The federal shutdown may be over, but its impact on Acadia National Park likely will be felt for a while, according to the head of a nonprofit group.
The park’s year-round staff of roughly 90 people returned to work Thursday, after Congress reached an agreement to end the 43-day federal shutdown Wednesday evening, according to Eric Stiles, president of the advocacy group Friends of Acadia. Seasonal workers who expected to finish out their 2025 contracts at Acadia in mid-October instead were furloughed from their jobs at the end of September.
Stiles said there was a “profound” sense of relief among the returning staff about the end of the shutdown, and the deal to end it that Congress reached Wednesday. Back pay will be granted to employees who were denied paychecks during the shutdown, he said, and workers who were affected by reduction-in-force cuts during the shutdown have had those layoffs reversed, he said.
But the end of the shutdown does not mean things are back to normal, Stiles said. While some facilities closed as annually scheduled in October — at the tail end of the tourist season when park operations are scaled back for the winter — the full winterization process for those facilities was not completed by the skeleton crew of staffers who continued to work through the shutdown, he said.
“A lot of that work was delayed,” Stiles said.
As a result, climate-control systems were left on in some buildings, though they were locked and unoccupied, weeks past their usual closure dates because there weren’t enough staff on duty to drain pipes and perform other routine seasonal tasks, he said.
Acadia’s trail crew typically performs seasonal work to get trails ready for winter, but could not get started on it during the shutdown — even as winter weather got an early start on Veteran’s Day with up to an inch of snow that fell in the area, he said.
The staff that continued to work during the shutdown, which was focused mainly on public safety and health, did “an outstanding job,” Stiles said. But still, for visitors who came to Acadia despite the shutdown, there was no park staff at the Hulls Cove Visitors’ Center or elsewhere to greet them or answer questions, and no park ranger programs to help them learn more about Acadia, Stiles said.
“It was a diminished experience,” he said.
Also, without the Sand Beach Entrance station being staffed, the park is believed to have missed out on more than $1.5 million in entrance fee revenue, which goes to help to supplement the park’s operations, which could affect projects in the park that Friend of Acadia is hoping to help support with matching funds.
Friends of Acadia, with support from local businesses, raised roughly $30,000 from park visitors in the form of voluntary online donations, he said — though they knew the effort would generate a “pittance” compared with what the park typically collects in entrance fees.
Across the country, he added, the shutdown may have prevented national parks from collecting as much as $15 million in nationwide entrance fee revenue, a portion of which is used to support smaller National Park Service properties that do not collect entrance fees, such as Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.
Stiles said that Acadia and the National Park Service as a whole already had grappled with upheaval earlier this year, well before the disruption of the shutdown was imposed.
After President Donald Trump took office last winter, his administration imposed a hiring freeze that remains in effect and then — in what Stiles referred to as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” — laid off hundreds or more of mostly park service probationary employees. Now, 1 in 4 park service jobs remain unfilled, he said.
The cumulative effect of these actions, which compound funding and staffing challenges that have been around for years, heightens the instability of working for the National Park Service, Stiles said. The shutdown could delay the offseason process of lining up seasonal employees for 2026, he said, but what has happened this year could drive career-track employees out of the park service altogether, either into early retirement or to seek job opportunities elsewhere.
“That’s my fear,” Stiles said. “It’s a state of nonstop volatility. It has to be taking a toll.”
