Las Urbanistas

Some garden-hungry park-goer claimed this real estate several months ago, bringing two well-used lawn chairs and planting a personalized mix of cactus, crown of thorns and green-spiked iris. City officials helped provide water to the patch and, at the request of the 93-year-old gardener, added a concrete bench left over from the 1984 Olympics.

The small plot escaped the fire that burned nearly a quarter of the park last month. But as officials plan for restoration, tough questions are arising about the very nature of a park that, like the megalopolis around it, is an eclectic, even messy hodge-podge of needs, desires and identities.

Should this be a people’s park where Angelenos can surreptitiously plant nonnative iris amid the sage scrub? Is it a refuge for hikers, golfers, tai chi devotees and equestrians? Should it have more room for soccer players, softball teams and picnickers?

Or should one of the nation’s largest urban parks evolve even more into a nature preserve, protected from people so that native wildlife and plants can thrive?

It’s a increasingly political debate that has profound implications for both the park and the city, where a dearth of parkland and recreation space has made the hills and canyons of Griffith Park a refuge for thousands each weekend, including many low-income families with few other open-space options.

Some conservationists and scientists look at burned hills and see a blank slate, a golden opportunity to restore much of the park’s rugged interior to its once-wild state.

Backers of that idea believe the fire did so much damage in part because nonnative species spread haphazardly for decades as visitors tracked in exotic mustard, planted eucalyptus and carved their own trails up Mt. Hollywood. Even the bird sanctuary was shaded by redwoods and other trees not normally found in Los Angeles.

Now, they envision a resurgence of native chaparral, with plants such as toyon, laurel sumac and blue-flowering lupine luring back back a wealth of wildlife.

“Oh, God, you’d have an incredible diversity of birds,” said Garry George, executive director of Los Angeles Audubon. “You’d have many species of western wood warbler, flycatchers, vireos, all sorts of birds coming through.”

Others fear that too much emphasis on chaparral could strip Griffith Park of its distinctive, crazy-quilt feel — eucalyptus from Australia, ice plant from Madagascar, the pocket parks.

The debate doesn’t just involve plants.

Some argue that a park-poor city like Los Angeles cannot afford to entirely turn over the park to nature. After all, its peaks, canyons and flatlands account for 26% of the city’s 15,700 acres of parkland.

“Griffith Park is at a pivotal place,” said Councilman Ed Reyes, who thinks it’s time for the park to better serve lowerincome youths who live a short bike ride away in areas such as Lincoln Heights.

“I know it’s going to raise a lot of fireworks,” he added, “because people there now really treasure their sense of isolation and exclusivity.”

Park as safety valve

The man who created this sprawling park in 1896 viewed it as a venue to relieve the pressures of urban life.

“Public parks are a safety valve of great cities,” wrote wealthy mining expert Col. Griffith J. Griffith, who envisioned a park “for the rank and file of the plain people.” He gave the city 3,000 acres of his ranch, which then sat amid undeveloped land a mile north of the city, on the far eastern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. Since then, a growing constellation of city landmarks — the zoo, Griffith Observatory, the Autry museum complex and the Greek Theatre — have made it a city centerpiece.

Even before the fire, this promised to be a pivotal year for Griffith Park.

City officials unveiled a master plan two years ago that included many new features at the park, including two aerial trams and parking garages. Backers saw the plan as a way to make the park more accessible. But many groups attacked it, arguing that the park’s rustic character would be threatened. The city is waiting for a new version being drafted by a panel of community groups.

“Griffith wanted it to be left in its most natural state,” said Marva-Lea Kornblatt of Burbank’s Rancho Equestrian District, where residents can ride their horses straight into the park.

In June, the city will also begin studying what residents throughout the city need and want in their parks.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said there is a “delicate balancing act” surrounding the park, but promised, “Whatever we do here we’re going to do with community consensus.”

Before the fire, the hilly interior contained huge swaths of native habitat — despite the eucalyptus, Canary Island pines and other motley plantings at popular spots such as Dante’s View and Captain’s Roost. Hikers have planted their own trees around the park. Dante’s View was a hilltop retreat of nonnative trees planted over the last 50 years by park users.

There is widespread agreement that the fire offers opportunity, but there is disagreement about what kind.

“The fire did what no one could afford to do in this environment, to just be clearing the fire hazard, the invasive species, the buildup of fuel,” said Andy Lipkis, founder of the nonprofit group TreePeople, which is working with the city on its Million Tree campaign.

Left alone, the burn area would rejuvenate naturally with native plants, predict scientists who specialize in post-fire ecology (some nonnative plants might return, too). But a drought spreading into next year could strain the natural cycle.

Despite the push by environmentalists to let nature take its course, city officials said they plan to do selective reseeding and tree replanting as part of a $50-million recovery plan — particularly on hillsides judged to be a mudslide risk. Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents the park, said he would not be opposed to the planting of nonnative trees at some of the preserves along hiking trails.

Councilman Reyes said officials should be thinking about ways to make the park more accessible to residents from around the city, not just the affluent ones who live in the foothills around the park.

“Right now,” he said, “the knee-jerk reaction has been more, ‘This is mine, I want to keep it…. I paid my million, $2 million, $3 million for my house. I paid for this.’ “

He suggested moving more quickly on a Los Angeles River bike trail leading directly into the park, making it easier for children to get in. Another idea suggested by some: Better linking of mass transit lines — bus and maybe eventually rail — to the park.

Raul Macias, founder of the Anahuak Youth Soccer Assn., sees firsthand the effects of active, competitive sports and fresh air on the more than 2,000 boys and girls in the league. He envisions a park that fosters more activity — perhaps with climbing walls and tree bridges — and ways to draw city youths and whole families into nature.

“The kids forgot how to play in the trees, run in the grass,” he said. “I want green areas, where you can tell a kid, ‘Look, this is a pine, this is a cypress.’

“It’s a perfect time right now. This opportunity will never happen right again, to keep our families in the park.”

Closure a sore point

As if to illustrate Col. Griffith’s description of the park as a pressure valve, some residents are lobbying to be allowed back into the shut-off interior.

Park managers warn that the fire dangerously eroded hiking trails, undermined boulders and weakened trees. Dry soil is slipping down onto roadbeds. On the popular Fern Canyon Trail, familiar to generations of city schoolchildren, canyon stairs are sliding into a gully crossed by the skeletal remains of a wooden footbridge.

Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri told a packed audience at a public meeting last week that he was “taking it slow and safe” and that the unburned sections of the park could be reopened within two to three weeks.

That’s not soon enough for some. Glendale resident Bob Star stomped out midway through the meeting, complaining that the Mukri was being too cautious.

“I’m a hiker, and I don’t like being kept out of the park,” Star yelled outside the hall. “They’ve got the whole damn place shut down.”

Equestrians from Burbank complained that their park access remained closed while other stables near Hollywood had already been allowed to ride on select trails. And when Bob and Elaine Robak, a couple in their mid-50s, rode their bicycles into the park last week, a locked gate barred them from a trail leading uphill.

“Just open it up if the fire is over with,” Elaine Robak said plaintively. “Just let us in.”

Amid the passionate debate, the natural rhythms are already returning to Griffith Park. Albert Torres, chief ranger for the parks department, says birds are keeping to their spring migration schedule, with the hooded oriole and black-and-white Phainopepla arriving from the south the week of the fire. Although some birds lost nests in the fire, others took shelter in unburned chaparral nearby.

Only 10 nights after the fire, Torres spotted his first seasonal glow worm. It was in the burn area, which delighted him. “It was a hopeful sign,” he said.

In the tiny patch of iris and cactus, a bag of Scotts cactus mix sits neatly under the Olympic bench, waiting for the surreptitious gardener to return.

Experts Clash Over Whether the District Was Meant to Get a Vote in Congress

By Mary Beth Sheridan Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 28, 2007; B01

The setting is Congress, the year 2007. But as lawmakers wrangle over the D.C. voting rights bill, they are turning the clock back to the 1700s, furiously debating whether the Founding Fathers intended to deprive District residents of a vote in the national legislature.

On one side: the Bush administration and other critics of the bill, who believe the framers created the current situation intentionally. On the other: supporters of the bill, including Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the District’s nonvoting congressional delegate.

It is “slander,” she declared heatedly last week, to suggest that the founders would fight a war over voting rights “and then would turn around and deny representation to the residents of their own capital.”

Who’s right?

Leading historians say the record on the founders’ intentions for the future capital is unclear in some respects. But there is little evidence they sought to deny the vote to what would eventually become hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents, the historians say.

Does it matter what a bunch of bewigged 18th-century revolutionaries thought about the District? It actually matters a lot: Their 200-year-old opinions could affect whether the current voting rights bill is deemed legal. The legislation, which seeks to give the District its first full seat in the House of Representatives, has passed the House and is now before the Senate.

The main argument advanced by the bill’s opponents is that the Constitution reserves House membership for representatives from states. And the District is not a state, they note.

Supporters and opponents of the bill are delving into history to try to clarify what the framers intended in 1787, when they inserted 38 words into the Constitution allowing for the creation of a federal government district. The brief clause gives Congress the power “to exercise exclusive legislation” over a future seat of government.

Did the framers mean its residents couldn’t vote in Congress?

Absolutely, said John P. Elwood, a Justice Department official who testified at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. “The framers and their contemporaries clearly understood that the Constitution barred congressional representation for District residents,” he said.

Nonsense, retorted Richard P. Bress, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general. “I can’t agree the evidence shows the Founding Fathers intentionally and permanently disenfranchised the people of the District of Columbia,” he told the Senate panel.

Historians say early politicians disagreed about the nature of the future federal seat of government, with some wanting a strong, independent enclave and others fearing it would turn into a new imperial Rome. Political maneuvering colored the discussion.

“There is no one Founding Father position,” said John Kaminski, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and editor of a 28-volume collection of documents on the ratification of the Constitution.

But several prominent scholars who have studied the period say there appeared to be little debate on whether residents of the new federal enclave would have the vote.

“The Constitutional Convention overlooked it,” said Kenneth Bowling, a George Washington University historian and author of “The Creation of Washington, D.C.” “The issue was not on their radar screen.”

Historians traditionally have traced the District’s status to a raucous demonstration in 1783 by unpaid Revolutionary War veterans outside what’s now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The federal Congress, which used the building, was not in session at the time; the rioters were aiming their wrath at a meeting of the Pennsylvania state executive council.

But some congressmen who were proponents of a strong central government seized on the incident, saying it underscored the need for a federal enclave under Congress’s control, historians say. They got their way when the Constitution was drawn up.

Soon afterward, Alexander Hamilton and a few other politicians realized the Constitution did not provide specifically for congressional representation for residents of the new capital. Hamilton suggested that the first Congress fix the problem, but his amendment went nowhere.

Opponents of the current bill view the Hamilton amendment as a sign that the issue was debated at the time — and that Hamilton lost.

“It was as controversial then as it is now,” Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar from George Washington University, said at last week’s Senate hearing.

But Bowling and other historians disagree, saying the young states and the first U.S. Congress were preoccupied with weightier issues — such as the amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights.

“They had to organize the entire government!” declared Bowling, co-editor of a 22-volume edition of records and letters from the first federal Congress, which met in 1789-91. “They certainly weren’t going to pay a lot of attention to the federal district when it didn’t even exist yet.”

In fact, it was 1790 before the U.S. government decided where to locate the capital — on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Residents of the new district continued to vote in those states until 1801.

But in that year, Congress passed the Organic Act, assuming control of the District of Columbia and providing no provision for its residents to vote for members of Congress or a president.

That would seem a clear enough sign of Congress’s intent. But historians caution that that act, too, should be seen in the context of the politics of the time.

It was passed by a lame-duck Congress fearful that the incoming president, Thomas Jefferson, an anti-federalist, would junk their vision of a strong capital, said William diGiacomantonio, a historian who has studied the period.

The outgoing Congress “really did want to preserve the independence of the District. And so they passed this really haphazard thing,” he said, referring to the act.

“It’s politics,” the historian added. “It doesn’t have anything to do with principle.”

Property Taxes, Energy Costs and Insurance Rates Force Family to Consider Closing Park

Trimper’s Rides, an Ocean City mainstay since 1890, is owned by 14 family members, some of whom are seeking help from the state to keep the park open. (Photos By Linda Davidson — The Washington Post)

By Philip Rucker Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007; A01

OCEAN CITY — For 117 summers, generations of children have frolicked through Trimper’s Rides on this beach resort town’s signature boardwalk. But this Memorial Day weekend might begin the last summer they circle the antique wooden carousel, fling around the Tilt-a-Whirl and loop through the Tidal Wave roller coaster.

The Trimpers say they are considering closing the amusement park and arcade this year.

As Ocean City has exploded into a megaresort, property taxes have soared for Trimper’s, which operates on the last chunk of undeveloped land on the town’s three-mile boardwalk. In the past three years, family members said, their assessed property value has tripled, from $21 million to $65 million.

So the Trimpers are facing reality. Revenue from thrill rides and arcade games can’t keep pace with the skyrocketing value of their three-block site, they say. In addition to property taxes, insurance and energy costs are up, and the family is split over what to do: Some members want to sell, but others want to find a way — perhaps through a change to lower the park’s assessment or a historic designation — to keep going.

“After 117 years, I don’t want to be the Trimper that closes the place up,” said family patriarch Granville D. Trimper, 78, president of the company. Although he declined to provide financial specifics, Trimper said, “We can’t keep going without making a profit.”

Across the nation — from Coney Island, N.Y., to Myrtle Beach, S.C., to Panama City, Fla. — beach amusement parks have become victims of the ocean-view development boom.

Trimper’s is the oldest continuously owned amusement park in the United States, and its demise would reverberate beyond the mid-Atlantic shore, said Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association.

Closing Trimper’s “will forever change Ocean City, and I don’t think it will change it for the better,” Futrell said. “It would rob the community of its soul.”

No developer has approached the family about buying the property, said Doug Trimper, Granville’s son, who helps manage the park. But the Trimpers need only consider recent history to know what could be in store if they sell.

At Coney Island, the vintage Astroland amusement park is scheduled to close at the end of this summer after 45 years in operation. A developer bought the park for $30 million and plans to build hotels and condominiums.

In Myrtle Beach, the Pavilion amusement park was shuttered in the fall after 58 years. In April, the old park’s creaky benches, rickety go-karts and chipped carousel horses were auctioned, and the property’s owner plans to develop a shopping mall.

And in Panama City, the Miracle Strip Amusement Park, home to Florida’s first roller coaster, went dark in 2004 after 41 years. A developer bought the 20-acre oceanfront property for a reported $15 million to build high-rise condominiums.

Some boardwalk amusement parks are surviving. In nearby Rehoboth Beach, Del., the Funland park has entered its 46th summer with children riding the bumper cars, touring the Haunted Mansion and holding on for the Sea Dragon free fall.

In Ocean City, Trimper’s is a fixture. There are the arcade with rows of Skee-Ball lanes, the pipe-organ carousel with hand-painted horses, the haunted house and the mirror maze.

“When you think of the boardwalk, you think of Trimper’s Rides,” Mayor Richard W. Meehan said.

The Trimpers themselves are fixtures. Granville Trimper, a former mayor and City Council president, is a gregarious and portly man known to hold court and talk politics on the benches outside the Pirate’s Cove amusement.

The park was founded in 1890 by Granville’s German immigrant grandparents. Today, the park is controlled by 14 family members, who are divided over whether to sell the property. Granville Trimper owns the most shares — a third — and he wants to keep the business.

Joyce Foreacre Trimper, 66, whose late husband ran the park before Granville, owns the second largest number of shares, about a quarter. She said she wants to sell because the business is no longer economically feasible.

“I think it’s time to move forward,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Vero Beach, Fla. “If you own something and it can’t produce the income to make it worthwhile, then anybody with a good business sense would look to do something different.”

Discussions of selling the property have strained relations within the family.

“There’s a definite difference of opinion,” Joyce Foreacre Trimper said. “I could lay it all out for you, but I don’t know that that’s the thing to do.”

Even loyal customers are torn.

As the sun was setting Friday, Henry and Joan Brisker brought their 5-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, for a ride on the carousel. Joan, 62, a native Washingtonian, remembers the rides at Trimper’s from her childhood. She took her son, Sophie’s father, when he was young.

“You always come to Trimper’s Rides,” said Joan, a former pharmaceutical executive who retired with Henry in nearby Ocean Pines, Md.

She doesn’t want to see the park close. “It’s really sad. It’s a landmark. How do you tell a 6-year-old, ‘Oh, well, there’s no more merry-go-round?’”

But her husband, Henry, 62, also a native Washingtonian, sees things differently.

“This is a disaster,” the retired engineer said, pointing to the aging carousel. “It’s a whole chunk of junk. They should tear this down and build something modern here.”

“This was hot stuff like in the ’50s,” he added. “It’s just over. We don’t have buggy whips anymore. Things end. It’s time to move on.”

Operating the amusement park has become more expensive with rising insurance bills and energy costs, Doug Trimper said. The Trimpers wouldn’t say whether revenue and attendance at the park is up or down.

To keep pace over the years, the Trimpers have raised ticket prices, but they say they will go only so high. “I’m ashamed with the prices right now, $3 to ride around for two minutes,” Granville Trimper said. “There’s a point where people are just not going to ride.”

Granville and Doug Trimper have appealed the taxes with the state. They also have reached out to Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and lawmakers for help. Options under consideration include a historic designation or legislation to change the way the park is assessed, Doug said.

Hannah Byron, O’Malley’s assistant secretary of tourism, said her office is considering drafting legislation to help Trimper’s.

“The governor has directed my office to work on solutions to save this state treasure and keep Trimper’s in operation,” Byron said.

Losing Trimper’s could harm Ocean City’s economy, which is driven by 8 million tourists each year. With a payroll of about $2.5 million, the park employs about 300 people, about 40 of them year-round, Granville Trimper said.

“It’s the heartbeat” of the boardwalk, said Del. James N. Mathias Jr. (D-Worcester), a former Ocean City mayor. “From the pipe organ of the carousel to the game where you pick the duck out of the pond . . . it’s what people dream about when they dream about their summer vacation.”

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — From Ukraine to Ecuador, scores of young maids and dishwashers are having trouble getting U.S. visas this spring — and that means trouble in Yosemite Valley.

“I’ve been making beds and scrubbing showers,” said Tracy Rogge, vice president of operations for park concessionaire Delaware North Cos. The chief operating officer “cleaned toilets and bagged groceries. Our director of finance was making burgers. This really caught us off-guard.”

Laura Chastain, recruiting manager for Delaware North, estimates that she is 300 employees short. “I don’t sleep at night right now,” she said.

Concession managers in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks bring in hundreds of foreign workers annually from Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Southern Africa because, they say, they cannot recruit American youths to fill the dirtiest jobs in the park’s kitchens and hotels.

At Yosemite, those foreign workers make up more than 20% of the summer workforce and about half the park’s housekeeping staff. At Yellowstone, they constitute one-third of a 2,600-worker summer crew. At the Grand Canyon, the ratio is about one foreign worker for every three domestic ones.

This shift in makeup has attracted little notice, perhaps because so many recruits land in “back-of-the-house” jobs. But this spring — as President Bush and Congress began to wrestle again over immigration policy — scores of would-be Yosemite workers hit a snag in their visa paperwork. That left park managers facing a staffing shortfall and has raised a pair of awkward questions.

Can these national parks can get along any more without international workers? And will Yosemite have its act together in time for the summer rush that begins this weekend?

“What we have found is that American kids, up to their mid-20s … don’t want to wash pots and clean kitchens and cut onions and be rooms-keepers making beds,” said Joe Levesque, Delaware North’s vice president for human resources. “So we have had to turn to these international workers.”

Delaware North grossed more than $110 million last year as the principal concessionaire at Yosemite — the richest single contract in the national park system. Xanterra Parks and Resorts handles commercial operations at several national parks, including Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

Both companies said that they started bringing in foreign workers about seven years ago and that their dependence on them had grown even as attendance at national parks fell slightly.

Because of English-language requirements, few of those workers are from Mexico. Instead, the roster is dominated by people from more distant lands, from Peru to Poland, South Korea to South Africa.

The Jamaicans at Mount Rushmore worked out especially well last year, said Steve Tedder, a vice president at Xanterra, as did the Thais at Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks. And at Crater Lake, a group from the Dominican Republic “ran our whole housekeeping department,” Tedder said. “They were great.”

Unlike the thousands of foreign workers who serve American cruise-ship customers for less than the U.S. minimum wage, these laborers are protected by state and federal labor laws, and they typically earn the same pay and benefits as their homegrown colleagues, park managers are quick to say.

At Yosemite, that means wages beginning at the state minimum, which will increase from $7.50 to $8 an hour in January. Health benefits begin after three months, and American and foreign concession workers alike are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 521.

“It does add a nice international flavor to the park,” SEIU internal organizer Debra Rockwood said. But the current worker shortage, Rockwood added, shouldn’t be blamed on lazy Americans. It’s what happens, she said, when “the company doesn’t try and look at what it needs to do to employ an American workforce. We have pretty good wages, but they need to treat employees like a valued asset….”

Delaware North managers disagree with Rockwood’s criticisms; they trace this year’s troubles to March, when they realized that the pace of visa petitions through federal offices had slowed dramatically. Then they learned that the Labor Department, facing a boom in petitions for 10-month H-2B visas in recent years, had decided to increase uniformity by consolidating six processing centers into two. In that shift, the agency fell weeks behind.

Immigration legislation currently before the U.S. Senate could bring relief. One provision would more than double the number of temporary visas issued annually.

Other parks that rely on different kinds of visas were unaffected, but by early May, visitors to Yosemite Lodge were finding signs that said, “The foreign workers we expected to have in place at this time are experiencing visa problems. As a result we do not have the staffing levels we desire.”

Despite six-day workweeks and overtime efforts by on-the-scene Delaware North staffers, those visitors found that housekeeping was hours behind schedule and managers were filling in at front-line positions. A spokesman said he had seen no increase in guest complaints, but this weekend will be a big test.

The pool at Yosemite Lodge, for instance, is supposed to open, but it won’t unless management can find some lifeguards quickly. It’s still unclear how many of those foreign workers will arrive in time for the season.

“We have 50 people that are awaiting interviews with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev,” Ukraine, Chastain said.

A Labor Department spokesperson acknowledged the backlog but declined to comment on Yosemite’s status, adding that “we recognize it’s a serious issue.”

Unable to wait, Delaware North said it hired 88 Americans last week. American college students will arrive almost as soon as finals are over. But when they return to school in August, the park’s managers will again be eager for foreign aid.

“It’s not difficult work. I don’t understand why it’s difficult to find Americans to work here,” said Ronal Beck, a 39-year-old culinary school graduate from Durban, South Africa.

Beck took her first Yosemite assignment as a pantry worker in May 2004. On arrival, she was surprised to discover 40 South Africans. “I’ve met Jamaicans, Indonesians, Brazilians, and people from Kenya and Ghana,” she said. “I’ve traveled the world in one place.”

Now Beck works as a junior cook in Curry Village, drawing $10.52 an hour. Her medical benefits are “great,” she said, adding, “I’d like to come back every year, but I’ve got family at home.”

Scott Gediman, a Yosemite-based spokesman for the National Park Service, said the service, which is forbidden to hire foreigners, had faced similar recruiting challenges. “These types of jobs are not as attractive to young people as they used to be,” he said.

Foreign workers, usually recruited through private agencies that do initial screening, pay for their own transportation to the park, stay up to 10 months and are less likely than Americans to leave early, even if they’re unhappy. Like most concession employees, the foreign workers typically live in the park and have meals and housing costs deducted from their paychecks.

“Basically, they’re a trapped workforce,” the SEIU’s Rockwood said.

But Geoff Watson, president of San Francisco-based Intrax Cultural Exchange, which matches foreign workers with American employers, said the workers “want to have that quintessential American experience.” In the last nine years, Watson said, his company has gone from supplying no park workers to providing about 1,000 to parks, including Yosemite, Alaska’s Denali and Yellowstone, usually on four-month visas.

Both Watson and Xanterra’s Tedder said they expected international hiring in the park system to increase. But in Yosemite, Delaware North’s Levesque is leaning the other way.

Among the prospects his recruiters have recently targeted are new military enlistees who have months to pass before reporting for duty and youths from the California foster-care system, who often find themselves at loose ends when government support programs stop at age 18.

Richard Louv, author of the 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” said he wasn’t surprised that park recruiting had taken this turn.

As suburbs encroach, indoor distractions multiply and parental fear of uncontrolled settings widens, “we’re actually making it against the rules to go outside and play in nature,” Louv said. “There are huge implications to that, and you’re seeing one of them.”