Park Service Priorities

Your Jan. 26 article, “70% of Jobs in Park Service Marked Ripe for Privatizing,” should serve as a warning for all those concerned with our national parks. When I go to Joshua Tree National Park -- one of the most perfect places in this or any country -- I know that I will be able to have a personal and rewarding experience, free of advertising and other trappings of modern life.

With the plan to privatize jobs in the Park Service, the Bush administration is opening the door for private businesses to enter yet another part of society in which they should have no place. President Bush -- our first MBA president, as he proudly notes -- proves again that he arrogantly and ignorantly assumes that the interests of private enterprise are the same as those of the American public. There are some places where business does not belong.

Evan Garcia

Los Angeles

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As a former employee of the National Park Service, I have seen the downside of privatizing or outsourcing visitor services jobs. I ask readers to imagine an experience such as this during their next visit to Carlsbad Caverns or Mammoth Cave: At Shasta Caverns in Northern California, already operated by a low-bid contractor to the U.S. Forest Service, another tourist in my group asked, “How did the cave form?” The response from our teenage guide, which I can still quote exactly: “I’m not exactly sure, but I think it has to do with water.”

Contracting these federal jobs is wrong. Taxpayers will learn that when our precious and irreplaceable natural resources are entrusted to lowest-bid contractors and minimum-wage workers, we all will lose.

Rhys Evans

Twentynine Palms

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We have 17,000 employees who are responsible for 388 units of the national park system. About 11,524 positions have been identified in the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act inventory as commercial in nature. Of these, the system has identified 1,700 positions to be studied through fiscal year 2003 and FY 2004. A figure of 70% has never been used as a measuring stick for privatizing National Park Service jobs, nor will it be. Nor will our ranger ranks be among the positions studied for competitive sourcing.

Our employees are dedicated public servants. I am consistently impressed by the quality and commitment of their work. Your article has contributed to the public’s misunderstanding and reopened unnecessary concerns among our employees. Throughout this process, we have been very open and upfront with employees regarding competitive sourcing.

Fran Mainella

Director, National Park

Service, Washington

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“The Law Loses Out at U.S. Parks” (Jan. 23) suggests greater militarization of National Park Service rangers in light of the challenges they face patrolling the national parks and monuments along our border with Mexico. Keeping our borders secure against drug traffic and alien smuggling is a huge job, one properly entrusted to the Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the military units that support them. Pressing park rangers into this service is wrong and will do real damage to the national park system.

Park rangers belong to one of the most respected professions in this country. The ranger embodies safety for the park visitor, protection of nature and interpretation of the parks’ resources. The Southwest’s desert is beautiful and fragile -- who can forget the pictures we have seen of majestic organ pipe cactus silhouetted against a vermilion sunset? Park guardians can’t be pressed into service as just another component of homeland security, guns drawn and facing south.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s support for making park rangers report to a centralized law enforcement command in Washington smacks of a “wannabe” national security force. Park superintendents are responsible for every aspect of a national park system unit, from visitor service to law enforcement, and they must continue to direct the work of the rangers.

Joseph T. Edmiston

Executive Director

Santa Monica Mountains

Conservancy, Malibu

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Your article states that in just one small area, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, “as many as 1,000 illegal immigrants” come into the U.S. each day. That’s about 300,000 every year at just one small portion of the U.S.-Mexico border! Drugs are pouring in as well. Write your congressional representatives and demand border control. This should not be left up to park rangers.

Gwen Erickson

Ojai