In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

131 c h a p t e r 6 Death Valley in the Twenty-First Century At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Death Valley National Park’s prospects had improved, for it had addressed many of the issues that had vexed its managers since 1933. Between the 1980s and late 1990s, Death Valley had completed the transition to national park status, added an enormous wilderness area, and standardized procedures and practices at a new and higher level than before. The park had already synchronized its management with the 1991 Vail Agenda, the redefinition of National Park Service objectives that stemmed from the agency’s seventy-fifth-anniversary conference and its powerful emphasis on resource management as the lead management goal for the park system.1 Death Valley had also addressed long-term issues such as burro management, and the regional planning process proceeded apace, promising the kind of integrated management of the desert that park staff had craved for more than fifty years. The Timbisha Shoshone were on the verge of attaining their long-term goal—land designated as their homeland in perpetuity—a reality that had led to strife within the Department of the Interior and between it, the park, and the tribe. Even the unbelievable backlog of maintenance issues that the park faced was being addressed. In the three decades following 1980, Death Valley had improved its ability to protect its resources and serve its visitors. That said, the new century also presented an array of new challenges at the park level and in the National Park Service as a whole. In 1995, to meet the objectives of Vice President Al Gore’s call to reinvent government, a major component of which was to reduce the size of the federal government, National Park Service director Roger Kennedy made a tactical decision to change the agency’s hierarchy. He froze all positions in the parks, forced the central offices to absorb the cuts 132 d e at h va l l e y n at i o n a l p a r k in staffing and funding, and then moved surplus people into the park-level positions . Kennedy designed this strategy to reduce staffing by 30 percent and save thirty million dollars.2 Kennedy’s decision redistributed authority, power, and resources throughout the National Park Service. It purposely eviscerated the regional offices, long the mainstay of management, oversight, and specialized expertise, leaving few managers who could hold park-level management accountable. The changes left each regional director with a minimal staff in cultural and natural resources, one person representing the rangers, one in administration, and very few others. The National Park Service moved interpretation, maintenance, and all other professionals into park-support offices. This change created two regional offices where the agency previously had only one, but the two offered less support and assistance than their predecessors, and the oversight long housed in the regional offices simply disappeared. Clusters of parks, based loosely on geographical similarities, determined regional priorities for research, preventive and rehabilitative maintenance , and most other budget functions previously handled by regional office staff. Parks were supposed to work closely together and share their expertise.3 By most accounts, the reorganization upended the standard practices of the agency, but did not replace them with a viable operating system. When the regional offices disappeared, people moved into leadership positions in parks for which they had no expertise or previous experience. Some parks found themselves with assistant superintendents, the operations chief of the park, who had never served in a park and had little conception of how parks functioned. Many experienced people took “early out” retirement options, sometimes with large incentive packages. Often the ones who left had precisely the expertise that the agency needed, leaving not only a gap in institutional memory but also diminished capacity. “The 1995 reorganization was a waste of money, people, and lives,” observed longtime National Park Service historian and superintendent Melody Webb in one of the most strident attacks on the reinvention process.4 Even more daunting was a change in the distribution of responsibilities that accompanied the restructuring. As part of the reorganization, a nationwide programmatic agreement shifted compliance to park superintendents instead of regional offices. The complicated legal nature of most of compliance mandates required at least some centralized authority. The process demanded an even larger share of scarce park resources. The specialists sent from the regional offices to the parks were supposed to pick up such obligations...

Share