Core Operations Analysis — What is the “Core Operations Analysis” process we’ve heard has been implemented in the Intermountain Region (IMR) and is soon to be implemented in other regions? A number of newspaper articles have been printed recently on the core operations process. I’ve been told that much of the information in the articles was incomplete or incorrect. Here are some of the basic ideas behind the process, as described by IMR’s regional director.

The core operations process is park based and park driven. It began in the IMR, at the request of a park, to help park managers look at their budget process strategically. The idea is that many of the budget decisions that are made on a daily basis have long-term consequences. Decision makers are in a better position to understand and anticipate those consequences if they know 1) what are the essential or core operations their park has to fulfill; 2) whether or not the activities that are being performed in a park contribute directly to the accomplishment of those core functions; 3) if those activities are being done in the most efficient and effective way possible; 4) and if the park will be able to accomplish those core activities within its budget allocation as projected over the upcoming five years.

If a park determines that it is performing activities that are not core, then it is in a position to direct those resources to activities that are. Too, if the park determines that there are ways to be more efficient or effective in the way it gets work done, then it can use any of those savings for core functions. Any savings achieved through realizing efficiencies stays in the park.

On the other hand, a park may determine that it is directing all its activities toward core needs and find that those activities are being done as efficiently and effectively as possible. It may also determine that, despite this, there are still core needs that remain unmet. At that point, it has the basis for a strong, credible request for additional resources to meet those core needs.

That is the process in a nutshell. As part of that process, parks are asked to look at their fixed costs (utilities and labor). In many parks those fixed costs are up around 95 percent or more of their base budget, and in some park that figure exceeds 100 percent. That allows for little flexibility if the park faces some unexpected emergency or need. Many business models suggest that the appropriate ratio of fixed costs to the base budget is 80 percent. However, 80 percent is not a fixed target. When parks undergo the core operations process, they are asked to identify what ratio of fixed costs to base budget is appropriate for their individual situation.

The core operations process was established to help parks. Its implementation will help individual parks, and the National Park Service, be transparent, accountable and credible when dealing with the public and with public officials. Through this process, the parks will be able to clearly show how we do business, on what core operations our funds are being targeted, and what additional funds we need to meet our stewardship responsibilities.

It is important to understand what core operations is and what it is not. It is not about eliminating jobs. It is about providing a foundation for sustainable park operations and position management. It is also a way to aggressively pursue added funding to meet parks core needs.

Interpretation

Fee-For-Service Interpretation — My e-mail inbox has been recently peppered with news stories about the reduction in base funding for the operation of the National Park System. The new initiative, called Core Operations Analysis, will examine ways to provide a base level of services in parks while jettisoning program areas and functions that are seen as expendable, thus shaving the NPS budget by 20 percent or more.

Though I will not pass judgment on such a plan, I do wonder how professional interpretation in our parks will be affected by a 20 percent funding cut to park base budgets.

Often when budgets are cut and park managers seek to make a public statement, interpretation bears a portion of the burden. Visitor center hours are cut and some visitor centers or contact stations are closed. Fewer seasonal interpreters are hired and fewer interpretive programs are offered at points of interest. Perhaps a few campgrounds are also closed so that maintenance resources can be diverted to other priorities, but when you want to get the public’s attention, cutting visitor services are the way to go.

Though like most people, I believe interpretation to be a core function of the NPS, there are options for keeping some of your interpretive programs solvent during budgetary downswings. Yes, I am talking about charging cost recovery fees for providing interpretive services.

I know that many interpreters find the thought of charging fees for interpretive programs to be sacrilegious (and, indeed, you may be thinking of me right now as the Anti-Tilden) but the pragmatist in me must weigh the options between free programs being canceled due to staff shortages versus more frequently offered fee-for-service programs whose rangers are self-funded.

Can the interpretive profession survive in the NPS when base funding only covers desk time in the visitor center? Can the interpretive profession survive if we cannot hire seasonal interpreters to provide interpretive services and, eventually, be groomed to become the interpretive leaders of tomorrow? Viewed in the milieu of professional survival, perhaps fee-for-service interpretive programs sound somewhat more palatable.

Parks are permitted to charge for interpretive services under the auspices of 16 USC 1a2g, commonly referred to a Title 16. The statute states that NPS units may:

“Sell at fair market value . . . products and services produced in the conduct of living exhibits and interpretive demonstrations in areas of the national park system . . . and credit the proceeds therefrom to the appropriation bearing the cost of such exhibits and demonstrations.”

Many parks are already using the Title 16 authority to recover costs from interpretive services such as cave and house tours. In fact, an examination of the Servicewide Interpretive Report (visit www.inside.nps.gov/sir from a government computer) for each park reveals that these parks are collecting anywhere from $30,000 to $500,000 per year to support interpretive operations (yes, interpretive operations — since fees are charged for cost recovery for providing an interpretive service, the money stays in the interpretive operation and is not diverted to other necessities).

There is some debate amongst managers in the fee realm about the language of the statute. Some regions interpret products and services to mean tangible items like blacksmith or glass-blowing items created onsite and then sold to the public. Others interpret products and services to mean interpretive programs and tours. Some regions read living exhibits and interpretive demonstrations to mean that you can only charge for living history programs (with living serving as the modifier for both exhibits and interpretive demonstrations). Others see living exhibits and interpretive demonstrations as each being discrete units so that you can charge for any interpretive program, demonstration or living history pro-gram or item. Still others define interpretive demonstrations as interpretive programs that demonstrate a skill (such as canoe skills, caving skills or other recreational skills).

The statute is written in such a way that any of these may be correct and valid, so working with your park or regional fee program manager is highly recommended. I work at a park that currently charges fees for interpretive house tours, and I would be glad to share our positive and negative experiences here at Death Valley with anyone seriously considering taking the Title 16 plunge (e-mail me at Rick_Kendall@nps.gov).

Charging fees for interpretive services may not be entirely palatable. It may not even be practical to charge fees for all interpretive programs. And since providing interpretive services is a core operation to nearly all parks, interpretive operations should still be funded primarily from base appropriations. But fee-for-service interpretive programs may be a useful way for your operation to augment your current interpretive offerings. Perhaps it’s not a popular opinion, but at least you can’t throw rotten fruit and vegetables at me through your magazine.

Protection

Protecting Sacred Ground — I attended a wilderness training course once where the instructor had us participate in an exercise that created an indelible impression in my mind regarding cultural resources and how important they are to our national heritage. From a stack of flashcards that listed common resource violations, he issued one card each to four participants, told them to stand in a separate corner of the room and read the violation on the card. He then instructed the rest of us to go stand in the corner that represented the one violation that we found most offensive.

The cards listed things like cutting switchbacks, leaving fish entrails along creek banks, graffiti, littering, washing dishes in streams, poaching and cutting live trees. We conducted several rounds of this exercise until the deck of cards was depleted. And on every evolution, the distribution of people from corner to corner was relatively even.

There was one glaring exception: “People using petroglyphs for target practice.”

When one participant read this caption from her card, every person in the room migrated to her corner, regardless of what the other three folks read.

The message was clear: We all found the act of destroying our cultural resources nothing short of deplorable. The same held true not just for prehistoric resources, but historic resources too. Why the threshold? What made such a violation so much more egregious than any of the others? Simple: The irreplaceable nature of such resources means that, once destroyed, we’ll never get them back. Never.

Clearly, then, due to their elevated importance, we ought to be spending a fair amount of our time and energy protecting these special resources. It’s a daunting task given the myriad other duties we shoulder every work day. One more responsibility to balance with all the others that are equally important.

Our congressional mandate charges us with protecting, “…the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein…” In one sentence, it sums up what we as rangers — as stewards of our national parklands — are expected to achieve on a daily basis. Collectively, we call it resource protection, and it’s a huge part of many of our jobs.

Every park in the system contains “historic objects,” or historic places, or prehistoric objects and places. Whether it be the Liberty Bell at Independence, a pot sherd or pictograph at Capitol Reef or the sunken hulk of a Great Lakes battleship at Isle Royale, cultural resources are a real, and in many cases, a valued element of our parks and our country’s legacy. Even our agency logo is an arrowhead — a projectile point.

What honor we should all feel to have these treasures entrusted to our vigilance. And what trepidation, too. So often we become discouraged when we discover resources that have been damaged, stolen, destroyed or otherwise defaced. I’m disgusted every time I discover recent looting at one of Big South Fork’s several thousand prehistoric rock shelters. The sheer magnitude of trying to protect them with only eight rangers, while continuing to run all of our other operations, can be overwhelming.

But that’s when we have to remember what it is we’re doing. That’s when we have to remember that we’re protecting sacred ground, the same ground that, over 2,000 years ago, might have provided a home to those who came before us.

We have colleagues to band together with in our mission. They are archaeologists and other resource management specialists, historic preservation folks, and maintenance division personnel who provide eyes in the field and without whose diligence many of our cultural resources would deteriorate at an even more accelerated pace. We also have university students conducting field work, interpreters passing along to the public the importance of cultural resources and how they can best be protected, and non-government organizations whose purpose it is to protect the resources.

They all provide indispensable help so we are not alone in this quest. This quote sums up the message:

“We have not inherited the earth from our ancestors, we have only borrowed it from our children.”

~ Kevin Moses, Big South Fork

Resource Management

The work of NPS cultural resource professionals is measured by several very specific GPRA goals, which a number of parks have struggled to meet. The intent is outlined in NPS Management Policies and Director’s Order 28, an organized program of gathering data on the number and condition of cultural resources. Specifically, it includes historic structures recorded on the List of Classified Structures; archeological sites recorded in a servicewide archeological database called ASMIS; cultural landscapes recorded on the Cultural Landscapes Inventory; and museum objects recorded in the ANCS+ database. As a result of failure to achieve sufficient progress on several goals, some parks are working hard, directed by corrective action plans, to achieve improvement in these areas in 2006 (and beyond).

These efforts at completing basic cultural resource inventories and condition assessments have been or will be the focus of many park and regional staffers. However, other needed work is not so easily captured by GPRA goals, such as conservation of museum objects. I wonder whether others have struggled, as I have, with the strong compliance-oriented message sometimes conveyed by cultural resource programs.

While the documented understanding and assessment of National Register-eligible properties, as mandated by Sections 110 and 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, provides a foundation for cultural resource protection in and beyond parks, it does not capture the totality of cultural resource preservation (museum collections being a notable example of things not covered under NHPA).

Ethnographic resources are an area of growing interest, although relatively few have been evaluated under NHPA; some state historic preservation offices are reluctant or insufficiently staffed to consider assessing ethnographic sites or resources as traditional cultural properties. I encourage subject matter experts to go beyond “doing Section 106 compliance” on how proposed park projects may affect cultural resources, and “share the wonder” of their park’s historic and prehistoric sites, landscapes, objects and stories in ways that non-experts in and outside the NPS can appreciate.

Cultural resource managers and staff face numerous challenges in accomplishing their ambitious goals. For example, I have expressed concern over continued efforts to maintain the LCS database, reader-friendly though is intended to be, when so much similar effort is focused on the maintenance database FMSS, to which new funding requests must be tied in the NPS project management information system (PMIS).

Speaking of project funding, the working guidance for use of recreation fee funds available to many parks in coming years does not appear to permit funding the database backlogs, or additional efforts such as conservation of museum objects, ethnographic assessments and evaluation of cultural landscapes, unless parks can demonstrate a direct visitor service connection.

~ Sue Consolo Murphy, Grand Teton