'Fiscal cliff' could impact Park

National park advocates warn that the so-called “fiscal cliff” and automatic cuts to the federal budget could negatively impact Glacier National Park.

If Congress doesn’t come up with a different spending plan, automatic cuts to the National Park Service as a whole could amount to more than $200 million, warns John Garder, budget and appropriations legislative specialist for the National Parks Conservation Association.

How those cuts would trickle down to a national park like Glacier Park remains to be entirely seen, but it could be significant, Garder warned.

“The ($200 million cut) is larger than the $150 million for all Park Service seasonal staff,” Garder said last week. “It’s reasonable to expect substantial impacts to hiring seasonal staff.”

The NPS already saw its budget trimmed through cuts in discretionary funding earlier this year. The fiscal cliff would deepen the cuts even further, Garder said.

All told, the NPS budget is about $3 billion annually, of which about $2.6 billion comes from congressional appropriation. The rest is revenue from a variety of sources, including entrance fees.

Glacier Park’s base operating budget in fiscal year 2011 was about $14.284 million, according to figures provided by NPS. Salaries and compensation make up 78.2 percent of its budget, or $11.66 million.

The operating budget from 2010 was actually higher — about $14.41 million. For the period 2001 through 2012, the operating budget has increased $4 million, or about 28 percent.

For its part, Glacier Park officials aren’t talking about specific cuts at this point largely because they don’t know exactly what they’ll be.

“We anticipate changes in the budget, and we’re trying to proactively respond to those changes,” Park spokeswoman Denise Germann said.

But even if the fiscal cliff is averted, there’s still a very real possibility the NPS won’t see cuts restored. Congress is under pressure to cut discretionary spending, and the cuts will have to come from somewhere.

Garder notes that the NPS budget is 1/13th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. According to NPS figures, its total operating budget increased $619.5 million from 2003 to 2011 or about 37 percent.

It could be difficult for the NPS to do an across-the-board pay cut because of how the pay scale is set up for full-time employees. In order to save costs with full-time employees, a position has to be cut.

Seasonal employees are easier to cut — they’re simply not hired back. Speaking privately to current Glacier Park employees, some seasonals have expressed concern that they won’t have a job next spring.

The Park has another way to cut labor costs — some positions are full-time jobs subject to furlough. To save costs, some employees could have furloughs extended.

Glacier Park hires between 350 to 370 seasonal employees each spring. They include maintenance staff, rangers, interpretive staff, and trail and vegetation crews.

Cuts to seasonal staff could mean fewer trails cleared, fewer people to answer visitor questions and fewer programs that enrich the Park experience, Garder warned.

“Seasonal staff are often the people having direct contact with the visitors,” he said.

Garder said a recent poll completed by NPCA showed that 92 percent of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreed that funding the NPS was “fundamentally a federal responsibility.”