(COLORADO) — While in Washington, D.C., to address health care concerns, Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper held a virtual meeting with several members of Colorado’s National Parks workers to speak on concerns related to the sale of public lands, continued funding cuts, firings, and hiring freezes.
Opening the meeting, Hickenlooper recounted the firings and funding cuts that directly relate to our nation’s national parks and public lands. Specifically, he mentioned that the current administration’s budget proposal seeks to cut around $4 billion, or one-third of funds, from public lands agencies like the National Parks Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, among many others that ensure the safe operation of national parks and forests.
As far as staffing goes, Hickenlooper said that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already cut 7,500 employees from the Department of the Interior, 5,000 from the U.S. Forest Service, and “shrank the full-time workforce of the national parks service by a quarter.”
Tracy Coppola, Colorado’s Senior Program Manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, focused on how these firings have and will affect the state’s parks.
Of these, she confirmed that 25% of parks’ permanent staff have been fired. Additionally, the firing freeze has left over 100 Park Superintendent roles unfilled. Coppola also estimated that close to 9,000 parks staff have been furloughed without pay.
Coppola also mentioned that operations like an archaeological study in the Sand Creek Massacre Historical Site were halted a week before it was scheduled to start. She also raised concerns that the Rocky Mountain National Park doesn’t even know if it will be able to have controlled burns due to a lack of staffing.
She also mentioned that the revenue provided by the national parks, normally a $17 billion economy, dwindles every day under a government shutdown.
“Each day the government remains shut down, the parks lose $1 million in fee revenue,” Coppola told the call.
Many others in the call stressed that this was a nonpartisan issue and that both sides of the aisle should seek a solution to keep agencies like the Bureau of Land Management funded and staffed.
“Fires don’t just burn in Democrat districts. They burn everywhere. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” said former White River National Forest Advisor Scott Fitzwilliams.
