Ex-AG blasted for leaving Interior board
Ex-chief of staff to Pearce calls mass resignations ‘dishonest political stunt’
Last week’s resignation of 10 out of 12 members of a U.S. Interior Department advisory board in protest of actions by Secretary Ryan Zinke and the policies of President Donald Trump involved two men with deep ties to New Mexico politics.
But the men are on opposite sides of the controversy, in which the former members of the National Park Service Advisory Board say the Interior Department has shut them out of the policymaking process and agency officials have fired back, accusing the board of ignoring ethics failures that occurred on their watch.
On one side is former New Mexico Attorney General Paul Bardacke, who has a law firm in Santa Fe and, for the past seven years, was a member of the Park Service advisory board. Bardacke, a Democrat, served as the state’s attorney general from 1983-86.
On the other side is Todd Willens, chief of staff for Republican Congressman Steve Pearce for nearly seven years. Since 2017, Willens has been an assistant deputy secretary at the Interior Department.
Nine members of the advisory board, including Bardacke, sent a letter to Zinke on Wednesday, saying they were stepping down because their requests for a meeting had been ignored. A 10th member resigned the next day.
Bardacke’s term on the board actually ended in July, he said in an interview last week. But no one had been appointed to take his place.
“I’d expected to be reappointed,” Bardacke said. “But then Trump got elected. And I didn’t know what to expect.”
By law, the advisory board, authorized by Congress, must meet twice a year. But it has not been called into session by the Interior Department since Trump took office a year ago.
“Our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” the board’s chairman, former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, wrote in the letter to Zinke.
Knowles said no one at the department contacted him or other board members this month about future meetings.
Willens told national media that what Knowles wrote was “patently false.” Department officials were working to renew the board’s charter, schedule a meeting and fill vacancies as recently as last week, he said.
“Their hollow and dishonest political stunt should be a clear indicator of the intention of the group,” Willens said of the board members who left.
According to The Associated Press, Willens also
launched a counterattack against them, pointing to investigations under their watch that uncovered sexual harassment at national parks such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and an internal investigative report of an unapproved guidebook written by former National Park Service leader Jonathan Jarvis.
“We welcome their resignations and would expect nothing less than quitting from members who found it convenient to turn a blind eye to women being sexually harassed at national parks and praise a man as ‘inspiring’ who had been blasted by the inspector general for ethics and management failures,” Willens said.
Bardacke denied the advisory board had ignored sexual harassment at the parks.
“Our job was policy,” he said. Investigating sexual harassment, he said, “isn’t what we do.”
Jarvis was the subject of a 2015 ethics investigation, prompted by a book he wrote for a nonprofit organization that has a cooperating agreement with the Park Service. The investigation found he didn’t get approval from the department’s ethics office. Jarvis received no pay for the book, but asked that any royalties go to the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that fundraises for the Park Service, and that the book’s copyright be filed in his name so that he could later donate it to the foundation.
Jarvis later apologized for his “error of judgment.”
Bardacke said Zinke and others in the Interior Department disrespected the board’s work.
“It’s not that they ignored our advice,” he said. “That happens. But it’s like they thumbed their nose at us.”
Bardacke said he didn’t want to get into a battle with the administration: “You don’t want to wrestle with a pig because you’ll get dirty and the pig will like it,” he said.
Still, he remained critical of the way national parks are being run, saying Zinke is “only interested in leaving parks in control of the same industries that want to profit from them.”
Since the days of President Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican who established the National Park system, Bardacke said, “it’s been a bipartisan effort to preserve these wonderful natural resources.
“It’s a shame what’s going on with the parks,” he added. “It’s a shame what’s going on with the [Environmental Protection Agency]. It’s a shame what’s going on in every corner of government with Trump.”
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.