Senators Want Thousands More Staff Jobs At Increasingly Popular National Parks

BAR HARBOR, Maine (CBS/AP) — Maine's independent senator and a colleague from Montana want more staffing at America's National Parks to keep up with increased attendance.

Sens. Angus King of Maine and Steve Daines of Montana said visitation and workloads have increased in the parks system, but employment numbers have not kept up. They said park staffing has steadily declined over the course of the last decade.

CBS News reported last year that overcrowding prompted the launch of online reservation systems at popular parks like Maine's Acadia National Park, Montana's Glacier National Park, Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park and Zion Natural Park in Utah. For those parks that didn't have reservation systems, visitors had trouble finding parking spaces and encountered hours-long wait times to enter and more litter on the trails.

King and Daines told the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee that a good staffing level would be 23,000 full-time equivalent positions. That figure was 18,567 in fiscal 2020, the senators said. Funding has already been secured to add 1,000 more full-time positions at the parks.

"NPS staff are some of the most mission-driven employees in the federal government, and we should be ensuring that they have the support they need to continue serving the public and protecting our national treasures," the senators said.

The senators said the increased staffing is needed in a time when "many of the nation's most popular parks consistently set attendance records through 2021." After setting visitation records month-after-month, Acadia saw more than 4 million parkgoers in 2021, which is 760,000 more than in previous years.

(© Copyright 2022 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)