Lake Roosevelt NRA: Administrative History (Chapter 7)

CHAPTER 7:
Building and Maintaining the Park: Administrative and Visitor Facilities (continued)

In the 1940s, the primary maintenance tasks at LARO involved minor or routine work on Park Service equipment such as vehicles and boats and on the radio communications system; there were no government facilities to maintain. Reclamation employees in Reclamation shops did all major repair work on Park Service vehicles. Reclamation also frequently loaned heavy equipment to LARO personnel. The park's first two permanent maintenance positions were established in 1962. LARO's maintenance employees have traditionally been mostly seasonal workers who already lived in the area when they were hired. [43]

LARO began to acquire and develop more equipment, buildings, and recreational facilities in the 1950s. Many of the boats, vehicles, and pre-assembled buildings were military, Reclamation, or other federal agency surplus. By 1950, the NRA had five boats and a warehouse/workshop building in the North Marina area (the latter was locally referred to as the "hobby shop"). LARO put up a corrugated aluminum building at Kettle Falls in 1951 to store picnic tables, noxious weed eradication supplies, and other materials. Soon the Park Service owned several residences and garages, all of which were maintained by NRA maintenance crews. As recreational sites were developed, LARO added comfort stations, bathhouses, and visitor contact stations to its facilities. [44]

LARO maintenance crews were responsible for a great variety of tasks, including road maintenance, equipment repair, facility maintenance, landscaping, grading beaches and placing log booms, maintaining communications systems, maintenance and extension of boat launch ramps, installing floating comfort stations, trail maintenance, building concrete fireplaces and other campsite amenities, maintaining utilities, plowing snow, and fencing. Most of the building maintenance was done between September and May rather than during the visitor season, and lakeshore facilities were often worked on during the annual winter/spring drawdowns. [45]

LARO employees went over the catalogues of General Services Administration surplus property published three or four times a month and put in requests for items they wanted, ranging from vehicles and boats to smaller items such as buoys and cables. Later Superintendents may not have been as enthusiastic about searching for used equipment, but Hugh Peyton and Homer Robinson saw the savings and rose to the challenge. All of LARO's early boats were surplus from government agencies. One, a thirty-six-foot Criscraft, was fast and expensive, popular with Regional Office staff and resented by local people. LARO Superintendent Homer Robinson obtained LARO's military-surplus fifty-six-foot flat-bottomed landing craft (named the Pelican but renamed the Heron by mistake during an overhaul) from a Navy yard in Seattle. This watercraft proved to be extremely useful for establishing boat-in areas and for cleaning floating debris because it could haul trucks and bulldozers and other heavy equipment to sites that lacked road access. [46]

One of LARO's unusual acquisitions during the 1950s was heavy cast-iron practice bombs with fins on the back ends. Don Everts hauled two or three truckloads to LARO from a military air base, and NRA personnel painted the bombs white and installed them fins down as guard rails. Everts thought they were "a work of art" and unrecognizable to the average person, but someone from the Regional Office in San Francisco recognized the surplus practice bombs and ordered them replaced immediately with concrete posts. [47]

This place was built on surplus material.

-- Don Everts, LARO employee 1951-1982, 1999 [48]

LARO personnel during the 1950s and 1960s generally exhibited a "can do" attitude that permeated every aspect of their jobs. The Superintendents gave the maintenance staff free rein to solve problems with ingenuity and creativity, recognizing that they had limited funds and equipment with which to work. As Don Everts commented about much of his work during this period, "Here we go again with our little old pickups and hammers." [49]

During the 1960s, more work and storage space was provided in the three districts for the maintenance division, gradually replacing the old war-surplus buildings in some locations. The older, temporary buildings needed much more maintenance than those that replaced them. [50]

The creation and maintenance of swim beaches is an ongoing job at the NRA. Two hundred tons of sand are lost each year due to wind, waves, and drawdowns. LARO maintains at least one sandpit as a source of replacement sand. The sand in the gigantic sand pile in Coulee Dam, behind park headquarters, is the size of pea gravel. Although it is not suitable for beaches, the Park Service and county and state highway departments use it for road work. [51]

Unlike many other Park Service units, at LARO the district rangers supervised routine or minor maintenance operations while the park engineer offered technical assistance and was responsible for major maintenance, engineering, and construction. Maintenance staffing expanded in 1965 to 4 permanent positions and 5.6 seasonal. They were responsible for over 450 campsites and some 240 picnic sites at 34 different locations, plus all the associated visitor and administrative facilities. One of the first women hired in a seasonal maintenance position at LARO was Ranae Colman, hired in 1972 and converted to full-time subject-to-furlough in the 1990s. [52]

In 1972, LARO's maintenance staff placed the maintenance of buildings, picnic tables, wooden signs, and garbage cans throughout the NRA on a scheduled program. Soon other maintenance tasks were added to the cyclic maintenance program, such as chipping and sealing roads, working on docks and floating facilities, bank stabilization, buoys, markers and anchors, painting building exteriors, residing buildings, roof replacement, and furniture replacement. In 1976, LARO added the historic buildings and foundations at Fort Spokane to the cyclic maintenance program. The funding was initially used for painting and foundation stabilization. Some of the park's permanent maintenance employees have received training in historic preservation techniques to better care for the historic military structures. The current cyclic maintenance program includes three types of projects: regular, natural resources, and exhibits. Parks submit their projects each year based on a ten-year program. LARO's base funding does not provide for adequate routine maintenance; having maintenance employees work longer seasons would help reduce the backlog. [53]

The 1980 State of the Parks report to Congress found that all Park Service units were in trouble. As a result, facility maintenance and repair received increased attention throughout the National Park System. The Park Restoration and Improvement Program of 1981-1985 was a high-profile program aimed at upgrading park facilities and infrastructure that had suffered years of neglect. For example, LARO used funds from this program for shoreline stabilization, surface coating of major gravel roads, replacement of swim floats and lifeguard stands, and rebuilding the boardwalk at Fort Spokane. [54]

Computers have allowed LARO's maintenance staff to track their time better on a wide variety of projects, rather than just special projects as had been previously done. The field people have become more involved in computerized recordkeeping. LARO used Maintenance Management System, a program established in the late 1980s to provide a Servicewide preventive maintenance program. It required detailed inventory information on physical assets and the work associated with maintaining each asset. LARO staff developed and computerized their own version and put it into use in 1989. This software was not Y2K compliant, however, so in 1999, reports South District Maintenance Supervisor Ray Dashiell, "we shot it." LARO is now one of about thirty parks participating in a pilot program to test new maintenance software called Maximo. [55]

Former LARO Superintendent Gary Kuiper commented that in the 1980s LARO had a reputation for looking good, saying, "Our maintenance crew, to the person, was so sensitive to how they came across and how they made the place look." [56]

During the 1980s, LARO's maintenance workload increased greatly because of higher visitation, more developed areas to maintain, the noxious weed control program, maintaining the fee collection systems, increased marine maintenance, the hazard tree/thinning program, more work related to concessions, and additional agency paperwork. By 1990, many routine maintenance items such as tree pruning, working on signs, road maintenance, and weed control were no longer accomplished routinely or on schedule. This was mostly due to increased visitation and to the need to provide minimum services at each developed area. The LARO Facility Manager requested that, like other LARO divisions, maintenance subject-to-furlough positions be converted to full-time positions. About half a dozen maintenance positions were converted. This change spread the workload out more evenly over the year, since winter work could include tree thinning, inside work on facilities, equipment care and repair, dock repair, and repair and construction of tables, benches, and garbage cans. During the busy summer season, maintenance crews spend most of their time cleaning and caring for campground facilities. [57]

LARO's Assets, 1989

39 miles of roads
8 miles of trails
50 housing units
151 public and administrative buildings
188 utility systems
1,870 acres of grounds (182 acres mowed, 43 acres irrigated)
435 miles of shoreline
257 docks/bulkheads/ramps
64 boats [probably includes canoes and rowboats]
35 park vehicles

plus: campgrounds, picnic areas, swimming beaches [48]

LARO's Facility Manager completed the park's Fleet Management Plan in 1990. It established policy for operating, maintaining, and acquiring all motor vehicles, equipment, and boats owned or leased by LARO. LARO had about sixteen boats and over thirty vehicles in 1992. The NRA made a major change in 1999 when it turned over its vehicles to the General Services Administration. The park now leases most of its vehicles under 26,000 pounds gross vehicle weight from this agency. The leased vehicles are replaced more frequently, which improves safety, but the additional cost — about 3 percent of LARO's budget — has had to be absorbed by the recreation area. This conversion from Department of Interior ownership to leasing was done in response to national directives to use leased vehicles wherever possible. [59]

The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, established in 1996, allows parks to keep a percentage of the fees they collect. This program provides a reliable source of funding to LARO for minor construction, rehabilitation, and cyclic maintenance. Some of the projects funded by this program in the late 1990s include installing solar lighting for various visitor facilities; making restrooms accessible; extending launch ramps; constructing picnic shelters; installing curbing and sidewalks; and adding shore anchor and courtesy dock improvements. [60]

LARO began participating in the nationwide Youth Conservation Corps program in 1977. The first crew built a tent camp to house the teenage enrollees. The crews work with park maintenance crews on tasks such as putting up fences, painting, and picking up litter, and they are supervised by maintenance foremen. The number of enrollees over the years has ranged from about ten to twenty-four, and currently all crews are composed of local young people. The projects accomplished by these crews have varied widely, from building the Lava Bluff Trail to timber stand improvement, noxious weed control, installing gabions, building a boat launch ramp, and campground maintenance. In 1993, the Spokane Tribe of Indians (STI) funded a Native Youth Corps program at Fort Spokane district. This program has been discontinued, however, because it required so much time of supervisors. [61]

Landscaping LARO's developed areas has been recognized as a major maintenance item since the planning period of the early 1940s. Although Park Service policy encourages incorporating "sustainable design" into park work programs, the establishment of irrigated lawns and shade trees has always been seen as critical at the recreation area. Park staff did experiment with letting some areas go natural, but the resulting powdery dirt and dying trees proved unacceptable to visitors. [62]

During the initial construction work on the major areas in the 1950s, topsoil was hauled in, lawns were seeded, and hundreds of shade trees were planted in picnic and campground areas. Sometimes this required almost heroic efforts. At North Marina, for example, LARO personnel used a surplus telephone-pole digger to dig holes. Then they filled the bottoms with powder and blasted them to break up the clay and rocks before filling with topsoil and planting trees. Other ongoing tasks have included applications of fertilizer, mowing, pruning, rodent control, and spraying to control insects. On occasion, attempts were made to eradicate native sagebrush from developed areas. Lawns, shrubs, and shade trees require much water for irrigation because the soil is sandy. LARO upgraded its water and irrigation systems in the early 1970s using regional reserve funds, including installing a large water-storage tank at Fort Spokane and replacing the "old hodge-podge watering system" [63] at Spring Canyon. The headquarters building was landscaped in 1972 using a plan prepared by the Regional Office. By 1989, about half of LARO's recreation sites had some maintained landscaping. Until the 1990s, most of the trees and shrubs were exotic species purchased from nurseries (native grasses were planted a little earlier, beginning in the 1980s). [64]

The Park Service directed all parks to reduce energy consumption in the early 1970s. At LARO, this initially affected vehicle use, causing reductions in off-site staff training. Maintenance staff developed energy conservation measures for LARO's buildings, including insulation, double-paned windows, and lower thermostat settings. The park also began separating and recycling selected materials and using biodegradable and/or recyclable materials as much as possible. Wood-burning stoves were installed in some employee dwellings. LARO appointed an Energy Coordinator in 1978, reflecting the program's high-priority status. In 1979, a concerted and successful effort was made to lower energy consumption by reducing lawn mowing, combining vehicle trips, reducing air conditioner use, and other means. LARO Superintendent William Dunmire, in a letter to all employees, commented, "Those Park Service bikes now in use at Kettle Falls don't use a drop of gas; more are on order for Fort Spokane." [65] High-mileage compact vehicles gradually replaced the NRA's "land whales." The interpretive program included energy-related programs such as a solar energy demonstration. Energy conservation and recycling projects continue to the present, although employees no longer save energy by riding bicycles while on duty. Currently, LARO has some solar lighting for vault toilets and bulletin boards. [66]

LARO began working on making its visitor facilities more accessible to people in wheelchairs as early as 1970 by installing ramps and widening comfort station stalls at major developed areas. The Spring Canyon bathhouse was the first facility designed for disabled visitors. The Park Service was required to do this by the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968. In 1978, a Regional Office employee surveyed wheelchair access at LARO, and plans for retrofitting facilities were adopted in the following year. Maintenance worker Don Everts remembers that it was difficult to retrofit some facilities according to Regional Office designs; "they could sit down there with their drawing boards and pencils and pictures and maps and come up with some beautiful stuff," but making the changes in the field was not always so easy. LARO's 1980 General Management Plan stated that all new facilities would be fully accessible and that existing facilities would be retrofitted wherever possible. The maintenance division completed an accessibility survey in 1988 and found several problem areas, such as the buildings at Fort Spokane, comfort stations and pit toilets, picnic areas, and swim beaches. Some of these facilities have been replaced or retrofitted since 1988. In 1992, the Park Service was required to use the more stringent ADA Accessibility Guidelines rather than the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standard that parks had been using in designing construction projects. Full accessibility of LARO's land and water facilities has not yet been achieved. [67]

Today, visitor satisfaction with LARO's facilities is high. One complaint that is frequently heard, however, concerns the lack of hot showers. The park's position, however, is that showers are provided by the private sector near Park Service facilities, and LARO does not want to compete with local businesses. [68]