Crater Lake park facing difficult times

CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, Ore. – It was the nation’s sixth national park, it’s the only one in Oregon, it draws 450,000 visitors a year and it has fallen on hard times.

Popular programs are being trimmed as the government lets a $10 million maintenance backlog grow. Guided talks are being cut back. Fewer rangers are being hired.

The leaner times come despite a flood of good publicity.

The park turned 100 years old in August of 2002 and is featured on a new state license plate selected by 75,000 motorists so far. It will appear on Oregon’s commemorative quarter next year.

But the park’s budget is down and has not matched inflation, salary raises, growing security demands and higher fuel costs.

The park hired 14 seasonal employees this summer, down from 21 two years ago. Six interpretive programs, including four guided hikes, offered in 2002 are gone.

The National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, contends national parks on average operate with two-thirds of the funds they need.

Since President Bush took office, the park service has had a 21 percent drop in its employee base, according to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees, a group of 250 former agency officials.

That is crippling Crater Lake park, said George Buckingham, a retired chief ranger who worked there 11 years and lives in Klamath Falls.

The goal is to make the cuts as invisible as possible, Park Superintendent Chuck Lundy said.

But more cuts in the popular ranger-led summer programs could follow if the money crunch continues in the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, Lundy said.

“It very literally could mean we’ll have no seasonal employees whatsoever,” he said.

But some daily talks, including those on the boat tour, survive because of franchise fees paid by Xanterra, the concessionaire that operates the tours and other park concessions.

The franchise fee – 5 percent of gross revenues – normally would go into concession-related projects but now is used to slow the loss of interpretive programs.

Crater Lake’s permanent staff is down to 50 from 55 mostly because the government covered only a fraction of mandatory pay raises, forcing the park to use its revenues to pay the rest.

Staff workloads are further stretched by temporary reassignments of rangers to fight wildfires or beef up security at the agency’s most prestigious sites, such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore, during elevated terrorism threats.

“It places greater stress, a greater burden, on those who are here,” Lundy said. “It’s fair to say that these are as hard a times for employees as most of them have ever experienced.”

Crater Lake’s buildings weather an average of 46 feet of snow a year, and crews must cram in repairs during the brief warm season.