Seven months into his administration, President Trump has yet to nominate a director for the National Park Service. But Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke does have an advisor on his team with a wealth of Park Service experience, one whose background has been investigated, leading to speculation that that individual soon will be nominated.
David Mihalic left the National Park Service on his own terms back in January 2003 rather than follow new-Park Service Director Fran Mainella's order that he move from Yosemite National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. At the Smokies, the Bush administration wanted him to push through the "Road to Nowhere," an environmentally questionable highway project proposed to run through the park on the north shore of Fontana Lake, and finalize a 168-acre land swap with the Cherokee Nation that reportedly would have led to a school complex being built on the land.
The Park Service previously had opposed both those projects, and Mr. Mihalic told the The Washington Post he was concerned about "the conflicting priorities which I would face."
When Ms. Mainella declined to discuss his concerns, and after being told no other assignment would be offered, he submitted his retirement papers.
''I keep the mission of the Park Service on the back of my name tag so that I can always remember,'' Mr. Mihalic told The New York Times late in 2002, shortly before leaving the Park Service. ''It says we are supposed to keep these places unimpaired for future generations.''
After retiring at the seemingly young age of 56, Mr. Mihalic returned to Montana, where he once had been superintendent of Glacier National Park, and focused on painting landscapes and, for a short time, dabbled in politics in 2004 as a running mate of gubernatorial candidate Pat Davison.
Speed forward to December 2016, and Mr. Mihalic's embrace of Ryan Zinke, a fellow Montanan and friend, for Interior secretary was quickly evident.
"I think Mr. Zinke is a brilliant pick for secretary of the Interior. Sure, he’s a Montana sportsman, but his college degrees in both geology and an MBA are perfect for the department that manages both responsible development and public use of our nation’s natural resources while protecting their natural and cultural values,” Mr. Mihalic told the Billings Gazette. "He knows and is unequivocal about federal management of our public lands, our treasured national parks, and wildlife refuges. And, his votes in Congress against his own party’s position on proposed federal land transfers and reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund shows he can work across the aisle with Democrats on important conservation issues.”
Not long after Mr. Zinke was confirmed earlier this year, he brought Mr. Mihalic on as a special advisor, a role soon rumored to be an on-deck position for his nomination as Park Service director. It wasn't a very well-kept rumor; after Secretary Zinke toured Kathadin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine as part of his review of 27 national monuments designated since 1996, he stopped in Boston to meet with Park Service staff and told them Mr. Mihalic would be their next director.
Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift demurred when asked earlier this year who Secretary Zinke would recommend for the job, saying only that a name had been submitted to the White House for consideration.
The relevant House committees have been doing background checks on Mr. Mihalic, though the staff of U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, declined comment last week when asked if the congressman had any concerns about Mr. Mihalic's background.
One individual contacted as part of the background check was asked about Mr. Mihalic's management style and whether it was harsh or brusque, but had no firsthand knowledge of that. Others who know the man have praised his managerial talents.
In that December 2002 story about his impending retirement, The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Milahic had a reputation for working magic more bluntly, for knocking heads and getting the seemingly impossible done."
So, who is David Mihalic?
- He had a long Park Service career, launched in 1972 as a seasonal ranger at Glacier National Park, that saw him eventually rise through the ranks to serve as superintendent at a number of parks, including Mammoth Cave, Glacier, Yosemite, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
- In 1993, he received the Park Service's Superintendent of the Year award for his work on protecting natural resources at Mammoth Cave.
- A year later, he was superintendent at Glacier, where he generated no small amount of consternation by drafting a General Management Plan that, among other options, proposed closing some roads and campgrounds and limiting access along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. That prompted then-U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, to amend the Interior Department's appropriations bill to require that any GMP for Glacier would require congressional approval, something the senator said at the time was "a final line of defense against illogical or unresponsive decision-making by the National Park Service."
- Shortly after his arrival at Yosemite as superintendent late in 1999, Mr. Mihalic told the Yosemite Association in an interview that he didn't view the park as too crowded. "People aren't the problem. If we've somehow gotten to the point that we think the visitor is the problem, then we need to reexamine our own view of what our job is," he said, adding that he wouldn't support limiting visitation. "... Quotas imply that people are a problem. If we say, 'Well a few people are okay, but multitudes of people a not,' it gets a little bit closer to the issue, which isn't overcrowding but experience. It might be, when visitation gets to a certain point, that too many people impinge upon the experience. But everybody has a different idea of what that point is. The tolerance level of people is different, and there is no magic number that says at this particular point it's too many people and at this point it's not."
- In 2013, along with former Yosemite superintendents Robert Binnewies and B.J. Griffin, Mr. Mihalic wrote an op-ed piece saying the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite should be drained so the Park Service could "heal the greatest blemish in all our national parks. ... A century ago, our nation sought to tame the wilderness with large-scale engineering projects, occasionally with destructive results. Today, we should commit to undoing one of the worst examples of that destruction. And tomorrow, we can watch a magnificent valley emerge from the depths," they wrote.
- Last summer, Mr. Mihalic, along with Mr. Zinke, then Montana's congressman, and Dale Bosworth, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote an op-ed concerning wildland fires. In it, they maintained that the public landscape in the West didn't have a fire problem, per se, but rather a land-management problem. "Today, (President Theodore) Roosevelt's conservation ethic is in jeopardy as special interests, endless litigation, and political gridlock threaten proven best practices, balanced use, and common sense while tying the hands of our resource professionals. The result is catastrophic wildland fires, destruction of critical habitat, management decisions made by lawyers, and the loss of millions of dollars in local revenue that funds schools, infrastructure, and preservation," they wrote. "What is needed to restore the conservation ethic is better management by resource professionals, greater collaboration with citizens, and increased investment in our public lands."
- This past June, during an appearance before the Outdoor Writers Association of America, he shed little light on Secretary Zinke's approach to public lands management, saying he didn't know why the secretary ended a ban on lead shot and fishing tackle, didn't know what his views were on President Trump's directive that he review the propriety of 27 national monuments, and didn't know why the secretary withdrew 17 sites in the country from the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves program.
Those who know him say Mr. Mihalic is concerned about low morale across the National Park Service, but how he would reverse that and how he would react to various administration moves, such as the goal of reducing the Park Service staff by some 1,200 employees and cutting its annual budget by nearly $400 million, and downsizing the agency's headquarters and regional staff to redirect resources to the park level, are unknown.
A Traveler request this past week to interview Mr. Mihalic was declined.
Comments
We can only hope that Mr. Mihalic hasn't met with any Russians lately. Seriously, he would be a good pick, provided he were allowed real independence. I just don't see that happening under President Trump any more than it happened under President Obama, and now that the Chief Historian of the National Park Service is a political appointee, I see no direction from that office, either. Social history is not rigorous about preserving "proven best practices, balanced use, and common sense." Those are landscape values, not social values. Mihalic is Old School--preservation. It is up to the visitor to understand the parks as parks rather than vehicles of political correctness.
The Tear-Downers, as Peggy Noonan calls them, are hoping for something else. Off with history's head unless it agrees with me! No doubt, the history of the parks isn't "perfect," but then history never is. If we sanitize it we learn nothing. If we sanitize the parks we have just rocks.
In short, good luck, Mr. Mihalic. You will need it.
Complete agreement here, Al. Your concerns for history remind me of the Texas Text Book Committee's efforts to remove the word "slaves" from history textbooks. "Agricultural workers" sounded a whole lot better, didn't it?
Mr. Mihalic would probably make an excellent director. But only if Donald could keep his little hands to himself.
Alfred, speaking of history & given the current state of political correctness and what I see as a lack of ethics in our Universities and the media today, how concerned are you that recent and current events will be (or even can be) documented objectively?
(my apologies to Kurt for being off topic).
https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/chiefhistorians.htm
Not a political appointment.
Alfred: Since when is the Chief Historian of the National Park Service a political appointee? As far as I know, and I work just a few doors away, the position is still a career position, and was actually been downgraded to a GS-14 durign the previous AD's tenure
Exactly, the position of Chief Historan was "downgraded" so the appointment would stand. It should be a GS-15, not merely a "career" position. At GS-15, every distinguished historian in the country might apply. At GS-14 they are being told: Don't waste your time.
It's the same in universities. Distinguished people know better than to apply, now with a whopping 71 percent of all college and university teaching is done by part-timers on contract. As for the "objectivity" wild places worries about, that is the first casulty of political correctness. Example: While the Left is so bent on tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee, does anyone taach that Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, offered Lee command of the Union armies? Why would Lincoln offer a slaveholder that? Perhaps because Lee could win a battle, and that is what war is all about?
So, what next? Tear down the Lincoln Memorial because he was a hyprocrite? In the past, we first learned the history before we condemned it. Now, at least two thirds of all college graduates couldn't place the Civil War in the proper century to save their lives. But boy, they can tear down a statue!
So yes, let's downgrade the position of Chief Historian, and still call it a real position. If the country were serious about history, it would be an SES position, let alone a GS-15. Perhaps David Mihalic will make it so, just as Jon Jarvis allowed the position to slip rather than fight political correctness.
I served with Dave in Alaska and found him to be dedicated to the principles of the NPS Organic Act and a true 'boots on the ground park ranger'. He joined a winter dog team expedition into the heart of Yukon Charley Nat. Preserve and traveled extensively by boat throughout the park. He never asked for special consideration and always pulled his weight. He is a pragmatist and knows how to communicate with a broad spectrum of park users and political forces. The Dave Mahalic that I knew stood up for his park and his employees. If Dave is selected to be the leader of the NPS I expect him to be a dedicated advocate for the parks and for the people who have devoted themselves to their protection and to the service of their true owners, the American public.
This makes no sense. The chief historian is still a career position, not a political appointee. GS15s can be career positions, as the chief historian position was before the downgrade. If it was an SES position, it would be more vulnerable to the political winds, which surely we do not want.