‘Going to be chaos’: advocates alarmed by last-minute national parks shutdown plans

The federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday after Congress failed to pass stop-gap funding by Tuesday’s deadline.

And with hours to go, the National Park Service shared a last-minute contingency plan that would keep many park sites open but without full staffing.

According to an internal NPS memo obtained by KQED, national park sites that can be made physically inaccessible to the public will be closed off. But all other NPS sites, including those with roads and trails that are accessible to the public, will now remain open according to the memo.

An expanded version of the NPS plan was posted online later Tuesday, with an estimate that over 9,000 staff nationwide — out of a total NPS workforce of 14,500 — are expected to be furloughed in the event of a shutdown.

The shutdown will see federal workers around the country — including NPS staff — go without pay, with those employees deemed “essential” required to work through the period regardless. Under the NPS shutdown plan posted online, just over 5,000 NPS staff would be categorized as essential.

Advocates for America’s national parks have expressed alarm at the last-minute nature of this planning for park closures. Superintendents were only informed during a meeting late Tuesday afternoon about which sites would remain open — followed by the email memo shortly after — according to Jesse Chakrin, executive director of the Fund for People in Parks, an advocacy group that works with small or lesser-known parks in the West.

Chakrin said this is the tightest turnaround for shutdown planning he’s seen by a large margin.

“They’re asking for each park unit to make a plan, including staffing numbers and associated costs for a shutdown, which is happening in hours,” he said. “This would have been something that would have taken at least, all hands, weeks to prepare for in any other administration."

‘Morale is already rock bottom’

The NPS’s email memo to staff “sounds to me like it will be a mixture of open and closed with as much open as possible,” said Chakrin. But he expressed concern about the “haphazard” nature of the planning and confusing language contained in the memo.

“It looks like a lot of this was cut and pasted from different plans,” he said, calling the memo “not very well thought out.” KQED has contacted NPS to request comment on its shutdown planning.

The memo states that parks that collect entrance fees will be staying open to do what they can to collect those fees and use them to run the park during the shutdown, Chakrin explained. Those that don’t collect fees may be able to pull from those same pots of cash to keep extremely limited services going.

While peak summer tourism season is over, fall is still a busy time for parks in the Bay Area and across the country. NPS data shows nearly 30 million people visited parks in October of last year.

As federal staff, NPS employees will have to wait for backpay after a shutdown ends, while some will be required to work unpaid through the period as “essential” staff. Parks staff have grown increasingly worried, however, that they will be the target of firings Trump has proposed — on top of the reported 24% reduction in staff that parks have already seen this year.

“Morale is already rock bottom with park staff,” said Don Neubacher, former park superintendent for Yosemite and Point Reyes national parks.

Parks advocates warn that keeping parks open with such skeletal resources is a bad idea for both the parks and the people who visit them. Late last week, a group of more than 40 former park superintendents signed a letter calling on the administration to close parks to avoid damage to fragile ecosystems and harm to visitors.

The last government shutdown over the winter of 2018-2019 lasted 35 days, and resulted in vandalism, garbage and long-term damage by visitors to California’s Joshua Tree National Park while most of its park rangers were furloughed.

“This type of both open and closed type of situation is really confusing,” Chakrin said. “It’s confusing for the folks that are trying to manage parks responsibly and for the public trying to visit them responsibly.”

“I think it is going to be chaos,” he said.

This story contains reporting from KQED’s Adhiti Bandlamudi.