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RANGERS GO ELSEWHERE Yellowstone keeps pay at lower level By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - A decision by Yellowstone Park managers not to pay seasonal law enforcement rangers the higher salaries available to rangers in other parks has put Yellowstone at odds with National Park Service headquarters and made it difficult for Yellowstone to hire enough rangers this year. Yellowstone Assistant Superintendent Marvin Jensen said that while rangers deserve better pay, the higher pay scale would cost about $150,000 extra per year - another expense the park cannot afford. "Other parks throughout the system are generally paying the enhanced pay," he said. "But if we were to do that, it would mean we would have to hire fewer rangers overall or for shorter seasons, or reducing some other operations in the park." He acknowledged that officials in Yellowstone had a difficult time filling all of its roughly 60 summer law enforcement positions this year because many longtime Yellowstone seasonal employees moved to other parks that have adopted the higher pay scale. "We had a number of seasonals that would have otherwise come back say they would have liked to come back to Yellowstone, but could not because they could get the enhanced pay in other parks," Jensen said. He said he does not blame such rangers for seeking higher pay, but said park managers face a Catch-22 because if they were to raise the pay for law enforcement positions, they could not afford as many positions. Fewer positions means reduced services for park visitors, he said. While the National Park Service's Washington, D.C., headquarters has supplied some supplemental funding to accommodate the higher pay rates this year, there is no guarantee that the extra funding will be forthcoming next year, Yellowstone spokeswoman Cheryl Matthews said. Yellowstone Superintendent Mike Finley also said that along with the higher pay program would come new position descriptions for ranger jobs that give short shrift to the Park Service goal of educating visitors about park resources. Chris Andress, chief of ranger activities with the Park Service in Washington, said Yellowstone is the only National Park Service site he knows of that has not awarded its seasonals the higher pay. He declined to discuss Yellowstone's resistance to the higher pay program - saying he did not want to argue publicly with park officials - but said that Congress had provided supplemental funding for the increased pay. The higher pay costs an average of about $3,000 per year per seasonal position, Andress said. On an hourly basis, an entry-level seasonal law enforcement ranger would earn $10.44 per hour without the increased pay and $12.88 per hour based on the increased salary scale. Congress approved the higher pay scales for law enforcement rangers in August 1994, he said, and parks have gradually been adopting the new system in succeeding years. The increased pay was intended to bring ranger salaries in closer line with the salaries of other career federal law enforcement officers and included new position descriptions for rangers that more fully described their modern law enforcement duties. Ranger-naturalists who staff visitor centers and give walks and campfire talks would not be affected by the higher pay. Yellowstone is the only park that has not yet adopted the higher pay scale for seasonal law enforcement rangers, although the park did adopt the corresponding higher pay scale and new job descriptions for its about 60 to 65 permanent law enforcement rangers, Jensen said. Yellowstone officials contend that the new position descriptions that go along with the higher pay for seasonal rangers focus almost solely on law enforcement and do not fully reflect the National Park Service's emphasis on educating park visitors about wildlife and other park resources, Jensen said. "Resource education is a big portion of what a law enforcement ranger does," he said. Asking seasonals to emphasize such topics when it's not spelled out in their job descriptions could open the park to legal problems, he said. Under the higher pay regime and new position descriptions, seasonal rangers must also undergo an extensive background investigation that would cost the park about $1,500 per ranger and a physical examination that also adds to the park's expenses, Jensen said. He noted that the National Park Service's Washington office will absorb most of those costs, though. He said Yellowstone officials are troubled by the high turnover in their seasonal ranks this year. "What we lost was the longer-term experience of folks who have been here for a number of years," he said. "They know the roads and trails and we lose that kind of institutional knowledge, although I do think we've got an overall good quality seasonal staff this year."
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