Can New Director Bring Fresh Air to Nation’s Parks? : Nature: Some see Roger Kennedy as the advocate to persuade the public and politicians to revive the system.

His Smokey Bear hat cocked at a raffish angle, Roger Kennedy, the newly appointed National Park Service director, was telling a network television audience he thought people were willing to pay more to support the parks.

“I am sure that the American people are willing to be taxed, and taxed to support the national parks,” Kennedy told CBS News last month.

Even if his tongue was in his cheek, and it wasn’t, Kennedy’s comment could not have been more precariously timed, as President Clinton was struggling to minimize the impact of higher taxes in his proposed budget bill.

So, just a month after taking office, the 67-year-old lawyer, author, documentary film director, and former bank executive and museum director was summoned to the woodshed. By his own account, he was given a proper scolding by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, the man who had convinced the President that Kennedy was just the eloquent magpie to persuade the public and politicians to begin resuscitating America’s ailing national parks.

The episode came as no surprise to some who know Kennedy and predicted that he might turn out to be a bit of a rogue--a frisky old bull in a bureaucratic china shop. But there are those who believe that the Park Service, after 12 years of quiet, compliant leadership, needs such an irrepressible advocate.

As the eighth Park Service director in two decades, Kennedy is taking over an agency in the midst of an identity struggle--one that could shape the service and its 367 parks, monuments, and natural and man-made sites for years to come.

“What happens in the next few years,” said Paul Pritchard of the National Parks and Conservation Assn., “could decide whether the parks will become mass entertainment and recreation centers or whether they will function as quiet campuses of the nation’s largest outdoor university.”

Avid constituencies exist for both approaches. One side urges broader use for snowmobiling, helicopter sightseeing, bungee jumping, mountain biking and, in one Washington, D.C., park, even grand prix racing. A formidable lobby exists for punching roads into the deepest reaches of many wilderness parks to provide “windshield access” to a host of hidden splendors.

On the other side are those who want the parks reserved for the contemplative enjoyment and the scientific study of nature. Besides minimizing mechanized recreation, they want park officials to take a more active role in surrounding communities, especially when it comes to lobbying against adjacent development that could upset the balance of nature inside the parks.

Kennedy, who grew up in Minnesota and spent several summers guiding canoe trips in what is today Voyageurs National Park, talks like a conservationist. He said he supports legislation pending in Congress that would require federal, state and local governments--often at war with one another over land-use policy--to cooperate in protecting natural resources in and around national parks.

So far, he declines to take a stand on several controversies, including hotly disputed proposals to allow cars into remote areas of parks in Utah and Alaska. The fights center on an 1866 federal right-of-way law and whether it permits thousands of miles of dirt tracks, wagon roads and even dog sled trails to be widened and paved.

“I’m just not ready to say anything about that yet,” he said.

With his background in American history--each of his eight books deal with the subject--Kennedy is a good bet to stress the educational role of the parks.

“As places to learn, the parks do need strengthening and encouraging,” he said. Although he admits that he does not know where the money to hire them will come from, Kennedy said “we need to bring in better people as historians and biologists.”

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which he ran for 13 years, Kennedy was known as a charismatic leader, a showboater and an experimenter. He won praise for opening exhibits on the Japanese internment camps during World War II and on the migration of black agricultural workers from southern farms to northern factories. But he also drew criticism for dismantling the museum’s most popular exhibit--the inaugural gowns of the nation’s first ladies.

Sylvio Bedini, a retired curator at the museum, described Kennedy as having a knack for making himself the center of attention. When Bedini heard that Kennedy had decided to wear a park ranger’s uniform to his new office at the Park Service every day, he said: “The next thing I expected was to see a little bear cub in uniform trotting beside him.”

“A lot of people didn’t like his flashy style,” said curator Robert Post, who worked under Kennedy at the museum. “But he took the museum to some genuine issues of social significance. And he knew how to get what he wanted. He could go up to Capitol Hill and sit in front of the Appropriations Committee and charm the pants off them.”

Clearly, the most pressing challenge facing Kennedy and the Park Service is financial.

Demoralized and dilapidated, the Park Service operates on a budget that has not kept pace with its responsibilities. The new director inherits a $2-billion maintenance backlog that includes historic structures on the verge of collapse, closed campgrounds and trail systems going to seed. In Yellowstone Park, where the number of annual visitors grew by nearly 1 million during the 1980s, the park’s budget increased by less than $10,000 in real dollars.

Salaries and working conditions of many park rangers are an embarrassment. Last year, half of the ranger corps was earning under $25,000 a year, according to a study prepared by the National Parks and Conservation Assn. Rangers in Grand Canyon National Park live in 30-year-old trailers and, overall, 20% of the corps are housed in substandard quarters, according to a recent Park Service survey.

As turnover in the corps has nearly tripled during the past decade and the number of seasonal rangers declined about 10%, the ratio of rangers to visitors has thinned from one per 59,000 in 1980 to one per 80,000.

This summer, the first-ever shooting of a ranger in Yosemite National Park and the death of James Hudson brought the plight of the Park Service home in dramatic fashion. Hudson was a caretaker at the Lincoln Memorial who collapsed of apparent heart failure while at work after eight years on the job. Only after his death did his family learn that like many veteran employees, Hudson was categorized as a temporary worker ineligible for benefits, including life insurance.

Kennedy says his first duty will be to make life better for the 25,000 Park Service employees.

“The first obligation is to get justice done for the Park Service,” he said. “By that, I mean proper pay, proper benefits and proper housing. Those are the big price tags. Second, let’s deal with the maintenance backlog.”

When he talks about paying for all of that, the word taxes does not fall quite as freely from his lips as it once did. “I believe the preferred expression around here is revenue enhancement,” he said wryly during a recent interview in his Washington office.

Call it what you will, he still plans to ask for more money, wherever he can get it. That may be by instituting fees for older people who do not have to pay now (“I don’t think people over 65, of which I am one, ought to have a free ride”), by requiring a higher return from park concessionaires or by stumping for higher taxes.

“I guess I’ll just have to keep getting in trouble . . . by saying that if you care about the national parks, then you’ll pay for them,” he said.

Park Service advocates have high hopes for Kennedy.

“He is usually portrayed as an academic or an intellectual,” said one Park Service official. “But at the core, he is a salesman, chosen to generate public support for the parks.”

Commenting on Kennedy’s decision to wear the park ranger uniform, Pritchard at the Parks and Conservation Assn. said: “It was clear to us he understood the symbolism of the position, which to a lot of us is like a minister wearing a clerical collar.”

Kennedy sees his role much the same way.

“Part salesman, part evangelist for the Park Service? Sure. One of the virtues of being over 65 is that it is considered good behavior to talk about values and patriotism,” he said. “It doesn’t embarrass me a whit to try to reduce our responsibilities to public lands to a moral position. . . . I believe our national parks are chosen places and that we have a moral imperative to take care of those places.”

But if Kennedy has come up with an agenda for taking care of the parks, he has revealed only bits and pieces of it.

He agrees with critics of park concessionaires that commercialism has run amok in some places.

“Some of the merchandise does little to enhance the education of park visitors. . . . There are things I will strive to get out of the parks,” he said after assuming his job. Pressed for specifics, he demurred: “We’ll kind of chip away at that over time.”

Discussing the crowds at Yosemite, where the number of visitors has grown by nearly 60% over the past decade, Kennedy ruefully contemplated banning cars from Yosemite Valley, where the congestion is worst.

“Yeah, I’d like to keep cars out of the valley, but I don’t think it’s going to be done.”

Instead, he wants to limit day use at Yosemite during the most popular times of year.

He seems willing to take stronger measures to stop what he regards as outright degradation of the park system. This month he wrote a letter to the mayor of Albuquerque opposing construction of a highway that would cut through Petroglyph National Monument--already bearing the scars of target shooters and graffiti scrawlers.

“Those petroglyphs will be trashed hopelessly if we don’t get the people who live around them to take care of them,” he said, adding that he is promoting an adopt-a-monument program that would have neighbors removing trash, erasing graffiti and generally watching over the place.

Kennedy also defends the right of park officials to speak out about environmental dangers to parks. This summer, a printed guide for visitors at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia aroused the ire of local politicians by warning that pollution was making park air unhealthful for people with breathing problems.

“One of the things that I would like to alter for the better is the sense that park employees are encouraged to address questions about which they have informed judgment,” Kennedy said in response to critics of the Shenandoah visitors guide.

Kennedy’s appointment initially raised some eyebrows within the Park Service because he was an outsider. Skeptics wondered how effective he could be on unfamiliar issues. Some of that skepticism is beginning to melt as people see Kennedy as someone willing to take risks, someone with little to lose by doing so.

“They can’t take away the books he has written or the reputation he built,” said one longtime Park Service official. “What’s to prevent a guy like that from speaking his mind or doing the right thing?”

Smiling broadly, Kennedy put it more bluntly.

“Hey, what can they do? Ruin my career?”