In defense of the green and the gray

The Trump administration’s federal workforce hiring freeze and “resignation” offer certainly sent a chill with locals who work for the Park Service and Forest Service last week.

I reached out to more than half dozen people who I know work for the Park Service and not one of them would comment about the situation, even off the record.

Hiring freezes and government shut downs, are nothing new.

There have been plenty of calls over the years to privatize the Park Service in particular, with claims that it would be more efficient and some of that might true. The Forest Service, for example, contracts out the operation of many of its fee campgrounds and Glacier Park contracts out the operation of its major hotels and lodges.

But I can’t see the private sector filling in other roles at Glacier. Plowing the Going-to-the-Sun Road comes to mind. That job comes with a great degree of institutional knowledge. Yes, we all get frustrated when the road isn’t open and we think it should be, but that may be a symptom of underfunding rather than efficiency. If you don’t have enough people to put up guardrails after the plows have gone through then you have an issue, right?

Some also argue that government workers can simply be replaced by volunteers. Glacier already has dozens of volunteers that play critical roles in everything from research to crowd control. I can’t see them doing much more. For those of you that think volunteers can repair a trail faster than the professional crews you’re sadly mistaken.

It takes a solid day just to train a volunteer, nevermind get a turnpike in.

Even when it comes to gathering biological data, volunteers are helpful, but not an end-all. Trained biologists need to crunch and interpret the data and many times, ground truth observations themselves. 

But I think the greatest thing we need to keep in mind is that most folks who work for the Park Service and the Forest Service are good people. They’re just trying to do their jobs and many are great at it. I consider many of them friends and a few of them have won multiple awards for their ingenuity and creativity that has likely saved the federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

And yes, a few of them even work remotely, because that’s the nature of their job. They go from place to place, fixing problems or installing new systems. They’re not demons sucking the life out of the country. They’re civil servants.

Keep that in mind as this discussion moves forward. There will always be detractors on Fakebook. One thing is for certain: Glacier can’t run without seasonal employees. We need to lift the hiring freeze soon, or Glacier will suffer greatly this summer.