National Park Service pronouncements on how to deal with the fallout of the sexual harassment episode at Grand Canyon National Park must be transparent/NPS

Three months past the public notice that a sordid chapter of sexual harassment pervaded Grand Canyon National Park’s Inner Gorge, the National Park Service has largely been silent on exactly how it will address the issue.

The park’s superintendent, David Uberuaga, has accepted “full responsibility,” he has dismantled the River District Office that was at the heart of the problem, and Park Service Director Jon Jarvis has agreed to a congressional request that his agency be surveyed to measure the extent, if any, that sexual harassment is an ongoing problem.

Intermountain Regional Director Sue Masica also spent a week in March touring Grand Canyon and talking with staff. She came away determined to change “the culture and environment that precipitated and were affirmed in the OIG’s report.”

If there is to be change, it must be visible, transparent, and meaningful.

Sadly, sexual harassment is an issue throughout the country and world. It probably never will be wiped out, but it must be rooted out and suppressed, if not eliminated.

And, equally sad, federal agencies are not immune to sexual harassment. A 1994 survey found that 44 percent of women and 19 percent of men “reported that they had experienced some form of unwanted sexual attention,” the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board said in a report to President Clinton and Congress.

If the NPS is serious about addressing sexual harassment in the workplace, it must stiffly punish those implicated by the Office of Inspector General’s report or explain why they were not. Supervisors at the Grand Canyon who were aware of the harassment but did nothing also are liable under the law.

To simply acknowledge the complaints from employees who endured harassment for 15 years by accepting “full responsibility,” dismantling an office staff and reassigning them elsewhere in the park, and promising to conduct a survey makes that acknowledgement ring hollow.

In its 1995 report, the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board noted that, “(A)gencies should find ways to capitalize on what is already known about the most effective actions that can be taken to prevent and eliminate sexual harassment; that is, they should publicize penalties and encourage assertive actions on the part of employees who are targets of unwanted sexual attention.”

The nearly universal awareness of sexual harassment policies among members of the Federal workforce indicates that agencies have done a good job in getting the word out about their policies. Less is known among the workforce about what happens to people who harass others. Employees should be made aware of how the agency intends to discipline proven harassers. Victims should always be informed about what happened to their harassers, and penalties should be public enough to serve as examples to potential harassers that management’s prohibition of sexual harassment is more than lip service.

Ideally, if Grand Canyon managers had taken appropriate action when sexual harassment allegations first arose and snuffed the problem, the energy and resources now being summoned to change a 15-year attitude and behavior could have been better spent on park resource issues. 

Now, however, Park Service managers must deliver a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated. To be sure, there are personnel rules to follow. But sexual harassment is against the law, and victims have rights, too. All Park Service employees, those who were harassed and those who were not, deserve to know what concrete steps are being taken to both punish those responsible in the Grand Canyon matter and to prevent recurrences anywhere in the park system in the years ahead.

That message also must be transparent, to those in and out of the Park Service. Would this Grand Canyon chapter be so well known if the OIG hadn’t publicly posted its report? Director Jarvis, in addressing the fallout to the NPS family, referred to “various electronic mediums” for spreading the news, not internal Park Service channels. And his email came two months after the OIG report went public, and many more months after the Park Service was apprised of it.

While President Obama came into office seven years ago promising that his administration would be the most transparent of all, it has failed miserably in living up to that promise.

The Park Service can improve on that record by being extremely transparent, with both its employees and the general public, with any punishments handed out and policies and practices it will adapt and enforce to prevent another incident such as this.