Washington – A high-ranking appointee at the Interior Department proposed fundamentally changing the way national parks are managed, putting more emphasis on recreation and loosening protections against overuse, noise and damage to the air, water, wildlife and scenery.
But a group of senior National Park Service employees rejected the proposal this month.
The 194 pages of revisions to the Park Service’s basic policy document were suggested by Paul Hoffman – a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior Department, a former aide to then- U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney in Wyoming in the 1980s and former director of the chamber of commerce in Cody, Wyo.
The revisions could have opened up new opportunities for off-road use of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles throughout the park system, including Yellowstone National Park, whose roads the department has kept open to snowmobiles.
Hoffman’s proposals often involved seemingly minor word changes, but their effect was sweeping. He proposed that illegal uses must “irreversibly” harm park resources, rather than just harm them. Instead of obligating managers to eliminate impairments to park resources, he proposed that they should “adequately mitigate or eliminate” the problems.
The draft would have added potential hurdles to procedures for designating new parks. And in its discussion of Park Service system resources and educational programs, it would have eliminated virtually every reference to the theory of evolution.
The Park Service’s ability to influence events outside park borders would have been curtailed under the draft. For instance, it would have been more difficult for park officials to request the Environmental Protection Agency’s aid in reducing haze and air pollution in parks.
David Barna, a spokesman for the Park Service, said Thursday that 16 senior employees met in Santa Fe on Aug. 8 to discuss the suggested changes and decided to scrap them in favor of a more modest rewrite.
Asked how park employees junior to Hoffman could summarily reject his proposals, Barna said, “Our view of that was he was playing devil’s advocate: ‘Gee, Park Service, tell us why you shouldn’t do this.”‘
Barna said that whatever policy emerged from the Park Service would be vetted by Hoffman and published in the Federal Register for public comment, probably next month.