Privatizing Study Targets Parks

Government to evaluate fee-collecting jobs at Sequoia and Yosemite.

by Michael Doyle
Fresno Bee, April 1, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Fee collecting kicked off Yosemite National Park Superintendent David Mihalic's career. Now he's contemplating it again.
Only this time, several decades after his entrance-station start as a young ranger, Mihalic oversees one of the nation's most beloved parks. That puts him in a poignant position as the Bush administration weighs a potentially widespread privatizing of park jobs.

Among the first jobs on the line could be 41 fee-collecting slots at Yosemite and 19 fee-collecting slots at Sequoia National Park.

The entrance station positions invite study because the work doesn't seem inherently governmental by nature; but that, Mihalic says, could be misleading.

"They'll have to look beyond the obvious," Mihalic cautioned. "The person at the entrance to the campground [has] to do more than collect the fees. They're the public face of the park."

Mihalic, who started off taking money at Yellowstone National Park's north entrance, is prepared along with others to contend that fee collectors are properly government workers. Though they're no longer part of the same civil service track as park rangers, the fee collectors have responsibilities that go beyond the entrance station.

For instance, Mihalic noted that the first park-safety information visitors receive comes at the entrance stations. In some cases, the park service has won lawsuits by noting that injured visitors had been properly warned of dangerous bears or tides by entrance station workers.

"They're often the only ones that can provide this information," Mihalic said.

Sequoia spokeswoman Kris Fister agreed the fee collectors perform more of a public function than simply taking money. Sequoia will be studied this year, and Yosemite next year.

"You can't blow it out of proportion," Fister said, "but in a lot of parks, they do provide a lot of safety-related information. We view them as our front line in some respects."

But this view will be put to the free-market test as Interior Department consultants begin evaluating jobs nationwide. The department's goal is to subject 3,500 jobs likely to include map-drawing, lawn-cutting, trash-collecting and more to competition with private bidders.

In Yosemite, for instance, park service trash collectors haul away bins from behind public buildings, while private trash collectors haul away essentially identical bins from behind concession buildings. A reasonable question is: Why couldn't one private company do both?

This week, the Interior Department's 70,000-plus employees nationwide received a relatively rare departmentwide memo advising them of the latest in what's called "competitive sourcing." This is the effort to identify jobs the government can hand off to for-profit business, a move whose sensitivity is reflected in the latest efforts to soothe employee concerns.

"In comparing the quality and cost of our services to similar services available from the non-Interior providers, we expect that, in many cases, current or re-engineered in-house activities will be shown to offer better value to the American people," Assistant Interior Secretary P. Lynn Scarlett reassured workers.

At the same time, Scarlett stressed the administration's willingness to look outside government to find the "best, most cost-effective ways to deliver excellent customer service." The Bush administration, in its overall budget, asserted that "half of all federal employees perform tasks that are readily available in the private sector."

This is a view some Bush administration officials held long before taking their current jobs. Before joining the Interior Department, Scarlett was president of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation. The foundation is affiliated with libertarian ideas and promotes what it calls "public policies based on rationality and freedom." Privatization of federal jobs is a significant component of this.

Another memo sent to park service workers in California clarified the stakes.

"It is apparent there are benefits to be gained from a process like this," John Reynolds, regional director for the park service's Pacific West Region, advised workers in December.

"But the obvious concern to us all is that it also potentially threatens the jobs of people in the National Park Service."