Park Service Outsourcing May Hurt Diversity

A Bush administration policy of turning National Park Service jobs over to the private sector could reduce visitor services and cause unexpected layoffs, as well as undermine the agency’s efforts to create a more ethnically diverse work force, according to an internal memorandum by Park Service Director Fran Mainella.

In the April 4 memo to assistant Interior secretaries Lynn Scarlett and Craig Manson, a copy of which was provided to The Times, Mainella disclosed her reservations that the unexpectedly high costs of administering the president’s outsourcing program would have “serious consequences for visitor services and seasonal operations.”

In the first phase of the program, hundreds of jobs held by fee collectors, maintenance workers, mechanics, lifeguards, museum curators, historians, archivists, cartographers and most of the Park Service’s corps of scientists -- including nearly all of its archeologists -- have been earmarked for replacement.

Scores of firefighting jobs, including at least 40 in California, are designated for replacement.

Mainella wrote that a disproportionate number of jobs likely to be lost are held by minorities -- in San Francisco, Santa Fe, N.M., and Washington, D.C.

In the District of Columbia, she said, 89% of those in vulnerable positions are African American.

“This potential impact upon this work force concerns us,” Mainella wrote.

Top Interior and Park Service officials would not comment on the memo Friday, but a Park Service spokesman said the document was intended as informational and meant to express Mainella’s concerns about her agency’s inability to pay for the outsourcing studies.

“We’ve got a $2.5-billion budget, and $2 billion is for operating expenses,” said Park Service spokesman David Barna. “She’s saying, ‘I have these concerns. Where am I going to get the money to pay for this?’ ”

Mainella stated in the memo that “the costs are too significant to be covered by the affected parks as some in the [Interior] Department have suggested.”

A former head of Florida’s state park system, Mainella became the first female director of the National Park Service when she was appointed by Bush in 2001.

The privatization initiative is part of the Bush administration’s effort to identify as many as 850,000 federal jobs that could be performed by private-sector employees. Administration officials say the program is not so much about saving money as promoting efficiency and injecting free market-style competition among current employees.

Critics say the policy is driven by ideology rather than common sense.

“It sounds to me that the reality of the contracting-out agenda of the Bush administration is so unreasonable and ill-conceived that the effect on the parks is beginning to dawn on Ms. Mainella,” said Frank Bouno, a former assistant superintendent at Joshua Tree National Park and a board member of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit group that represents federal workers employed by public land management agencies.

Although Mainella did not specify what reduction in park services could occur, park superintendents are concerned that with budgets tight already, they might have to scale back on a variety of visitor services if faced with employee cutbacks.

The Park Service has been struggling for several years to make its work force more diverse. As late as the mid-1990s, 87% of the Park Service’s professional staff was white. Today, in the seven-state, 54-park Pacific West Region, which includes California, there is only one African American park superintendent: J.T. Reynolds at Death Valley.

“The Park Service has enshrined the idea of creating diversity in its work force as one of its top goals,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER. “That goal, according to the director, is going to be one of the casualties of this program.”

Brendon Danaher of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union with 20 local affiliates within the Park Service, said the loss of diversity was predictable.

“Privatization often targets minorities,” he said.

For Reynolds, a 33-year veteran of the Park Service, the absence of minorities in the agency is glaring, particularly at higher levels.

“The majority of people of color are in low-graded positions,” Reynolds said. His concern with the outsourcing effort, known as A-76, is the lack of monitoring of private contractors.

“The federal government has no control over who those companies will hire,” he said. “The Park Service would lose a number of their ethnic employees at the expense of providing opportunities for the private sector. Employees have been raising this issue for quite some time. The Park Service has had a program to deal with diversity. A-76 will defeat that program.”

Interior officials have maintained that there is no quota on positions to be privatized. Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Scott Cameron predicted in January that no more than 4% of the 16,470 current park employees would lose their jobs. That would amount to about 650 workers. But, according to Mainella’s memo and a spreadsheet detailing outsourcing studies through the end of February, 900 jobs have been identified as replaceable with at least 800 more under study.

Under the program, some federal workers who lose their jobs could be hired elsewhere in government, Cameron said.

By January, Interior officials had determined that the Park Service’s entire science staff could be replaced. The outsourcing of the agency’s archeologists comes in the middle of an effort to create a systemwide inventory of Park Service cultural resources.

The privatization program has demoralized scientists across the Park Service, said one agency veteran, who also said Park Service employees are anxious to find out whether their jobs are in jeopardy.

“To say we feel underappreciated would be a mild statement,” said Doug Scott, an archeologist at the Park Service’s Midwest Archeology Center in Lincoln, Neb. In September, Scott received the Distinguished Service Award, in part for his expertise in battlefield forensics, a skill developed at Civil War sites managed by the Park Service.

“Morale is at the bottom of the barrel. In my 28 years, this is the worst it’s been. It’s a zombie-like atmosphere. People are hurting.”