Congressman Jay Obernolte is part of an open letter from six members of congress to Acting Director Charles Ezell at the Office of Personnel Management asking for seasonal hiring authorities to be transferred to National Parks.
The letter begins saying it “supports the Trump Administration’s recent decision to increase the hiring of seasonal workers” and asks acting director Charles Ezell to give individual parks the administrative tools to do their own hiring “as quickly as possible.”
The letter mentions Yosemite, Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks as examples of parks that receive the majority of their visits beginning in Spring and says that “if sufficient seasonal workers are not hired and onboarded in time, we are concerned that basic services such as fee collection, sanitation, and transportation, will suffer. Using the normal hiring process for these seasonal workers would impair the parks’ ability to have them trained and in their positions by the time the busy season begins.”
The letter doesn’t address the 1,700 positions that were already eliminated in the National Park Service by the OPM in early February.
Luke Basulto works with the National Park Conservation Association and says from NPCA’s perspective, the letter doesn’t address the park’s dire staffing situation and with “compounding issues like the on-going hiring freeze for full-time employees and mass firings, the ability to have an expedited hiring process does not move the needle in terms of helping Joshua Tree function at the capacity it is intended to.”
Annually Joshua Tree now sees over three million visitors come through, with the busy season already in progress and continuing through spring and summer.
Basulto says that the seasonal employees will still take months to onboard before they are on the ground in the park, which is already short-staffed.
He urges Constituents of Congressman Obernolte to ask him to come through on the statements he made at a contentious February 24th community meeting in Yucca Valley, and to urge him to call on Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to reinstate those 1,700 positions lost NPS wide, lift the hiring freeze and stop further cuts.
The letter was signed by Congress members Tom McClintlock, Jay Obernolte, and Doug LaMalfa – all three republicans from California. They were joined by Tom Tiffany from Wisconsin, Elijah Crane from Arizona, and Burgess Owen from Utah.
It is unknown whether the OPM has the authority to grant National Parks the tools to do their own hiring. A federal judge has ordered Charles Ezell to testify in court today regarding the legality of the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal employees, however that order has been ignored by the Acting Director.
Previously Reported:
