as volunteers while they waited to be put on the federal payroll.  

Some of the workers said they feel exploited.

"It's definitely taking advantage of people who love their jobs and don't want the park to suffer," said one of the employees, who said they volunteered for three weeks before being hired.

NPR spoke with four seasonal and two full-time workers employed by the National Park Service who described the situation. NPR has agreed not to publish the names of the employees because they are not permitted to speak publicly and feared retribution.

Yosemite depends on seasonal workers to perform a variety of jobs from May through October, when the park receives most of the more than 4
million visitors who typically enter the grounds. The Northern California national park is one of the most visited in America.

At Yosemite, seasonal workers do "anything from campgrounds operations, to wilderness permitting for backpackers, to the seasonal interpretive rangers, seasonal maintenance staff," said Jesse Chakrin, the executive director of the Fund for People in Parks, a nonprofit that advocates for national parks. The National Park Service hires thousands of seasonal workers a year across America. More than 100 are typically hired annually at Yosemite early in the busy season, Chakrin said.

But 2025 was no typical year. On Feb. 14, 10 full-time federal employees at Yosemite were fired when the federal government terminated about 1,000 newly hired employees throughout the National Park Service. In the weeks that followed, additional experienced workers left the park service voluntarily. Since January, the amount of permanent staff across the service has declined by 24%, according to data analyzed in July by the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that defends parks.

Then, after staff members were fired in February, some were hired back. That meant the park service's already straining Human Resources division had to take on additional work to bring those people into the workforce again, federal workers told NPR. Around late spring, when more visitors started entering the park and seasonal workers began arriving at Yosemite to start their jobs, Human Resources wasn't able to onboard all the seasonal staff, Yosemite employees said.

"We had the firing of probationary employees in February and then the rehiring, and this was a huge, huge burden on Human Resources to try to get people in and out," said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, a nonprofit that supports workers at parks. "And seasonal hiring was delayed."

But Yosemite still needed seasonal workers. An April order from the Department of the Interior, the agency that oversees the National Park Service, said all parks should stay open as usual in 2025, with changes to operating hours requiring special approval.

Seasonal workers needed the jobs too. Many count on their employment at the park to provide them with housing. Because some parts of Yosemite are dozens of miles from the nearest city, accommodations at the park are typically offered to people who work there, for a fee.

"They're dependent upon their job to have a home," said Chakrin.

On May 18, visitors took photos at a viewing point above Vernal Fall, a waterfall at Yosemite National Park.

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In other parks, seasonal employees weren't hired at all. As of July, only about 4,500 of the people expected to fill 8,000 seasonal positions across the Park Service were working in seasonal roles, according to the data from the National Parks Conservation Association. But in late April, supervisors at Yosemite started offering some of the prospective seasonal workers a different option. If they volunteered for at least 32 hours a week at the park, they could stay in Yosemite housing for free until the federal government was able to onboard and start paying them, emails reviewed by NPR reveal.

"My supervisors were emailing people week after week saying, 'Hey, the update is there's no updates and we understand you guys need housing and you're relying on this and we're relying on you. And we don't know what's going on, but one option is to volunteer,'" said one Yosemite worker.

NPR requested an interview with a representative at Yosemite and sent questions regarding how and when seasonal workers were hired this year. The park declined to answer the questions or speak with NPR.

"We are not conducting interviews about staffing levels," said the park's public affairs officer, Scott Gediman.

Gediman recommended that NPR email the National Park Service instead. No one at the service responded to NPR's questions or request for an interview.

But workers at Yosemite told NPR they estimate that more than 50 seasonal workers volunteered for the park service in Yosemite before they were paid later in the summer. Of the four people NPR spoke with who were asked to work for no pay until they could be onboarded, one declined and did not work at Yosemite this season. The other three agreed to volunteer and wait. The workers said they signed volunteer service agreements with the federal government, some of which NPR reviewed.

The three who volunteered said they were assigned a role in a different division than the one they had originally committed to work for. The park service prohibits seasonal employees from volunteering for positions "similar to their paid work" outside of the season. That sort of policy is to prevent the federal government from exploiting workers, the park service's reference manual indicates, and to ensure the park complies with federal labor laws.

"The NPS does not allow an NPS employee to serve as a volunteer in a manner that takes advantage of an employee's willingness to perform their paid work without pay," the manual states.

The federal government also assures people that they can expect competitive pay if they choose to work in public service. But seasonal workers said that's not what they received when they worked for free for weeks. Some believe the federal government did take advantage of them.

"We're here because we need housing," one said. "And there was this urgency to have a place to go, so we did it."

The sun rises over tall granite cliffs that rise from Yosemite Valley.

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It was 'offensive' to work without pay, one worker said

For weeks, before they started being paid by the park in June, the seasonal workers spent hundreds of volunteer hours doing tasks like educating visitors and maintaining trails, they told NPR.

While the employees said they were grateful to have a place to live and understood that their supervisors at Yosemite may not have had control over hiring delays at the federal level, they thought it was unfair not to be paid for their labor.

"The idea of volunteering for the job that we already don't get paid enough to do was offensive," said one of the workers.

A few weeks into the busy season, some prospective seasonal workers were hired and paid by the Great Basin Institute, a nonprofit that promotes conservation and has partnered with national parks on projects before.

"They reached out and said, 'Hey, we've got needs,'" said Peter Woodruff, the nonprofit's chief executive, referring to staff at the Park Service. "So they turned to us for that support during a time of uncertainty."

The institute paid fewer than 30 seasonal workers at Yosemite for a few weeks, said Woodruff. But not all seasonal workers were offered the opportunity. Of the three people NPR spoke with who volunteered, only one received payment from the Great Basin Institute in between volunteering and their employment with the federal government.

Another worker labored without pay for six weeks, from early May until the end of June, before they were onboarded, the employee told NPR. During that time, they stayed in a shared room owned by the federal government that was valued at under $500 a month, their housing agreement reviewed by NPR shows.

The park ultimately onboarded the three workers at different times, from early to late June. After they started being paid by the park, from that point forward, the workers said they earned between $19 and $23 an hour. But none were paid back for the weeks they volunteered, they said, and none were promised back pay.

By asking volunteers to work in different jobs than the ones they were later paid to do, the park service may not have violated federal labor laws, said Kevin Owen, an employment lawyer who represents federal workers. Still, Owen said that the requests to volunteer could harm the park. Since experienced workers might be less likely to agree to work without pay, fewer of them may have accepted the proposal, he said.

"It will lead to either stories of long lines at national parks or stories of missing campers who can't be found when they otherwise should have been," Owen said.

Chakrin, the director of the parks nonprofit, said that parks are currently under strain and struggling with staffing across the West. But he has never heard of seasonal workers being asked to work without pay for weeks because a park couldn't onboard them on time.

"The unprecedented part that I have never seen is, in mass, having seasonals have onboarding dates that are delayed indefinitely and up to three pay periods," he said. "It's just a whole lot of a season when your season is six months long."

Copyright 2025 NPR

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk. (The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized).

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.