Park Service Plan to Downsize Sparks Disputes : Government: Internal debate slows agency’s efforts to deal with Administration’s directive to shrink work force.

The National Park Service--the custodian of Yellowstone, the Everglades and the Washington Monument--is poised to undertake a multimillion-dollar reorganization that will downsize the Washington headquarters and give new power to park superintendents.

The draft plan has divided the Park Service and created morale problems at regional and Washington offices facing staff cutbacks. Longtime employees contend the reorganization will cost significantly more than currently projected, will put parks at increased risk to environmental dangers and will weaken accountability. Supporters of the plan, however, say it will force the Park Service into dealing with environmental questions outside park boundaries and put more staff in the parks.

The disagreements inside the Park Service reflect, in varying degrees, the debates under way in virtually all government departments as federal officials deal with how to implement the Clinton Administration’s decision to shrink the federal work force by 12% over the next five years. For the Park Service, whose historical sites and parks attract about 273 million visitors each year, the proposed reorganization would transform traditions and practices that have remained mostly unchanged since 1934.

George T. Frampton Jr., the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, in describing the plan’s effect, said it would bring not just generational change but a “century change” to the Park Service.

Vice President Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative provided the framework for the proposed Park Service changes. In keeping with Gore’s directives, the Park Service will flatten its Washington headquarters structure, cut back its regional offices and try to shift personnel from mostly invisible desk jobs into the parks or into positions that directly support park rangers.

The Park Service has tried to blend Gore’s desire to reduce bureaucratic layers with past and current park efforts aimed at protecting the nation’s treasured geographic and cultural sites.

In Frampton’s view, the proposed reorganization will help shift the Park Service away from its traditional command-and-control management structure toward an approach built on peer groups, consensus and the development of partnerships with landowners, local and state governments and other groups outside park boundaries.

At the Everglades, for example, almost all the decisions about the quality of water in the park are made by farmers and state and local authorities. Frampton thinks the Park Service must become more agile in developing strategies to protect the parks from environmental threats that originate beyond park boundaries but affect park land.

But the plan’s critics include several Park Service employees who, speaking on condition they not be identified, contend that the downsizing effort will actually create a less unified system that will create new power centers. At the same time, the critics argue that stripped-down management ranks will not be able to stay on top of developments in 366 separate park system sites.

According to draft documents on the proposed reorganization, the Park Service, which has about 19,000 “full-time equivalent” employees, would shed about 1,300 of them over 2 1/2 years. The Washington office, which numbers about 1,100 employees, would be cut to 200 workers, according to the draft plan.

But Frampton suggested that the personnel cutback would not be as dramatic as envisioned in the proposal. He said current projections showed the Park Service cutting 700 jobs, with the Washington office losing about 350 positions.

Determining how many people will lose work hinges in part on how many more employees sign up for “buyouts” and whether the Park Service is granted a fiscal 1996 budget increase that allows extra hires, Frampton said. As of Labor Day, 423 employees had opted for buyouts.

Regardless of how the personnel numbers play out, Frampton said they are in keeping with the Administration’s government-wide goal to decrease management structure substantially.

“What’s happened over time is that you ended up with a lot of people in the Washington office who basically review and check off decisions made at the regional offices. And the regional offices had two or three levels who would check off decisions made by superintendents,” Frampton said.

Those layers that existed only for double-checking and passing on decisions can be significantly reduced, Frampton said.

To accomplish that goal, the draft plan would pare back from 10 to seven the number of Park Service regional offices and consolidate or reduce staffing at national program centers that provide specialized expertise, such as historical interpretation.

The regional offices would be replaced with seven field directors who would have a staff about one-tenth their current size. The bulk of the regional employees would shift to 16 system support offices set up closer to the parks but outside the chain of command. The remaining employees would take jobs in the parks.

The parks, in turn, would organize into “clusters,” with 10 to 35 parks in each one. Park superintendents in each cluster would meet to figure out ways to stretch limited funding and to share approaches to environmental or other policy issues.

Frampton acknowledged that the plan--put together by a committee of rangers and managers--would expand park superintendents’ authority and, to succeed, requires improved leadership skills.

“It demands somebody other than a manager simply accustomed to taking orders and translating them into other orders,” Frampton said. “If we’re going to manage to protect park resources in the future, then they’re going to have to be up to it.”

The plan’s critics argue that it is folly to expect park superintendents ever to agree on budget priorities, and some contend that the new 16 support offices will end up as fiefdoms asserting their independence from the parks.

Frampton, who has met with a wide range of employees about the reorganization, said he had his own list of tough questions that need answers.

“There are some significant risks to this reorganization. I think anytime you really try to look ahead 10 or 15 years and make changes to update an organization to your vision of what the future problems are going to be, it’s risky,” he said.