Specifically, the National Park Service brass looked down from their perch in Washington, D.C., and decided that federal janitors should be replaced by private sector janitors. It's a changeover called "outsourcing," and although it's become a common buzzword under the Bush administration, it was a relatively new - and disturbing - concept to the janitors at Bighorn Canyon.
Operated by the National Park Service, Bighorn Canyon sprawls across 70,000 acres of rugged and beautiful wild West land that straddles the Wyoming-Montana border. Holm was in charge of interpretation, which is to say he made sure visitors knew what they were looking at.
But when the private janitors showed up, he said, "we lost a dimension that the uniformed employee provides."
The new private contractor did the janitorial job for a couple of years, during which Holm said "we didn't really save anything from a dollars and cents perspective, but we did incur a cost in the loss of interpretation and visitor contact. The cost came in the above-and-beyond, the things the Park Service janitors regularly did that were outside their job descriptions."
After a couple of years, the private company dropped the contract, and the National Park Service put the job back out to bid. There were no takers.
The Park Service (that is to say, taxpayers) had paid to review the jobs for possible outsourcing, had paid to make the transfer from public to private, had paid the businessmen who ran the janitorial service, had paid to extend a second bid, and finally had paid to reinstall a dismantled program that just two years prior had been running smoothly. At the same time, despite all that cost (or perhaps because of it) visitors saw the quality of service decline.
Now, after nearly three decades with the National Park Service, Holm is being asked to watch over a much bigger and broader outsourcing proposal. Holm is now superintendent at Glacier National Park, where a review begins this August to determine whether any of 50 targeted positions can be outsourced.
It is part of a push to evaluate more than 2,000 Park Service jobs nationwide for possible privatization, which is part of a Bush administration initiative to identify as many as 850,000 federal jobs for outsourcing. Ultimately, as many as two-thirds of Park Service jobs could go.
But the problem Holm faced back at Bighorn Canyon hasn't changed a bit.
"So many of our employees are multitasking," he said. "There are things they do every day, things not explicit in the job description, but that are implied just by working for the Park Service. They make visitor contact, provide local information, discuss a certain environmental philosophy that goes along with the Park Service mission. Visitors look for that uniform and rely on that uniform for solid information."
Writing a private contract to pick up the trash is easy, he said. Writing a contract to include the spirit of national parks and a career of public service is somewhat harder.
Steve Thompson, who has worn the flat-brimmed hat himself, couldn't agree more. Before taking over as Glacier Park program manager for the National Park Conservation Association, Thompson wore an NPS uniform as an entrance station ranger and later as a member of a backcountry trail crew.
He and NPCA now are asking the White House to exempt the Park Service from the outsourcing push, just as the Army Corps of Engineers has been exempted.
"I see the uniform as a major part of the public image," Thompson said. "It's a service, and these people are there to help the public. When you put on the uniform, you're assuming the entire mission of the National Park Service. The esprit-de-corps is really tied in with wearing the gray and green. How do you write that into a contract?"
His implication is that you cannot.
But former Glacier Park Superintendent David Mihalic isn't so sure. Mihalic, who has a profound respect for NPS employees and likes to note that, "It's National Park Service employees who paint the White House white," insists that "the Park Service has to be smart enough to write job descriptions that accurately reflect the duties."
That means some jobs should get new names. A "fee collector," for instance, does much more than take your five bucks at the gate. A fee collector might provide visitor information, road reports, information about dangers such as grizzly bears. A fee collector might assume some more general ranger duties, might pick up some trash.
And speaking of trash, is that trash collector hauling garbage or is he part of a team managing bears and other wildlife?
"One of the keys to this whole outsourcing thing is to be able to accurately articulate the job that's expected and required," Mihalic said. "And if there's even the remote chance of public contact in the job, you have to be able to hire people who buy into the mission."
The problem is, once you write a contract of such specificity and depth, it is quite likely that no private contractor can beat the going rate of seasonal park employees.
"Our seasonals are not what you might call highly paid," Holm said. "They work here for reasons other than the paycheck."
But under the Bush administration plan, which critics say reduces the job to a paycheck, they might not work there at all.
In an April 4 memo to assistant Interior secretaries Lynn Scarlett and Craig Manson, Park Service Director Fran Mainella warned that the cost of implementing the White House plan for outsourcing would have "serious consequences for visitor services and seasonal operations."
As many as 8,000 seasonal positions might have to be cut in order to pay the costs of outsourcing, including guides and rangers.
The cost, she wrote, of just reviewing jobs targeted in the first round could approach
$3 million, a fact she defined as a "major area of concern." In addition, pulling staffers from their usual duties to help in the reviews will create gaps elsewhere, what Mainella called "substantial additional human resource costs."
In Mick Holm's park, the first-phase review looks at campground workers, custodial employees and mechanics who maintain park vehicles. Across the nation, the first phase targets fee collectors, maintenance workers, mechanics, firefighters, museum curators, historians, cartographers and most NPS scientists.
Those scientists include nearly all archeologists, despite the fact that the National Park Service currently is hip deep in a long-term effort to inventory all NPS cultural resources.
Mainella also raised concerns in her April 4 memo regarding the diversity of the Park Service work force if the Bush plan for outsourcing is implemented. Specifically, she wrote, workplace diversity could be eroded in places such as San Francisco and Sante Fe, and especially in Washington, D.C., where 89 percent of the jobs targeted are held by African Americans.
Diversity is an especially touchy subject in the Park Service, where 87 percent of the staff was white as recently as the mid-1990s and where even today only one African American holds a superintendent's post (J.T. Reynolds at Death Valley).
"This potential impact upon this work force concerns us," Mainella wrote.
It is particularly concerning to folks such as Harry Pitman, who came up through the ranks at Glacier Park to supervise the campground workers before retiring in 1998. Under the current proposal, his former job would be contracted out.
"We weren't just cleaning campgrounds," Pitman said. "We were representatives of Glacier National Park. Visitors came to us for advice, for information, for help. I'm sure that if it's privatized, that sort of relationship would disappear. You just can't beat local people for information."
And you can't beat local workers for propping up local economies. Nor can you beat "parkies" for dedication.
"The people who work in a park are a different breed," Pitman said, "They're interested in the place, in the Park Service mission, in being in a park. That's why it all works. The basic thing is, how are the visitors going to be taken care of? That to me was the most important thing. It was more than just working a job."
Gary Gregory, a former resource management specialist in Glacier, couldn't agree more.
"The people who work for the Park Service, in general, have a sense that this is something more than a job," he said. "They're there because it's a special place and a special agency. There are definitely jobs that can be and perhaps should be outsourced. But not the jobs that have contact with the public. And when it comes to the scientific and technical jobs, I think outsourcing would be a real mistake."
Privatize, he said, "and you're absolutely not going to get the same quality of people with the same attitude."
By example, Gregory talks about a trip to Oregon Caves National Monument, where the interpretive ranger tours have been hired out.
"That entire cave tour, that employee - I won't call him a guide - he just complained about his salary, his boss, his work schedule. It was the worst tour I ever went on."
After the tour, Gregory sought out the park superintendent to complain.
"But he just threw up his hands," Gregory said. "He said he couldn't do anything because the guy didn't work for the Park Service and the contractor just ignored complaints. There's no accountability in that sort of system, and the public is the one to suffer. Yet that's why we manage these parks - for the public."
Why, then, would we outsource the jobs, he wonders.
Bush administration officials have said outsourcing is not so much aimed at saving money as it is at bringing free-market competition to government. It is a matter of ideology, not efficiency or savings.
(Ironically, the agency did not use a competitive bidding process to select the multi-national corporation charged with reviewing jobs targeted for outsourcing, seeming to contradict the goal of free-market competition.)
In fact, there exist several recent examples demonstrating that outsourcing sometimes costs taxpayers more.
Earlier this month, Joseph Schmitz, inspector general for the Defense Department, announced that a program to outsource 650 DOD jobs will cost taxpayers $30 million. The department paid a Dallas corporation $346 million for a 10-year contract to process payments to retired military families.
The Bush administration had said the outsourcing would save taxpayer money. Critics said it was a reward for the president's business friends and campaign supporters. The inspector general concluded allowing federal employees to do the job would have saved $30 million.
The inspector general also found that overhead costs remained unchanged with outsourcing, and that following privatization there were problems with holding the contractor accountable for inadequate performance.
The Park Service, however, already has outsourced thousands of jobs without substantial problems. The folks who make the beds and serve the hamburgers, for instance, are generally employees of private concessionaires, and generally serve well as park ambassadors, Holm said.
And back in the mid-1990s, amid a series of expensive and controversial NPS construction programs, the agency's Denver Service Center was downsized and outsourced.
The DSC office was home to about 750 engineers and landscape architects, the folks involved in almost all Park Service preconstruction planning.
According to Denver Service Center Director Dan Wenk, about 90 percent of the work was done in-house.
But since 1995, that ratio has reversed, with about 90 percent of the work outsourced to private firms.
"I think we view it as a very successful way of doing business," said Wenk, who added that he is moving toward contracting out 100 percent of the DSC work. "We're spending less on design, with no corresponding decrease in the quality of construction."
Wenk is a former park superintendent himself, however, and is quick to point out the difference between outsourcing an engineering job - where the public never sees the employee - and outsourcing a campground job - where the public sees the worker every day.
"It's somewhat apples and oranges," Wenk said. "What works for one sort of job might not work so well for another. All I can say is that it has worked very well here at the Denver Service Center."
Can it work in a place like Glacier Park, which like many parks is geographically isolated from large commercial centers? There are, after all, not many local companies that could compete with one another to bid on the work.
And what happens if, like at Bighorn Canyon, no one bids? Who will pay to resurrect a program already dismantled? The individual parks certainly cannot afford the costs, and the entire NPS budget is stretched thin these days. (Congress gave civilian employees of the NPS a 4.1 percent raise this year, but did not give the Park Service additional money to cover the cost. In addition, basic maintenance backlogs continue to mount, with costs measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.)
"The National Park Service is being assaulted as never before," said Ken Mabery, president of the Association of National Park Rangers. The outsourcing plan, when combined with other proposals from Washington, he said, has the "potential to adversely affect our ability to fulfill the National Park Service mission forever."
As many as two-thirds of all Park Service positions could go private under the current proposal, he said.
"Ironically, the idea behind competitive sourcing is to improve federal agencies, not impoverish them," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Mainella's April 4 memo, he said, was "a plea to the administration to come clean and disclose the real consequences of adherence to these arbitrary quotas and deadlines."
"Make no mistake," Ruch said, "this is a radical attempt to commercialize the federal work force such that the majority of people working in a national park do not answer to the superintendent but to their home corporation." Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Outsourcing "is ideological," Ruch said. "It's not aimed at cutting costs or improving service. It's a fundamental belief that the private sector is good, and if it doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger."
The Bush administration, he said, which campaigned on a smaller-is-better philosophy toward government, has since the election made government bigger and bigger, and is looking at going down in history as having created the biggest increase in civil service government jobs since World War II. It is against that backdrop that the National Park Service and other agencies have been told to privatize, whether it saves money or not.
But when employees must answer to a corporation and its stockholders rather than to a park superintendent, Ruch said, then invariably the corporation's interests will supercede the park's.
"What you're looking at is science for hire," said PEER's Jennifer Reed. "Biostitution. Scientists who will say what their bosses want to hear. The line between a national park and Disneyland becomes blurred."
But back in Glacier, Holm has more immediate concerns.
"We've been told to begin reviewing jobs in August," he said. "We've not been told where the money is coming from. That's only one of the unknowns. It would be fair to say there's a considerable degree of uncertainty and anxiety about all this."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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