Administration Intensifies War on Park Service

One day this spring, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel called National Park Service Director William Penn Mott Jr. and his assistant Loran G. Fraser into a conference room, interrogated them before a dozen other officials without telling them why they were being questioned, accused them of improper conduct and suggested they might face criminal actions. A few days later both men were formally notified by a department solicitor that they were under investigation and might be wise to hire attorneys.

It wasn’t the first time Hodel had sent the NPS inspector general after a park service official. In 1986 the staff at Grand Canyon, after much study, recommended restrictions to protect the park’s quiet from air-tour operators who fly airplanes over the canyon in great numbers. Hodel, who generally favors use-for-profit operations in the parks, called for an investigation of the staff people who prepared the plan. The investigator found no wrongdoing.

This newer investigation is more mysterious. Nearly four months later, neither man has been told what exactly he is being investigated for. Fraser’s attorney, Lawrence Speiser, said he cannot even find out who has accused them.

The subject of the Mott-Fraser grilling by Hodel was the assignment of Fraser to help private citizens form a committee that would promote a national week of celebration and thinking about America’s outdoor resources. The celebration was to promote the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors, urging “a prairie fire” of concern for outdoor resources and more than $1 billion a year in funding to acquire and manage outdoor recreation resources. Fraser had been deputy director of the commission. From accounts of the meeting, Hodel was apparently concerned that Fraser was working for a private group while on the government payroll. But Fraser had been praised for doing just that, as a member of a group that recommended the formation of the President’s commission; federal law allows for such transfers of government personnel. Moreover, for months, said Speiser, his attorney, “Everybody in Interior was aware that Mr. Fraser was helping in the celebration.”

Park Service officials describe the affair as “bizarre” and “farfetched.” Nearly everyone connected with the investigation agrees that some deeper difference has moved Hodel to this unusual action.

At the heart of the conflict between Hodel and Mott is the Administration’s deep-seated ideological dislike of acquiring--and paying the costs of managing--public land. For years, the park service watched the rapid development of the nation’s remaining scenery and urged the purchase of new lands before the price became prohibitive. And it watched the threats to existing parks grow menacing, from neighboring mining, energy development and subdivisions.

William J. Whalen, NPS director during the Carter Administration, described the park service mission as “protecting the best of what’s left in America.” That seemed to require spending for acquisitions and for the studies needed to demonstrate that neighboring developments were threatening. But Hodel and his predecessor, the controversial James G. Watt, opposed acquiring new lands or funding for research. Instead, the Administration has favored National Park Service management that focuses on providing services for visitors--roads and water treatment and garbage collection.

Congress has tended to side with the park service; that support, and Civil Service rules, have kept the secretary’s office from simply sweeping all the park service bureaucracy out. So, increasingly, the secretaries have reduced NPS power. The secretary’s office has consistently squelched plans prepared by career park service personnel. After years of study led the NPS to ban motorized rafts on the Colorado River, Watt nullified the decision. When park staff called for an environmental impact statement to examine the consequence of an oil company’s plan to explode dynamite charges over 86 miles of seismic testing lines in Big Cypress National Preserve, the secretary overrode the recommendation.

Man by man, Watt and Hodel have attempted to weed out or isolate park professionals who see things differently. On taking office, Watt installed a loyal aide who had no park experience as second in command to NPS Director Russell Dickenson. Said former NPS Director George B. Hartzog Jr., “They totally cut Dickenson off from his organization, so he sat there as a ceremonial head of his agency until he decided to retire.”

Politics are nothing new to the park service. Developers have used friends in Congress or in the White House to build dams and prospect for oil in the parks. Before the early ‘70s, however, politics didn’t threaten the professionalism of the agency.

That began to change under President Richard M. Nixon, who got rid of Hartzog in 1972, reportedly because the park service director had withdrawn a use permit that would have given Nixon crony Bebe Rebozo exclusive docking privileges within Biscayne National Park, Florida.

In the last eight years, politics have reached new levels of meanness. In one instance, Assistant Secretary William P. Horn changed the park service director’s performance rating of one regional director from “excellent” to “marginal” after the director refused to sign a statement saying Yosemite would never need to acquire any of the privately held lands inside the park. “Things have become very personal,” said former NPS Director Whalen.

The conflicts have environmentalists and former Interior officials worried about what they may do to the highly dedicated and often idealistic employees who make the parks run. Former Under Secretary for Parks and Wildlife Nathaniel P. Reed recently made public a letter he wrote to Hodel, in which he charged that the Administration had “lost any appreciation, understanding or respect for our parks and our park system” and decried “politicization of the service.”

Said Hartzog, “There’s a great wave of concern out there that the parks are going to hell in a hand basket. Less than 5% of the people in the Washington office have ever put in a day’s work in a national park. There isn’t any such thing as morale in the agency.”

Hartzog points out that the genius of the early NPS directors was to take politics out of the parks and lodge them in the director’s office in Washington. That freed the personnel in the parks to deal personally and openhandedly with the public, and made the character of the ranger one of America’s most respected institutions. Park rangers and interpreters have worked largely for the joy of doing good work and doing it well; they have been the agencys’ greatest resource.

By destroying the Washington office’s ability to deal with politics, this Administration risks pushing politics back into the parks. It puts rangers on notice of the fragility of their employment and the limits on their freedom of speech. It declares to them that the ideals of service, resourcefulness and forthrightness that make them want to be rangers and wildlife managers are unwelcome.

In response to such concerns, Rep. Bruce F. Vento (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) have introduced legislation that would remove the power of the secretary of the Interior over the National Park Service. It requires that the director of the service be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, rather than selected by the secretary. It would reassign park service matters now conducted in the secretary’s office back to the park service, and would establish a national parks review board to report annually to Congress about park needs, new areas and budget.

Critics argue that passage of the bill would not end the politicization of the park service, that developers and oil companies, entrepreneurs and conservationists alike will always find officials willing to advance their cause. But it might restore political sense to the parks and permit the National Park Service to protect the best of our natural and cultural heritage.