The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the End --October 10, 2006

The Good---for instance, Rangers who swear in Junior Rangers!

The Good!

Working as Park Rangers has been just as exciting and enjoyable as we had expected!

Everyday we’ve been able to talk with people and to share stories and experiences; we’ve been able to help them enjoy their vacations and their time at the Lighthouse; and we hope we’ve been as helpful to them as so many Rangers had been to us in the past.

And in return, people have been wonderful! They have been friendly, they have been appreciative of what we do, and they remind us again and again of how lucky we are! In fact, almost every day a visitor will thank us for what we are doing; and people are always sharing how jealous they are and how much they would like to be Park Rangers!

Meanwhile, the other seasonal Rangers and our supervisors also have been great! They are people who enjoy the natural and physical resources of our park, who look forward to working with people and preserving the resources of the park, and who are interested in teaching, communicating, and educating.

And so it’s been good!

Of course, as with any large organizations, there are some problems in the National Park Service. It’s a large bureaucracy, it’s a department of the federal government, and it suffers from the usual tribulations of large, federal bureaucracies. In talking about these problems and in describing some of them, I hope no one gets the wrong impression. We do so not because we want to criticize, but because we are concerned and hope things can change; we describe the “Bad” and the Ugly” as we’ve experienced them not because we are discouraged or frustrated, but because we see ways in which the National Park Service could improve and become even better.

And if given the chance, we look forward to many more years of either working as seasonal Park Rangers (Interpretation) or as volunteers in some of our National Parks!

The Bad---for instance, Rangers who get eaten by mosquitos!

The Bad

When we first started volunteering at Ellis Island and during the first few months of seeking jobs as Park Rangers, someone said things are done three ways: the dumb way, the dumber way, and the government way!

After years of dealing with state bureaucracies and DEP bureaucrats, I had a suspicion of what he was suggesting, but we have seen other examples!

For instance, employment policies often are inefficient and illogical, human and natural resources are often wasted or remain unused, and channels of communication can be convoluted and totally ineffective.

• Human Resource or Employment Practices:

  Often within the NPS there is very little staff continuity among the full time employees, and hiring practices compound the problem among the seasonal workers. When we arrived here, for instance, only three of the seasonal Rangers had been at Cape Hatteras before---our Lead Ranger was a seasonal and was new to Cape Hatteras; the District Chief of Interpretation hadn’t been in the Interpretation section for years; the Park’s Head of Interpretation was new in her position, and the Superintendent of the Park was brand new. And so no one knew what had worked in the past and/or what had not worked, or what we were supposed to do or not do, or what programs and schedules had worked best and which had not worked.

  The development of our summer interpretive programs and schedule was slow and inefficient at best, a sense of disorganization prevailed often, and we frequently changed schedules, procedures and plans. This wasn’t caused by any personal weaknesses or failures in our supervisors or leaders; it was caused by their total lack of recent experience here at the Lighthouse.

  And now we are seeing it happen all over again!

  For the “winter season” there are two “seasonal” Ranger positions here. To hire people, the NPS uses a system which gives absolute priority to the numerical scores given to written applications. Veterans get an extra five points; and no “extra credit” is given to those who have been here for the summer, who know how to answer visitor questions and can present interpretive programs about the Lighthouse and Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

  Eventually all the names of those who received the highest scores or a score of 100 are put into a computer, the names are placed on a “randomized” list, and the hiring staff has to work down the list.

  Here at Cape Hatteras, several of the summer Rangers applied for the positions along with over two hundred other people. Any maybe because they are verbal people and not as good with written applications, or maybe because they were working so hard they didn’t have time to write their KSA’s (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities) as carefully and as well as they should have, some of our better summer Rangers didn’t make the final list of more than 25 who received a perfect score on the application.

  Consequently, none of our regular summer interpretive Rangers will be hired for the winter. One person worked for the Natural Resource group and the other person will be totally new.

  To be sure, we often hear that there are problems in the NPS because of budget cuts, and that may be true. But not giving priority to Rangers who have worked well at a Park and would like to stay is not a budgetary problem, it’s a management one.

• Maximizing Human and Natural Resources: Seasonal housing here and at many National Parks consists of dormitory-style, single sex apartments, trailers, or duplexes. For married couples this is very difficult, and that’s why Sara and I purchased a motor home so we could live together.

  In addition to dormitory-style trailers for employees, the Park has a very nice campground with nine sites for volunteers located verynear the seasonal housing. Before we left New Jersey, however, we had been told that employees of the Park couldn’t live in the volunteers campground even if it wasn’t being used or wasn’t full. Consequently we made reservations at Cape Woods Campground, a private campground in Buxton that has charged us between $650 and $775 a month. In contrast, the other Rangers who live in the old double wide trailers (three people per unit) are charged $160 a month.

  Shortly after we arrived, however, some of the park volunteers in the volunteer’s campground began questioning why we were living “off site” and paying so much since only three sites were being used. To be sure, throughout the summer there were never more than five sites being and for the last three months there have been only one or two of these sites being used.

  We heard often that the NPS has very little money, and sometimes there were problems reimbursing volunteers for supplies they had purchased. And so we offered to pay the Park anywhere between $320 a month (the same as we would have paid if both of us had lived in Park housing), or $600 a month (what we would have paid if we had stayed in one of the regular Park campgrounds,) or even the equivalent of what we were paying Cape Woods Campground.

  At first we were told that the volunteer campground was only for volunteers and that staff simply could not live there.

  Then half way through the summer we heard that in the future, Rangers and staff members would be allowed to live in the campground. That was progress!! But we couldn’t move into the campground because the Park Service hadn’t decided how much to charge us.....and that could take several months.

  Apparently the Park Service wants to get out of the housing business and so setting up a fee schedule for employees using the campground would somehow violate this goal. This doesn’t make sense----since by living in a motor home we saved the Park the expense and headache of maintaining two rooms in Park housing for us. By not making a decision, the Park lost somewhere between $1920 and over $4000 in unanticipated income during the summer!

  Meanwhile because we are married, and because we chose to save the Park the expense of maintaining some kind of housing for us, we had to pay approximately $2400 more than all the other Rangers for our housing. There’s something wrong with this picture! And in the business world it would be considered a waste of resources and a failure to maximize income. Or, some people would say, it’s bad management!

  Parenthetically one more example.

  Another Ranger and his wife had both been offered a position here, but they had two boys who would have had to live with them. They were told that wouldn’t be possible. Housing in town or anywhere in this area would have been prohibitive, and so the man came, and his wife and children stayed home for the summer. Since Sara and I were not living in the housing units, one could argue the Park had two extra “beds” available. And since President Bush, the current administration, and many previous administrations have stated again and again how “marriage friendly” we should be, why is the National Park Service making decisions like this which are so “un-marriage friendly”? And the Park Service probably could have charged extra for the boys (four people living in the unit instead of two or three).

  So not only did the Park Service effectively adopt a very marriage and family unfriendly policy, it also rejected the possibility of additional income. Why?

  In our case, and in the example above, the decisions that were made or not made were not driven by budgetary issues, or staffing issues. They were not made by mean-spirited people. They were examples of just poor management, and it was bad!