If Congress and the Obama administration fail to avert a budget impasse next week, the National Park Service will move to furlough more than 21,000 employees in a two-day process of closing down the National Park System.
The shutdown, coming as many eastern parks are heading into the traditionally tourist-heavy fall leaf-peeping season, could cost gateway communities upwards of $30 million a day in lost revenues, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. Too, the economic impact would be something of a double-whammy for those gateway communities that lost revenues when the budget sequestration imposed early this year led some parks to delay their openings, while others shuttered campgrounds.
Across the 401 units of the park system, closures will be conducted quickly, with "day visitors ... instructed to leave the park immediately" and overnight visitors given two days to leave the parks.
"Wherever possible, park roads will be closed and access will be denied," states the Park Service's contingency plan (attached below) drafted in the event Congress fails to pass a Continuing Budget Resolution to keep the government operating. "National and regional offices and support centers will be closed and secured, except where they are needed to support excepted personnel. These steps will be enacted as quickly as possible while still ensuring visitor and employee safety as well as the integrity of park resources."
According to the plan, posted on the Interior Department's website Friday, each of the Park Service's seven regional offices will be whittled down to about three full-time employees.
At individual parks, "Due to the dramatic differences in operations, size, visitation, location, and infrastructure represented in national park sites, the number of employees required to carry out the essential activities defined above will vary greatly from site to site. As a rule, staffing will be held to the very minimum for the protection of life, property, and public health and safety. Only personnel absolutely required to support these activities will remain on duty. Wildland fire personnel required for active fires or for monitoring areas currently under a fire watch will remain on duty.
"All other personnel, including law enforcement, EMS, and Fire Management not deemed excepted will be furloughed, but will be subject to being called back in the case of an emergency."
Of the agency's 24,645 employees, all but 3,266 will be furloughed if the closure comes about, according to the plan.
At the NPCA, officials decried the possible closure of the park system, saying it could impact as many as 750,000 visitors a day and cost gateway communities as much as $30 million in lost revenues every day the parks are closed.
“A government shutdown would make a bad situation even worse for our national parks,” said Theresa Pierno, the NPCA's acting president. “Families, school groups, and tourists from around the world have made plans expecting our parks to be open. Instead, they face the possibility of disruption and disappointment, while local businesses and park concessioners that serve them face the prospect of lost revenue and further economic hardship.”
While the threat of government shutdown occurred in 2011, the government actually shut down in late 1995 and early 1996 for a total of 27 days. According to NPCA’s 1996 report, this shutdown cost park-dependent communities an estimated $14 million daily.
"Mariposa County, adjacent to Yosemite National Park in California, saw 25 percent of their adult population temporarily out of a job due to the park closure," NPCA said in a release. "The communities around Everglades National Park were hit with an estimated decrease in direct sales of up to $1.4 million. In today’s dollars, a government shutdown next week could be even more devastating to these communities."
“When our national parks closed in 1995-96, I received an outpouring of calls from gateway communities alarmed by the situation,” said Phil Francis, recently retired superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway, typically the most visited National Park Service unit in October, with nearly 60,000 visitors spending $1.4 million each day.
“The potential shutdown adds insult to injury because these communities are already concerned about the recent cutbacks in funding for national parks that have harmed the Park Service’s ability to serve visitors. No one expected these cuts to happen again. Now we’re looking at not only a potential shutdown, but the likelihood of another round of cuts. If that happens, there’s a good chance it’s going to be even harder than last year,” added Mr. Francis.
Chris Fogg, executive director of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce in Maine, said the potential shutdown could be devastating to the Bar Harbor community.
“Acadia National Park is an economic driver for our community and we could see a potential loss of $684,000 per day. The beautiful fall foliage in October attracts nearly 10,000 visitors daily and the loss could be shattering to our community," he said in comments distributed by NPCA. "Because of the sequester and the late opening of Acadia’s roads, business was already down about 30 percent in April and May of this year in comparison to the average of the previous five years. We just can’t believe that Congress is letting this happen."
Grand Canyon National Park averages more than 11,000 visitors per day during the month of October. Kevin Striet, business director of Grand Canyon Tour & Travel, is also concerned about a possible shutdown.
“Grand Canyon Tour & Travel operates several buses daily to the South Rim filled with anxious passengers, both domestic and foreign, and some of whom, have planned their whole trip around the chance to visit the Grand Canyon," he said in the NPCA release. "The thought of having to re-direct hundreds of passengers at a moment's notice is not one that we like to think about but as the day comes with no resolution to an approved budget, the actuality of having to re-route passengers to other tours, or to perhaps cancel their excursion altogether, is daunting. We are hoping that at least a temporary budget is approved until a more permanent solution can be found."
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Comments
Here's my 'paper-trail', Kurt.
I had downloaded the 2012 Greenbook. It took 19 minutes, but proved to be 'only' a 7.4 MB file. I have a typical 'gateway community' Internet connection, which is Late Iron Age at 256K, and works solidly at a little over 1 MB per minute. The NPS site is 'having trouble' (page-links also show delays).
[Actually, it is "admirable" that a heavily-loaded website continues to function, albeit in low-gear. It takes acumen & work (and foresight), to make that happen.]
With a normal connection (and perhaps waiting until current excitement/interest dies down), the download chore won't be so arduous, but folks will still be confronted with a 595 page PDF file document (2012).
When Congress gets through fooling around, at least we will get a straight answer, what the budget will cost us. They won't point us to their 10,000 page PDF.
I started 'paging through' the monster, and soon found a section titled Budget Overview:
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The Greenbook PDFs download page is sub-linked under the NPS About Us intro-page. The centerpiece of this page is their list:
[This data has apparently not been update in 5 years.]
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The Wikipedia NPS page has a nice chart showing budget-figures, 2001-2006:
That's where/how I got my numbers. Very recently, it's been a hair under $3 billion, from well under $1 billion in 2003, and not much over $1 billion, going into the 2007-2008 Crash.
Conclusion: money for NPS tripled-plus inside the most recent decade; doubled-plus during the current & ongoing Recession-crisis.
From Ballotpedia: The 45 calendar days that the New Mexico Legislature was in session during 2011 is tied with Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas for the shortest legislative session in the country.[6]
Seems like plenty of time to get their work done... At least one of these states takes the citizen legislator concept further and does not pay pensions for legislative service...
I disagree with Lee's adjectives. I'd prefer Self-service, lust for personal power/reward.
Examples: Jesse Jackson Jr., "Duke" Cunningham, William Jefferson...and on and on and on...
The wikipedia gif is only partially correct in that it gives only the operational budget.
For year:
2004 - actual: $2.5
2005 - actual: $2.6
2006 - enacted: $2.6
2007 - enacted: $2.6
2008 - enacted: $2.8
2009 - actual (including $750K recovery): $3.6
2010 - (enacted, adjusted): $3.1
2011 - (enacted): $3.0
2012 - (enacted): $3.0
Thanks, dahkota. Is there a link for these numbers? I realize, maybe not...
As a 'check', I went back to NPS' Greenbook download page, and got their oldest copy, for 2006, which is also the newest version, in the Wikipedia chart. (It proved to be an 11.3 MB, 540 page PDF file, and took 29 minutes. A couple times that I noticed, it "stopped" entirely.)
What I see in the 2006 Greenbook is similar to dahkota's numbers.
I therefore now withdraw my previous assertions, that the NPS budget "ballooned" recently, and most onerously, as the rest of the country cinched the belt after the Crash, and have cut new holes in it, during the Recession. This appears to be, happily, "not so".
In fact, NPS budget-trends appear instead to show a normal or typical public-agency pattern ('moderate' growth).
I apologize for the confusion, though it certainly is not a matter of lax or flippant conduct, on my part. In all perfect candor, I was "prepared" to find outrageous budget-numbers, once it became too-clear that I was not readily finding a simple accounting. E.g., "Yeah ... these folks are evidently hiding/obfuscating the goods ... must be bad news".
Now seeing that the older budgets were not 'that' much smaller than current ones ... why this reticence with the simple facts? How many media people & private citizens are clogging the website, right now, downloading stupendous documents (they don't even want!) off their Budget page, when Parks could just put a simple list of numbers there? Kinda weird ... but "false alarm".
Although some may view the likely upcoming furloughs as a "paid vacation with a delayed paycheck," there's no guarantee Congress will decide to pay the employess sent home by the politicians. In the meantime, employees get an IOU, which doesn't help pay the bills if this thing drags on. Surely their mortgage company will understand if their payment is late.
As the story above notes, "All other personnel, including law enforcement, EMS, and Fire Management not deemed excepted will be furloughed, but will be subject to being called back in the case of an emergency."
So, their "vacation" works out something like this: Don't come to work, but don't go very far from the house, and be sure we can reach you immediately in case of fire, flood, rescue calls or other emergencies. If that happens, we'll expect to back at work right away to risk life and limb...without pay, of course, but we will give you an IOU that Congress might or might not decide to honor whenever this is all settled.
Perhaps even more onerous is this news item: "The US military's nearly 1.4 million troops will stay on the job in the case of a government shutdown but they will not get paid, the Pentagon said Friday....Military personnel will not be paid until such time as Congress makes appropriated funds available to compensate them for this period of service, Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter wrote in a memo describing contingency plans for a shutdown."
If you're acquainted with any enlisted personnel in the military, you'll know that many of them are barely getting by paycheck to paycheck. Great treatment for these folks and their families, and even more so for those serving in combat zones while spouses try to manage the family as single parents back home.
According to the above news item, about 400,000 civilian employees in DOD would be sent home by a shutdown, so "We wouldn't be able to do most training, we couldn't enter into most new contracts, routine maintenance would have to stop." Friends who work for DOD tell me the sequester-mandated cutbacks have already had a serious impact on military readiness, and a shutdown will only aggravate those concerns.
Nice work, politicians - but of course, your paycheck and operating budget will continue without interruption, so no worries.
Lee, from Republican Congressman Peter King, New York, he calls the actions of the tea party crowd "Governmental terrorism". Must admit I agree. Having been involved on two major fires here in the Central Sierra, its totally outrageous for this threatened governmental shutdown to be held over the heads of these NPS employees, and all others as well.
The back and forth about budget numbers and the green book make interesting reading, but maybe we are missing the real story here. People who have planned their trips for months are not going to be able to enter any of the 401 areas of the National Park System. Day visitors, who are in a park if the shutdown occurs, will be asked to leave immediately. People staying in concession facilities will be given 48 hours to vacate.
Some of the comments above have suggested that the gateway communities will survive. I agree. But what about the dream vacations in which money has been invested and will be difficult to recover? I have a brother in Michigan that was planning to go to Yosemite the second week of October. I have advised him not to. There is just too much uncertainty.
And this does not even consider the hundreds of thousads of employees across the government who will be out of a job on October 1st unless some mircacle occurs. It's not a pretty picture.
Rick
Neither is Obamacare and the financial state of our country. You need to get some priorities.