| It’s not often that the director of the National Park Service comes all the way from Washington, D.C., to visit the bush communities of McCarthy and Kennicott—in fact it has never happened before! |
| But it did happen. On August 5th Fran Mainella— accompanied by the Alaska Director Rob Arnberger—spent two days in our humble towns. |
| Ms. Mainella, who likes to be called Fran, made history long before she came to our town. She is the first woman to ever be appointed as Director of the National Park Service. |
| Bonnie and I felt a kinship to this special lady, since she moved to Florida about the time that we left Florida and moved to Alaska. “My folks lived down in Bonita Springs,” said Fran. “I’ve been in Florida since 1977 but I served on both the municipal level and private sector. I served as executive director of a non-profit called the Florida Recreational Park Association, and then I moved into being director of the Florida Park Service. I came in under Governor Martinez and then served under Governor Chiles and recently under Governor Bush.” |
| We talked with Fran about relations between the community and the Park Service. The Director said she wants to concentrate on the concept of partnership. “Everything needs to focus off of partnerships and we want to make everything a win, win,” said Mainella. “It can’t be that the NPS just wins or the partner just wins; it needs to be a win, win on all sides which means it takes time and energy to work on those relationships.”Fran said she would like the NPS staff to spend more time working with the community. The local park recently got funding for increased staffing, and Mainella hopes it will help. “I don’t think we’ve given Gary and his staff here all the tools, and we still don’t have all the staffing we need, but we certainly, I think, are making a step forward.” |
| Mainella told us she wants to make sure that the park staff has a broad spectrum of partners sitting at the table when they have meetings. “If we aren’t doing that we need to make sure we are,” said Fran. “As I go across this nation I talk about partnerships—why I’ve succeeded, why we got voted the best state park system in the country in Florida is because of our ability to make sure that we had a wide variety of folks at the table. We spent a lot time on the front side before decisions were made to bring people together,” she continued. Talking about groups that had disagreed with her decisions, she said they still supported her confirmation as NPS director. “Fran always had us at the table and we were respected,” they would say. “Now we didn’t always get the resolution that we were looking for, but we always felt respected, and we felt we were at the table.” |
| Fran talked about several other subjects. She used the expression “environmentally friendly access” to describe her goal for access to the nation’s parks. “We’ve been very successful recently in some cases around our national park systems working on those access questions,” said Mainella. |
| The Director had just come from dedicating the new NPS Visitor Center in Copper Center, and was clearly excited about the new facility. She sees it as a place where visitors can get information on the area, perhaps watch a video, then be directed into the park itself. |
| About the McCarthy Road: “Again, the state is a partner, and the state has the right-of-way and we plan to work with them.” |
| About the Kennicott River bridge: “If it becomes the desire of the community in this area to make a change in the state then we’ll be glad to work along and see how we can adjust if the desires that they want are different access than just a walking access.” |
| About Kennecott: “We’re really doing an awful lot of, it’s not development, but improvement in that it is bringing things back to as we call it “adaptive management”— taking facilities, improving them.” |
| “I was so impressed with the facilities that I’ve seen over there and the opportunities that are going to be available. Not only the great natural resources, but these cultural resources we have here and that’s part of what the mill is—it’s part of the history of this country.” |
| “I saw when I was over there so many groups going through tours, and then others that were walking up on the glaciers and that kind of thing—all this diversity, so you’re reaching a lot of needs and I believe our staff is ready and willing to reach out to [different] groups.” |
| "We still have our national needs that we have to meet, but we are very reflective of what the community is looking for, so if we're not getting the right read... maybe you all can help us with that." |
| We here at Wrangell St. Elias News and the residents of Kennecott and McCarthy wish you all the best, Fran, and look forward to working with you. |