Big GOP donors, business executives added to panel
WA SHINGTON» At the beginning of the year, nearly all the members of a federally chartered board that advises the National Park Service quit in frustration after they felt the new administration was ignoring them.
Nearly a year later, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has resurrected the national parks board and filled its ranks with several business executives, including a few major Republican donors, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The appointments reflect the latest instance of Zinke reshaping the work — often in a more business-friendly direction — of the more than 200 advisory boards that help Interior manage the approximately 500 million acres of public land it oversees. The current committee poses a contrast to the 12-member panel picked under President Barack Obama:
• All of the 11 new members appear to be white, and nine of them are men. The new group includes three big-dollar donors who each have contributed more than $500,000 to GOP candidates and causes since the 2008 election cycle.
• Meanwhile, two-thirds of the old panel were women, and the group included African-american members and members of Latino and Asian descent.
• The newly appointed board also did not include any working academics, as the previous version did. Among the old panelists were professors from Harvard and Yale universities, as well as the University of Maryland and the University of Kentucky.
The major GOP donors on the board are John Cushman III, a Los Angeles-based commercial real estate executive who gave $537,950, mostly to Republicans and Gop-affiliated political action committees; John Nau III, who runs the nation’s largest distributor of Anheuser-busch products and gave $847,022, largely to Republicans; and Boyd Smith, a Bay Area-based real estate developer who contributed $986,407, largely to GOP candidates.
The newly reconstituted National Park System Advisory Board was set to meet for the first time Wednesday in Washington.
The Interior Department postponed the session, however, because the federal government observed a national day of mourning out of respect for former president George H.W. Bush.
In a statement Thursday, Interior spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort said the Park Service published a notice Nov. 16, 2017, soliciting nominations “for interested members of the public who wished to serve on the Board. All applications received by the Department of the Interior were reviewed and compared to the membership criteria contained in the Board’s charter.”
Leaders of some national park advocacy groups voiced dismay about the panel’s lack of diversity, given the agency’s ongoing efforts to broaden its appeal to Americans of color. Theresa Pierno, president and chief executive of the National Parks Conservation Association, said her organization was “pleased to see these vacancies finally filled.” But she added that “we had hoped that the Department of the Interior would have recognized the importance of diversity when appointing new members.”
Many of the new members, though, come with experience relevant to park management. Cushman, for example, once served as national president of the Boy Scouts of America. Another new member, Philip Pearce, is a paraplegic wheelchair user with expertise in accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A third, Zelma Lansford, an organizational consultant, said in an interview Wednesday she brings to her new assignment two decades of experience working with two dozen parks.
“What I bring to the table is knowledge of the agency and how it works,” Lansford said.
She and Joseph Emert, also a Tennessean named to the board, emphasized this week they viewed the job as nonpartisan.
“The national parks are too important to be a political football. I hope that people from any political spectrum can come together and support our parks,” Emert told the Blount County, Tenn.-based Daily Times in an interview this week.
Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which represents 1,200 current, former and retired Park Service employees, said some of the new board members bring valuable skills such as a knowledge of the agency’s history and operations. But he emphasized they should view their job as more than just promoting outdoor recreation and managing park concessions.
“It’s also how to protect the parks and leave them unimpaired for future generations,” Francis said, noting that climate change is already affecting parks across the country. “I hope the agenda will be comprehensive, and not just items consistent with business interests.”
He added: “If anything, it will be interesting to see what they are going to be asked to do.”