Dear editor:

Have you been watching Yellowstone’s 150th Virtual Video Series on YouTube?  Yellowstone’s record of past mismanagement is a common theme in the videos.  

The Historic Fort Yellowstone edition illustrates the immediate need to phase out employee housing. In-park housing maintenance suffers generational and intentional neglect.   

With Tenement Row (aka, Officer’s Row) employee housing in Mammoth as a backdrop, the cultural resource specialist in the video walks viewers through the importance of rain gutter and how it protects a building’s foundation from rot. Before and after still images of a particular tenement show attached rain gutter in 1905, but missing in summer 2022.

On my mid-December park visit, rain gutter had yet to be been installed. Evidently, rain gutter is not as important as producing a video on the importance of rain gutter.

Viewers were treated to House Painting 101 as well. While cause of the hideous exterior paint peeling has been determined along Tenement Row, repairs — like the rain gutter — have yet to be implemented. 

In the video we learn how resourceful bureaucrats obtain maintenance funding from taxpayer dollar sources outside the park, such as congressional acts. Yes, tenant rent does not cover maintenance costs. Fiscally, this is known as “upside-down”.

At the north end of Tenement Row, the Albright Visitor Center underwent a $5 million renovation less than 10 years ago. Entryway doors are chained and padlocked from the outside as a means to lock-up for the night, nullifying mandatory — and necessary — interior panic hardware. Is there a fire marshal in the house?

Past park programs include: Predator extermination (primarily wolves), ungulate feeding, farming hay, bear feeding exhibits, elk culling, exotic fish introduction, exporting cutthroat trout eggs, garbage landfills, forest fire extinguishment, earthen Pelican Creek causeway, Undine Hill cattleguard and fencing and Undine ski hill. These policies have been discontinued.

In-park housing carried forward from the misguided, exploitive yesteryear policies needs similar correction — discontinuance. Converting existing in-park housing to overnight accommodations for visitors operated by a private sector concessionaire is long overdue.

Exclusive Yellowstone Club, Spanish Peaks, and Moonlight Basin in Big Sky, Montana, all bus employees, as there is minimal to no onsite employee housing. Each have their own guarded gates, full-time security, fire departments, and maintenance divisions. The Stillwater and East Boulder mines in south-central Montana bus all 2,900 employees. All these entities are within the recognized boundaries of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.   

Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management do not colonize their jurisdictions.

The argument for in-park housing cites the need for National Park Service stewards to live there to better protect park resources. A top cop in Yellowstone rented out his in-park housing to tourists for years. A French family stayed in his quarters for eight days.

Tenement Row — where folks don’t have to pay much rent — should be converted to private sector chalets along the new and improved Avenue des Champs-Elysees Petite. Charge fair market rates for the duplexes adjacent to the historic Army parade ground sprinkled with elk, and taxpayer-funded maintenance will disappear. The NPS will see positive revenue streams in the form of concession fees.

For Park County commissioners, Park County Travel Council and Wyoming Office of Tourism, revenue potential is huge.  

NPS autocrats all too eager to confine visitors to buses, should themselves bus from Livingston, Paradise Valley or Gardiner, Montana. If they really want to impress the Davos crowd, Gardiner has an airport.

Gov. Mark Gordon’s new-found superhero, superintendent Cam Sholly, is leading the charge building new unsustainable in-park housing destined to decay much the same as Tenement Row and Albright Visitor Center, not to mention ecosystem encroachment.

Steve Torrey

Cody