Crater Lake on a hazy afternoon Aug 4, 2021, caused by wildfires in southern Oregon. (Alex Baumhardt / Oregon Capital Chronicle)

Kevin Heatley, who led the park for just five months, resigned June 30 over concerns about staffing cuts ordered to the National Park Service by President Trump

 

While Democratic members of Oregon’s congressional delegation expressed alarm at the sudden resignation of the leader of the state’s only national park, the Republican who has the park in his district declined to take a position Friday.

Kevin Heatley, the new superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, resigned from his post May 30 over staffing concerns after just five months on the job.

Heatley, who had previously worked at the Bureau of Land Management, told Oregon Public Broadcasting, KGW, The Washington Post and several other news organizations that staffing was already lean at Crater Lake, and layoffs of probationary employees President Donald Trump ordered, followed by hiring freezes, mandates to leave vacant positions unfilled and new federal incentives from the Office of Personnel Management and the office known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to resign or retire were making it worse.

Oregon’s congressional delegation met the news with differing levels of concern.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, representing Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District, wrote Wednesday to Doug Burgum, secretary of the Department of the Interior, demanding to know if he or the agency had undertaken any analysis of what staffing levels were like there or how bad it had gotten. Dexter is also a member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said it is clear to him that Trump is “hellbent on destroying natural treasures like Crater Lake.”

U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, who represents Oregon’s 2nd District —his district includes southern Oregon’s Crater Lake — said on the phone Friday he’d “look into it.”

“The person’s (Heatley) concern may be well founded. It may not. Until I know the facts better, I’m not going to take a position on it, but now that you’ve raised an issue, we’ll look into it,” he said.

The national park in southern Oregon, famous for its vibrant and translucent volcanic lake that is among the deepest in the world, typically sees about half-a-million visitors each year. But this summer, 60 to 65 seasonal positions will need to be filled, Heatley told journalists in several reports, and just eight ranger positions have so far been filled to keep visitors in the 286-square-mile park safe.

“I mean, the train is still running on the tracks, but it’s not heading in the right direction,” Heatley told OPB on June 2. “I cannot, in good conscience, manage an operation that I know is moving in the wrong direction.”

Spokespeople for Crater Lake did not respond to Capital Chronicle requests for staffing and hiring data.

The federal jobs portal USA Jobs does not list any current vacancies at Crater Lake. The Kansas-based company running Crater Lake’s lodging, concessions, retail and boating operations had 18 vacant positions listed on its site as of June 5.

The National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit conservation group, called the staffing issues at the 63 National Parks a “full-blown staffing crisis.”

They report that the Department of the Interior’s own workforce database shows that as of May 13, the Park Service had just over 18,000 employees across all parks, a more than 16% drop from 2023, the previous fiscal year — a decrease equal to that of the previous ten years combined. The association said the recent sharp drop was driven by Trump-incentivized buyouts, early retirements, deferred resignations and leaving vacancies unfilled.

Interior Department data also shows 39% of seasonal and temporary staff at the national parks have been hired so far — about 3,300 employees. That’s less than half the number of seasonal employees Park Service officials said they’d hire in a February memo.

In her letter to Burgum, Dexter called Heatley’s resignation a “flashing red warning sign that something is very wrong,” in a news release Wednesday.