Far more resources are needed to move national park employee housing from artists' renderings to construction/NPS

If Charles Sams, who is waiting for the Senate to confirm him as National Park Service director, is serious about his top priority being to lift the morale of the agency's workforce, seeing better, and more, housing for the field staff should be in tandem with better pay at the top of his to-do list.

"The one thing I've always learned in leadership is it's the people that are most important," Sams told U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, during his confirmation hearing back in October. "And therefore helping to improve the morale, listening to the staff, the long-term staff, and figuring out exactly what needs to be done to support them out in the field in order to be the good interpreters they are, to be able to take care of the parks in an appropriate way."

What was missing from Sams' answer was concern over the deplorable conditions some park staff endure to steward the parks. College students usually have it better in their dorms.

As Lori Sonken pointed out Sunday in her story about Park Service housing needs, the lack of enough housing, and quality housing, is costing the Park Service personnel.

“Employee housing is the limiting factor affecting park operations, project implementation (including addressing administration priorities ranging from implementing the Great American Outdoor Act to connecting with underserved communities) and workplace culture/employee morale,” Grand Teton National Park Superintendent Chip L. Jenkins told Sonken in an email.

“While we have been careful to ensure we are meeting park priorities with the resources we have, we are concerned that as fewer park employees can afford to live in the private housing market, we are going to be faced with some tough choices about core park functions in the future. Unless the park can expand its housing stock, the park will have to reconsider its resources and operation because it will not be able to house new employees,” added Jenkins' chief of staff, Jeremy Barnum.

This is not a new problem that should be catching anyone off guard. The National Park Service noted it in fiscal 2018, saying deferred maintenance for employee housing amounted to nearly $200 million.

"Compare that with the $2.2 million NPS received that year for its Housing Improvement Program. With such inadequate yearly funding, it’s no surprise the problem continues to grow," said The Pew Charitable Trusts at the time.

Stories of employee housing issues span the National Park System. As noted in Sonken's story, they can be found from Acadia to Indiana Dunes to Voyageurs to Rocky Mountain and no doubt many other locations.

Yellowstone National Park employees have been extremely fortunate, no doubt due to the revered status of their park that goes a long way in driving the superintendents' requests. More than $80 million is being spent on new housing, though it must be pointed out that the funding for the new housing at Mammoth Hot Springs began arriving three decades -- a career's worth of time -- after the park first conducted a housing inventory.

It should also be pointed out that 1996 legislation "mandated that the National Park Service review and revise the existing criteria for providing housing to National Park Service employees."

And yet, there appear to be more struggles than successes out there. Rocky Mountain National Park has to wait until 2023 before it will have the funds to replace employee housing lost last year to the East Troublesome Fire. And while Superintendent Darla Sidles is looking to improve employee housing elsewhere in her park, she says she's limited to replacing, not adding, to the housing inventory.

The need for more in-park employee housing is underscored by the advent of Airbnb and VRBO, two outlets that give homeowners more reason to seek the highest dollar when it comes to renting out their homes and place many summer rentals out of reach for Park Service seasonal employees.

Rising housing prices are adding to the woes. In Gardiner, Montana, the northern gateway to Yellowstone, a one-bed room, one-bed 576-square-foot house (shack might be a better description) is on the market for $499,000.

Exasperating the housing crunch are paychecks that won't cover the rent or pay a mortgage. With many seasonal employees making less than $40,000 a year, how can they afford rent in a gateway town unless they share housing with other seasonals?

If confirmed, Sams needs to drive these points home to Congress, and national park champions in Congress -- Sen. Angus King of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, not to mention members of the National Parks Caucus in the House -- need to show they really are champions of America's Best Idea and rise up and push any and all initiatives that will improve Park Service housing and salaries.

Waiting For Specifics 

It's been more than a month since the Interior Department released a plan intended to "outline the steps each agency will take to ensure their facilities and operations adapt to and are increasingly resilient to climate change impacts."

Specifics were wanting in that skimpy plan, as we're still not sure what that means when it comes to on-the-ground steps being taken across the National Park System. That said, there will be some money arriving to help implement those steps when they're finalized.

We're told the Build Back Better Act provides for a five-year reauthorization of the Federal Transportation Program. It is anticipated the Park Service will average $346 million over five years in FLTP funds to invest in NPS roads, bridges, trails and transit systems. However, the NPS is only guaranteed one grant award per year for a park with at least three million in  annual visitation, a condition that automatically eliminates 407 of the park system's 423 units based on 2020 visitation levels. Among those that wouldn't qualify under 2020 visitation numbers are Olympic, Glacier, Shenandoah, and Mount Rainier national parks. 

Looking at the big picture, the Park Service we're told "takes a holistic view of the asset portfolio to optimize all fund sources for all parks and to ensure we stretch the funding streams as far as possible. The reauthorization of the FLTP, along with the Great American Outdoors Act Funding, Line-Item Construction, Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, Repair/Rehab, Cyclic Maintenance, various disaster supplementals, and other smaller funding streams; enable the agency to strategically invest for the betterment of the agency’s entire portfolio. The timely funding, obligation, and completion of projects for all fund sources remains a priority for the Service. The Service continuously evaluates its project prioritization strategy relative to conditions in parks and available funding opportunities to ensure the agency is delivering the best value within a still-constrained funding environment."

Climate change long has been on the Park Service's radar, and so identifying specific projects shouldn't require starting back at square one. And the outdoor industry is lobbying Congress to move forward aggressively. A week before Interior released its plan, members of the outdoor industry asked Congress to require "significant and meaningful climate provisions" in the reconcilition bill still being hammered out.

"We are already taking significant actions to reduce emissions and embrace climate-forward practices, but the federal government needs to do more if we are going to prevent the worst effects of climate change," read the letter signed by more than two dozen companies, including Burton, Carhartt, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, REI-Co-op and Patagonia. "Meaningful federal policies are required to address the growing threat of climate change, encourage other industries to join the effort, and ultimately strengthen America’s economy."

As the Traveler pointed out in its series on how the long-running drought in the Southwest is impacting parks, hot, dry weather caused by climate change is reshaping the landscape in many Western national parks, and bringing with it an uneasiness over how plants, animals and visitors will be impacted. Examining climate-change impacts elsewhere in the park system should raise regional concerns just as serious. They stand to impact Everglades restoration, national seashores that are facing more potent and more frequent storms, parks in the Pacific Northwest that are seeing more rainfall, and Midwestern parks that could be impacted by either historic floods or droughts on a more regular basis.

Adding to the necessity for action in one area is the growing popularity of EV automobiles. While EV chargers began showing up in the National Park System as long ago as 2015, if not earlier, more parks will need them, and more than just one or two chargers per park.

Elsewhere, sea level change is challenging coastal units of the system, while parks in Alaska are struggling with melting permafrost. Can anything be done to save coral reefs in park marine waters from warming oceans? What needs to be done to protect the sequoias in national parks in California from more intense and frequent wildfires? Even employee housing should be in the mix, as employees at hurricane-weary Virgin Islands National Park no doubt can attest.

We look forward to learn of specific actions the Park Service will take so the park system can "adapt to and are increasingly resilient to climate change impacts." But we also hope Congress finds a way to ensure climate-change plans adopted by one administration are not tossed aside by another.