Chronic seasonal staffing shortages have been a big challenge for the operation of Acadia National Park in recent years, but officials at the park and with partner organizations have suddenly stopped talking about it.
That doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. On Friday, U.S. Rep Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine, said that the damage caused by inadequate staffing at the National Park Service “cannot be overstated,” although her Republican counterparts have taken a rosier view on whether the service will have enough seasonal workers to meet summertime demand, according to a report by CQ-Roll Call.
Acadia gets millions of visitors each year and has become even more popular since the COVID pandemic, with visitation spiking to historic highs. At the same time the availability of workforce housing in and around the park has become extremely scarce, with many local homes bought up by commercial short-term rental investors.
In the past few years, Acadia officials and others have spoken out each spring about staffing challenges, voicing concerns that the lack of housing and other issues could negatively impact Maine’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry by having fewer staffed services available to visitors.
As of Friday, descriptions for eight seasonal jobs in Acadia this summer were posted at USAjobs.gov, including for maintenance workers and laborers. The park typically has more than 160 seasonal positions that it looks to fill, but in recent years has been able to fill fewer than 120 of them, Acadia officials previously have said.
As recently as early January, a spokesperson for the park told Acadia National Park on My Mind, an independent blog, that seasonal staffing shortages the past two years had led to a major backlog in trail maintenance, campground staffing and other programs. A lack of affordable housing in the area is a major reason why several summertime positions in the park have gone unfilled, the spokesperson told the blog.
Since Trump took office later in January, however, Acadia officials have not answered questions about how staffing in 2025 might affect services this year. Amanda Pollock, Acadia’s spokesperson, has forwarded inquiries about staffing to the main office of the Park Service in Washington, D.C.
Other inquiries about issues unrelated to staffing have not gotten any response from park officials.
Park Service officials have not said why they are reluctant to talk, but it comes at a time when federal funding for multiple government programs in Maine has been targeted for elimination — though federal officials have either reversed some of those decisions or shown willingness to reconsider.
The orders and reversals have come in quick succession since Gov. Janet Mills got into a heated exchange with President Donald Trump on Feb. 21 — a day after he threatened to withhold federal funds to punish the state for allowing transgender student-athletes to compete in sports. Similar programs in other states, in the meantime, have not come under the administration’s crosshairs.
Friends of Acadia, an advocacy group that provides staffing and funding support to Acadia National Park programs, has not weighed in on the staffing issues since the end of January.
Perrin Doniger, FOA’s vice president of communications and marketing, declined on Friday to comment about the park’s staffing levels, directing inquiries to the Park Service.
In late January, after Trump took office, concerns about staffing in Acadia spiked after reports leaked out that his administration had put a freeze on hiring new federal workers and that some probationary federal employees — including some at Acadia — had been laid off.
At the time, Friends of Acadia officials said freezing or reducing national park staffing likely would aggravate the park’s seasonal shortfall, putting maintenance projects even further behind schedule and reducing services for park visitors.
The Park Service later reconsidered those actions, restoring dozens of jobs and agreeing to increase the number of seasonal workers across the country.
About a week later, Park Service personnel in Washington responded to the Bangor Daily News inquiry from late January, but they did not directly comment about the reported staffing freeze.
“The National Park Service is hiring seasonal workers to continue enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management,” the service said Feb. 27 in a two-sentence email. “We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks.”
Before Park Service officials in Washington sent that statement, Acadia officials, without explanation, canceled an advisory commission meeting that had been scheduled for Feb. 3. The citizen advisory commission, which was created by Congress in 1986 as part of an effort to promote communication between national parks and abutting communities, meets three times a year so its members can speak publicly with Acadia officials about programs and issues.
Some members of the commission contacted Friday said that they have not been told why the Feb. 3 meeting was canceled, but that meetings have been canceled before and they weren’t especially concerned about it.
The lack of public comment from the park service over the past two months is not limited to questions about staffing. The New York Times reported last week that the Trump administration had sent a memo to Park Service staffers not to proactively share numbers about visitation levels, though the information remains available through other means, including online.
