Glacier Park staffing up in past 10 years

Hungry Horse News

While some of the nation's parks have seen staffing slashed, the number of jobs in Glacier National Park has actually gone up in the past 10 years.

The Hungry Horse News filed a Freedom of Information request with the park after members of a park activist group claimed that positions were being slashed in the Park Service by the Bush administration. That may be true in some parks, but it hasn't been the case in Glacier.

Figures provided to the Hungry Horse News show that Glacier had 107 permanent positions and 276 temporary positions in 1994.

In 2000, it had 119 permanent positions and 356 temporary positions.

The upward trend continued through the Bush years. By 2004, Glacier had 131 permanent positions and 358 temporary positions. That's an increase of about 28 percent from 1994.

The counts do not include positions at the park that were not filled. Temporary positions, which include seasonal jobs, were counted in July of each year.

The overall employment increase comes at a time when the Bush administration has come under harsh criticism for the way it has handled funding of the National Park Service.

A report in late September issued by the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees called for an increase in the operational budget for the Park Service of $600 million.

"Good for them is all we can say," said Bill Wade, a member of the Coalition and the former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park. "They certainly are an anomaly."

Wade points to drastic cuts to other parks like Olympic in Washington and the Everglades in Florida, which he says have seen severe cuts in seasonal staffing.

Wade still says the Bush administration is being disingenuous about funding levels Service-wide. He said it would be one thing if the administration was saying there's a war on terror and there needs to be some belt-tightening. But it hasn't done that. It keeps touting all the good it has done for parks, which simply isn't the case, he claimed.

"What we object to is the administration saying what great shape the parks are in and continuing with the happy talk," Wade said. Wade points to the hundreds in millions of backlogged projects in the nation's parks.

Glacier has its fare share of those, most notably the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, which needs about $100 million in repairs.

Glacier's budget saw the squeeze this year. It's operating budget budget in 2004 went down slightly. It is now $11.072 million from $11.1 million in 2003. But also added into that was a 4.1 percent pay raise that the park had to absorb.

The park also has not filled some positions this year, most notably the deputy superintendent spot, which was left vacant after park's former deputy superintendent, Jerry O'Neal, died of hantavirus in March.

Wade says his group expects a slight increase in operating budgets for parks in 2005. That fiscal year begins this month. But 2006, some budget forecasters are predicting, could be far worse.