Policy at Heart of Feud Inside U.S. Park Service

During 40 years with the National Park Service, Howard Chapman worked his way up through the ranger ranks, spending the last 15 years in San Francisco as the Western regional director--all, he says, without a blemish on his record.

Then last fall, top officials of the U.S. Department of the Interior, overriding the recommendation of Chapman’s supervisor, gave the 61-year-old career ranger a bad performance rating and suggested that he take “immediate reassignment” or an early retirement.

Instead, the normally taciturn regional director is fighting back.

News of the unfolding Chapman case has reverberated through the tightly knit ranks of professional rangers, coming as it does on the heels of an Interior Department effort to reorganize top park service management and to rewrite national park policies.

Critics of the Interior Department see the Chapman case as “the tip of the iceberg” in a power struggle between the professional ranger corps, headed by National Parks Director William Penn Mott Jr., and the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, William P. Horn, a political appointee.

Beyond the personalities and power struggle, there are practical effects involved in the dispute, such as the number of visitors and types of recreation allowed in the national park system. Mott and Chapman represent the professional ranger corps that wants to limit recreational use so that natural and historic resources are preserved for future generations.

Horn believes that the national parks should be accessible to a greater number of people for recreational use without impairing the parks. He believes, for example, that flights carrying tourists can be continued through the Grand Canyon without any harmful effects.

Horn’s reorganizational efforts are only the latest Interior Department attempt to “change the fundamental, long-established policies of the National Park Service,” said T. Destry Jarvis, vice president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. “They’ve tried to do this before and failed because of the professionals like Chapman who have fought to protect the parks.”

Tim Mahoney, the Sierra Club’s representative in Washington, charged that Horn “has an amusement park mentality and he’s trying to write this into the service’s policies.”

Until Chapman decided to talk openly, the struggle between senior park service professionals and the political appointees in the Interior Department had been taking place out of public view. This case has focused attention on the management shake-up and proposed policy changes.

In Congress, a House Interior subcommittee is holding a hearing today to question Horn and Mott about the management shake-up and the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees Interior Department budgets has scheduled a hearing for later this month, said Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), who called the handling of the Chapman case “grossly unfair.”

Horn called these reactions “a tempest in a teapot,” and said the management changes were nothing more than “a realignment” that Mott had proposed. Mott, upset by Horn’s intervention, wrote to the assistant secretary, saying, “I disagree with most of the suggested modifications.” Horn ordered Mott, a former director of California’s state parks system, to reassign three out of the four associate directors to other jobs and to create a fifth associate directorship.

In addition, Horn has countermanded Mott’s appointment of a new Pacific Northwest regional director, putting in a man of his own choice instead.

Horn is personally supervising a major revision of the park service policy manual because, he said, the nation’s population is expanding, creating an increasing need for a wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities. The park service will have to come up with “creative” new ways to meet that need, he said in a telephone interview.

And Horn acknowledged that his views on how these policies should be changed have again revived “the age-old debate” of how to make the nation’s 337 parks, monuments and play lands more accessable to increasing numbers of visitors while protecting the natural and cultural resources that make these areas unique. Last year, 281 million people visited these areas, a 25% increase over the figure of 10 years ago.

Crucial Paragraph

The debate focuses on a single paragraph of the 1916 act creating the National Park Service. In the paragraph, Congress required that rangers “conserve” the natural and historic resources of these areas while providing for the public “enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Traditionally, when public use conflicts with protection of resources, the park service has given conservation top priority, restricting use, installing reservation systems, even closing areas entirely to preserve them. Horn finds that priority troubling and would like to modify it, if not reverse it entirely.

“Unimpaired,” is the key word in the 1916 act, according to Horn. In a memo to Mott last November, he warned that “impairment” is a “highly subjective” word and “must not be invoked to undermine the intent of Congress to provide for public use and enjoyment.” Congress never “envisioned the parks to be elitist preserves open only to the self-selected few,” he wrote.

“We have to take a stab at conservation,” Horn said in the telephone interview. “But I am troubled by what I see as a growing philosophy that we have to protect the (park) resources at the expense of the public.”

Horn is critical of park managers in the field who, faced with protecting a meadow or waterfall, “find it is easier to say, ‘Let’s close the area to the people, fence them out.’ I want to avoid putting up fences. . . . The government has an obligation try to accommodate all its citizens.” He has written, “Our job . . . is to conserve these resources for the benefit of the public, as opposed to protecting them from the public.”

These are the views first expressed by former Interior Secretary James Watt and Horn’s predecessor, C. Ray Arnett. They go to the heart of the increasingly bitter debate that now focuses on Chapman, who for several years has resisted breaking with the old traditions and policies.

Chapman began his career as a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone and worked his way up through the ranks. In 1971, he moved to San Francisco as Western regional director in charge of 44 park areas in California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and the Pacific Trust Territories. Both Yosemite and Grand Canyon are in this region.

He received a Meritorious Service Award in 1971 and the department’s Senior Executive Award.

On a scale of one to five, one being best, Mott gave Chapman a “level two” evaluation last fall, indicating that the regional director had “exceeded performance standards.” Horn wanted this reduced to an unsatisfactory “level four,” and recommended that Chapman be immediately reassigned. Mott resisted and Horn compromised on a “level three,” average rating.

“I’ve never had an average rating in my entire career,” Chapman said. “Then I hear all over the service that I’m going to retire in September, 1987, but I have no plans to retire.” Neither Horn nor Mott explained why his performance rating was lowered, he said.

“The change (from a high rating to a low one) was not due to any defendable evaluation of my performance,” Chapman said. He has contacted an attorney and said, “I won’t settle for anything less than a level two, that’s the bottom line.”

Horn, angry because Chapman has “gone public,” refused to comment on the rating or how it was arrived at, other than to say “different people raised questions about Chapman’s performance.”

“I believe it’s retribution,” Chapman said, explaining that over the past five years he has opposed Interior Department political appointees on several issues. One of these key issues was the rangers’ effort to restrict or ban aircraft flights inside the Grand Canyon. Officials estimate that 50,000 flights are made each year over or through the unregulated canyon airspace, most of them by commercial tour operators who gross $50 million a year giving rides to 450,000 visitors.

Park officials reported in an environmental assessment that helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft flights below the canyon rims not only present safety hazards, but create noise pollution that disturbs canyon hikers and river runners deep in the wilderness areas of the park. Chapman recommended that the most frequently traveled portions of the canyon be declared “flight-free zones” and that all other flights be kept 2,000 feet above the rim.

The recommendations were made before the below-the-rim midair collision of a helicopter and a twin-engine airplane that killed 25 people last June.

Mott later concurred with Chapman’s recommendation. Horn disagreed and scrapped the concept, after air tour operators complained directly to Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel. The Interior Department turned the controversy over to the Federal Aviation Agency, declaring that air safety was not within the park service’s jurisdiction. The noise problems could be studied jointly by the FAA and park service, Horn suggested.