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In fewer than 15 minutes, two separate carloads of people pulled up to the John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez last Saturday. But then they turned away because the 325-acre park, with its Victorian mansion, historic pear orchard and visitor’s center, had been closed to the public without notice.
“What’s going on?” a man in one car asked. When told that the park was closed because of the federal government shutdown, he said, “I didn’t expect a historic site to be closed. I feel bad.” He had driven an hour from Santa Clara to Martinez, having heard that a famous American once lived there.
That eminent figure is Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist who founded the Sierra Club and hosted President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip in Yosemite in 1903. Muir is called the “father of the national parks,” in part because the writing he did in his Martinez study persuaded Americans to see their wilderness areas as treasures to preserve, not as resources to be exploited.
But since Oct. 1, Muir’s home has been shuttered, a closure Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the park service from 2009 to 2017, and Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada and clean air senior program manager of National Parks Conservation Association, said was emblematic of the murky future of the National Park Service.
Popular national parks in the Bay Area such as Alcatraz, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore remain open during the shutdown, though some of the larger open-air parks will offer bare-bones services. But three smaller, historic parks have been closed in Contra Costa County: Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial in Concord, and the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site in Danville.
Jarvis and Rose said they fear the shutdown could become a pretext to drastically reduce funding for the country’s public parks, even as they broke attendance records in 2024, with 332 million visits. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump proposed $900 million in cuts to the park service — as detailed in a May 2 letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — potentially wiping out budgets for at least 350 of the 433 parks, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
Even though a House Appropriations Committee proposal would avert the administration’s “most damaging” cuts, the park service has still lost a quarter of its permanent staff since earlier this year, the parks association said. With the shutdown, more than 9,200 parks employees have been furloughed without pay, according to the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service Contingency Plan.
Friday, Vought announced on X that “The RIFs have begun,” referring to reductions-in-force of the 750,000 federal employees currently furloughed because of the shutdown. Politico confirmed with an OMB spokesperson that the reductions “are substantial” and “not furloughs.”
“The administration has been calling it a reduction in force, but it would just be a mass termination of potentially hundreds of thousands of additional park service staff,” Rose said.
The park service, in an email, said it “remains committed to maintaining as much access as possible to park lands during the lapse in appropriations. Critical functions that protect life, property and public health will continue to be staffed.”
The spokesperson did not respond to a question about potential layoffs, saying, “We do not have comment on personnel matters.” The White House Press Office’s automatic reply email stated media members could expect delays in responses because of the shutdown.
In contrast to the official parks service statement, Rose and Jarvis describe a more dire situation: To stay open, larger open-air national parks are relying on skeleton crews, which may be challenged to stop vandalism, harm to wildlife or damage to natural resources. Rose also said public safety is compromised, as help could be delayed if visitors get lost or injured.
This situation is the result of “a combination of incompetence and intent,” said Jarvis, who lives in Pinole. During a 2013 government shutdown, he closed all the national parks and said it’s “stupid” that parks are not all closed right now, though this move would be politically unpopular. He said the circumstances around this shutdown are unlike anything he’s seen. “It’s chaos upon chaos,” he said of the current state of the national park service.
Jarvis and Rose describe a top-down style of leadership in the U.S. Department of the Interior, which runs the park service, resulting in confusing information about what’s open, what’s closed and how the public should be notified. The national parks shutdown contingency plan stated that park websites and social media would not be updated, nor will regular notices of road or trail closures be posted.
Jarvis has raised concerns that the Trump administration is setting up national parks to fail. In a worse-case scenario he described in The Guardian, the parks’ failure would give this administration an excuse to privatize the park service’s high-visitation “cash cows,” such as Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon.
As for the hundreds of smaller parks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in May proposed the idea of transferring them to state agencies, as recommended by the Office of Budget and Management. Jarvis said that wouldn’t be easy, given that each national park was established by Congress and new legislation would be needed to strip them of their status. It’s also questionable whether many states could step in to run these parks, he said.
The John Muir site and the other Contra Costa parks fall into that category. The park service manages more than 130 sites that highlight places related to significant figures and events in American history. This includes famous battlegrounds, presidential homes and others that have been established to elevate narratives about those sidelined in traditional texts.
So the Bay Area is home to the Rosie the Riveter park, which spotlights women who contributed to the war effort, local Japanese Americans and Black migrants from the segregated South. World War II also provides the backdrop for Concord’s Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, which honors 320 Black soldiers killed in a 1944 explosion while unloading munitions — a tragedy that led to desegregation of the military.
Even if the Trump administration doesn’t have the legal authority to offload these sites, Jarvis expressed concern about the “moral aspect” of sending the message that they should be removed from the national park system.
“You’re basically saying that the people that the stories that these parks represent are not relevant to the American experience, and that’s just horrible,” Jarvis said.
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Martha Ross
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