At California’sYosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.
I think this is the first time in 20 years of writing at RedState that I just copied the lede from anyone’s story because there was no way to do better. That’s how the Washington Post frames the impact of the National Park Service unloading about 1,000 probationary employees. Keep in mind that the NPS has a total workforce of 20,000 and hires over 7,000 seasonal workers.
Before returning to the mortal danger of being locked forever in s***house in Yosemite National Park, let’s take a look at some of the other impacts that will ruin your summer.
The wait to enter Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park this past weekend was twice as long as usual after the administration let go four employees who worked at the south entrance, where roughly 90 percent of the park’s nearly 5 million annual visitors pass through.
And at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, last week’s widespread layoffs gutted the team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses. Visitors received notifications that their reservations had been canceled indefinitely.
The New York Times has a parallel story, with more tales of horror.
“If you’ve planned your bucket list trip to a national park, you may have to take into consideration that you won’t have the full experience and reschedule for next year in the hopes it gets better,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan organization.
…
At the Grand Canyon, a depleted staff of fee collectors resulted in lost revenue for the park over the weekend, and because of a lack of staffing at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado, the park announced it would be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
…
Arianna Knight, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., the wilderness trails supervisor for the Yellowstone District of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, was let go on Feb. 14 along with more than 30 other Custer Gallatin employees. Ms. Knight said she and two workers under her supervision typically cleared 4,000 downed trees and logs from hundreds of miles of trails each year, often hiking and using hand tools for a week at a time in wilderness areas, where federal law prohibits motorized vehicles and mechanized tools like chain saws.
Now those trails won’t be cleared, Ms. Knight said, adding, “People are going to suffer.”
Now, back to the crisis at Yosemite.
Nate Vince, Yosemite National Park’s fired locksmith, said he found out about his termination three weeks before the end of his probationary period. The 42-year-old said he worries about not only his career prospects, but also the safety and security of park visitors and workers.
Yosemite, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, has hundreds of locked buildings and gates. Sometimes visitors get locked inside vault toilets or restrooms. Sometimes employees get locked out of their houses in the middle of the night.
“We have a federal court, administrative buildings, toilets, closets, gun safes,” said Vince, who started working as a permanent employee at the park in March after four years as a seasonal employee. “We have endless things that need to be secured in various forms, and I’m the sole keeper of those keys, the one that makes the keys, the one that fixes the locks, installs the locks, and has all that knowledge of the security behind the park. And so it’s a critical role. And without it, everyone else in the park is handicapped.”
I’d suggest that if you are locked in a crapper from the inside, you are probably able, with enough coaching, to figure out how to unlock the door. If not, I’m sure a quick call to 911 will save you before you are reduced to drinking from the toilet. If one guy has the keys to the federal courthouse and all the gun safes, firing him might be a useful lesson in organizational resilience.
I appreciate National Parks as much as the next guy, and I’d be one of the last to gloat over some working-class guy losing his job, but nothing in these two articles makes a case for the continued existence of these lost jobs. Taking reservations for historic homes at Gettysburg sounds like the quintessential contractor operation, likewise, with clearing hiking trails through a National Forest.
The fact is that we are spending too much and getting too little for it. Another point is that if you are unwilling to cut five percent of an agency’s workforce in a time of trillion-dollar deficits, you are a monumentally unserious person who should be ignored.
