The Right Man for the Job

The appointment of a career National Park Service official as superintendent of Yosemite National Park has, happily, squelched for now fears that politics would be injected into the selection of administrators of the nation’s two oldest and most-revered national parks, Yosemite and Yellowstone. But that does not mean the job facing 42-year-old Michael V. Finley will not require a leader with a keen political sense. All of the divergent forces that come to bear on the operation of the national parks converge on Yosemite, where years of study and planning have failed to reconcile conflicts that sometimes seem to be irreconcilable.

If anyone in the National Park Service is up to the job, it should be Finley. He has gotten rave reviews during his three years as superintendent of Everglades National Park, which is considered the most threatened in the park system. “He seems to thrive on tough jobs. He’s a real pro,” said Paul C. Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. Finley may be just the sort of person who is capable of developing creative methods of handling the problems of Yosemite, particularly the tremendous visitor pressures on Yosemite Valley.

Should that be the case, it will be because Finley has come up through the ranks of the Park Service and is intimately familiar with the conflicts involved in trying to achieve the park system’s congressional mandate: to preserve the natural features of the parks while also making them available for the people’s enjoyment. He knows how to deal with the concessionaires who run the hotels and other money-making ventures in the parks, with the environmentalists, and with the Park Service bureaucracy. And while he has had a short career with the agency, he also knows the importance of tradition and morale among the ranger corps.

The new superintendent at Yosemite might not know those things if he or she instead had been drawn from the senior executive service, a federal management super-corps that consists of both career federal officers and political appointees. Such a proposal has been kicking around the past few years in the Department of the Interior, the Park Service’s parent agency. The idea surfaced at about the same time the department’s top-level political appointees began meddling in personnel affairs of the Park Service in violation of traditional practice.

Yosemite and Yellowstone apparently were singled out because they are such visible natural catalysts for political controversy. An example was the intense criticism unjustly heaped on Yellowstone Supt. Robert Barbee during the 1988 fire season. If the Yellowstone and Yosemite appointees came from outside the Park Service and did not plan full careers in the parks, they might be more subject to political manipulation.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. apparently has decided this was a bad idea and has dropped it. Good. There should be no further thought given to political tinkering with the parks. Superintendents must have the freedom to offend powerful political groups and economic interests, if necessary, in fulfilling their responsibility to protect the natural integrity of the park lands. Only if that independence is maintained will the nation’s park system have the benefit of talented people like Michael Finley.