Grand Canyon's incoming superintendent comes from outside the National Park Service, which might be just what the park needs, according to one observer/Rebecca Latson file
Growing up just south of the Canadian border on Lake Champlain in upstate New York, Ed Keable spent much of his youth "playing in the great outdoors, oftentimes barefoot."
"And I think that’s really where I began my love for the great outdoors, as a child,” said Keable, who will move to one of the grandest outdoor settings in the world when he heads to Grand Canyon National Park next month to take over as the park's superintendent.
But as beautiful as that setting is, whether you view it from the South or North rims or while floating the Colorado River through the park's gut, Keable's life likely won't be as blissful as the one he enjoyed on Lake Champlain so many decades ago. At least not immediately.
Edward Keable in Yosemite National Park/Courtesy of Ed Keable
A top Interior Department attorney for the past 17 years, Keable comes to a position the National Park Service has been unable to permanently fill since Christine Lehnertz left a year ago after baseless allegations spurred an investigation into her management of the park.
Outwardly, Keable seems an unlikely choice for the job as he has no on-the-ground experience with the Park Service. Indeed, the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks attacked his appointment, saying the lawyer "is not qualified to manage and lead a complicated park such as the Grand Canyon. While Mr. Keable may possess the ‘passion’ and ‘leadership skills’ that Acting Director (David) Vela referenced in his statement, it does not mean that Mr. Keable has the knowledge, skills, and ability to be superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the most high-profile, complex, and heavily visited national park operations in the System."
But the 1.2-million-acre Grand Canyon is not just any park in the National Park System.
It is one of the crown jewels, one with many facets that just might require an atypical superintendent. There are:
- ~ 350 employees.
- Nearly two dozen concession operations that gross roughly $200 million annually.
- A residential community that includes a K-12 school system with roughly 300 students.
- More than 1,200 buildings.
- 254 miles of roads.
- 23 miles of the decrepit, leaky Trans-canyon Pipeline that requires $100 million -- or about five times the park's annual appropriation -- for replacement.
- Four sewage treatment facilities.
- More than 1,000 lodging rooms.
- An annual base appropriation of more than $21 million.
- Campgrounds with more than 450 sites.
- More than 200,000 river "user days" per year.
- Eight National Historic Landmarks.
- 39 sites on the National Register of Historic Places.
- Museums, dump stations, theaters.
Among the hot button issues awaiting Keable are:
- The park's longstanding problem with sexual harassment.
- Efforts to develop a major resort just outside the park on the South Rim. Opponents to the project being pushed by an Italian developer have said it could see more than 2,000 housing units and several million square feet of commercial space reach to within a half-mile or so of the park, and could impact groundwater flows that feed the canyon's springs and hanging gardens. The town of Tusayan, Arizona, on the South Rim just outside the park retained the Denver-based law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farbr Schreck, LLP, of which Interior Secretary David Bernhardt -- Keable's boss -- was a former shareholder, to see the project succeed. Since the firm was retained, on the same August day Bernhardt was sworn in as deputy Interior secretary, it has been paid more than $500,000 to lobby the Interior Department on the project.
- Lobbying to see uranium mining return to lands nearby the park.
- Thorny Colorado River water issues that are growing more and more complex with climate change.
- Managing thousands of air tour operations each year.
While Keable might not bring any management experience stemming from working in a park, he has extensive knowledge of the legal world in which superintendents must operate.
"I’ve been providing legal services to seven secretaries of the Interior, both Democrats and Republicans, and many senior leaders of the Park Service, for 23 years as a career civil servant, and I’ve done that on a wide variety of issues," Keable said during his first interview not just as incoming superintendent to the Grand Canyon but in the past 30 years. “I know the Park Service very well. I also have expertise in many issues, in many management areas, that will help me succeed as the superintendent of the Grand Canyon."
One of his roles working in Interior's Solicitor's Office was to coordinate with Interior's Office of Inspector General on its investigations, including the one into the contrived allegations that Lehnertz during her short career as Grand Canyon's superintendent fostered a hostile atmosphere among the staff and spent recklessly on renovations to employee housing. Not only did the OIG staff clear her of all allegations, but its report created a portrait of one of her accusers as determined not to follow her directives and even impede them.
The individual who brought the allegations is believed to still be on the park's management team that Keable will inherit.
Asked about the Lehnertz matter, Keable acknowledged his familiarity with the investigation but wouldn't comment directly on its implications.
“I’m not going into the park with any preconceived notions about any particular issues. I am going, as is my nature as a leader and a manager, to be fair with everybody. And I’m not going to comment on any particular individual or any particular issue,” he said.
What Keable would say was that his career has prepared him for the tasks he'll confront at the park.
"I certainly will bring a perspective that’s not Park Service-centric. I bring a really good management and leadership perspective," he said during a phone call. "I served in the United States Army for seven years and I learned a number of leadership principles in the Army, and a number of management principles as an executive in the Solicitor’s Office, and I marry those two issues.
"Leadership is not the same thing as management. In order to be successful in a key position like the superintendent of Grand Canyon, you have to be able to understand what leadership is and what management is, and the difference between them, and be prepared to both be an effective leader and an effective manager. So I think with my background I’m able to do that,” he said.
Those who have worked with Keable over the years consider him well-suited for the position, particularly when it comes to the personnel issues that have festered in the park for some time. Bringing in an outsider to address those issues might just be the approach needed, one told the Traveler.
Former Park Service Director Jon Jarvis spoke highly of Keable, saying the lawyer "is smart and capable and a career public servant with experience in the legal aspects of public lands."
"It is an odd choice for the superintendent of Grand Canyon," Jarvis allowed, "but if Ed has a good operational deputy and a strong NPS management team in the park, he should do fine."
Cam Sholly, Yellowstone's superintendent whose past NPS duties included chief ranger for the agency as well as director of its Midwest Region, has a long working relationship with Keable.
"He’s a very competent, pragmatic, and thoughtful person who I think can succeed at Grand Canyon," Sholly wrote the Traveler in an email. "He has helped us work through some very complex issues over the years in this agency. He’s good at problem solving and using the people around him to inform his decisions. Insofar as the team there provides that support, I think he’ll do very well."
Sholly also thought it was unproductive to be "ripping Ed right out of the gate," and pointed out that "I don’t think there were people necessarily banging down the door for this job. These jobs are tough and many times thankless. I commend Ed for being willing to go in and try to make a difference."
Keable's legal experience spans many of the areas he'll have to grapple with in Grand Canyon. His work for Interior has involved contracting, budgeting, law enforcement, emergency management, facilities management, information managagement.
Plus, personnel law.
"I issued the personnel bulletin, 1801, on eliminating harassing behavior at the department," the lawyer said. "Since then, I’ve provided extensive legal advice to the department and the Park Service on how to eliminate harassing conduct."
Specific to the park's struggle with harassment, Keable said that he looks "forward to working with the Grand Canyon staff to learn what steps they’ve taken at the park to address this issue, and to assess what might need to be done still, and to working with them to address those issues."
Overall, he's looked forward to getting to the park and working to move it forward.
“I am confident that, especially with the talented employees of the park, the leadership team at the park, I will be able to work with them to leverage their expertise and my experience and form a really good management team at the park,” said Keable.
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Comments
Alfred, nihilism is the belief that all moral values are so tangled and so shifting as to be baseless, that there is no real truth that can be known, no real action that can be taken, and that nothing can be done to effect any genuine change or improvement in our meaningless existence. It masquerades as a worldly wise and weary skepticism, but is actually just the nihilist's own cynical belief in nothing beyond their own experience, no story beyond their own, no evolutionary direction, and no genuine loyalties beyond personal indulgence and petty grudges and bitterness. Nihilists cannot imagine any cause worth the effort or any reason to try to right any wrong or prevent any misfortune other than their own and their distaste for such efforts and beliefs in others is so intense that they cannot resist using any diversion, distraction, disinformation, or confusion to throw such efforts and beliefs off track, stall them, spin them around, immobilize them, paralyze them, drown them in an irrelevant story or two, cloud their memory, disperse their energy, and depress their hopes that anything can be done to have any impact. Nihilists, the clinically depressed brethren of narcissists, are agents of entropy.
Nailed it.
Rump, you think you're good at this. You're not. I have spent my whole life being "positive" about the national parks, but that means being honest to the truth. You pick and choose which "truths" you want to follow. And they wind up being exactly what you accuse me of--"diversion, distraction, disinformatiion, and confusion," because you refuse to be informed by history.
Don't worry, however. You're in good company. Now something like half the states in the United States no longer require high-school history. And institutions of "higher learning" are also abandoning it in droves. You want a conspiracy, Rump? Try that one on for size. Who benefits when the nation forgets its history?
Fifty years ago, when I graduated college, practically every major national park had a full-time historian. You could visit Gettysburg and find four or five. They would sit down with you--and encourage you to be a historian. They were the most wonderful people in the Park Service I have ever met.
I then determined, on entering graduate school, to make telling their story my life's work. The problem was: The moment I got into the records, I had to confront the truth. The national parks, as much as we love them, began as "worthless lands." They were the leftovers-- what the settlers, miners, loggers, and cattlemen didn't want. They were gorgeous to look at, but worth little else in the larger scheme of national development. Tourism, i.e., the railroads, then gave the national parks an "economic" base.
Was I wrong? The one or two true exceptions, such as Olympic National Park, got undermined from within.
Suddenly, you're all hot and bothered that Grand Canyon is being "undermined." Well, when I said that fifty years ago NO ONE wanted to listen, with the exception, perhaps, of David Brower, Roderick Nash, and Michael Frome, who themselves were fighting for the Grand Canyon's life as a living river and not a reservoir.
To be good at what you do--being a critic--you have to know what you're talking about. I talk about trains; you call me Choo Choo Al; I talk about this issue, and you call me a nihilist. You're good at labels, Rump, but that is all you're good at. As I used to tell my students, the moment you need a label you're admitting that your argument is BS. A real debate proceeds with nouns and verbs. Adjectives are for amateurs, and desperate ones at that. You only call my history "irrelevent" stories because you don't know the history. You need the adjective "irrelevant" to protect you from being irrelevant.
You want to be relevant; you want to effect meaningful change? Stop barking at the world from the cheap seats, becoming for Grand Canyon what Rosalie Edge was to Olympic National Park, for example. But first, in doing that, you will need to sign your name.
You are on fire Alfred!
Rump ---
Hope your self esteem has enough of a turtle shell to protect you from the velocity of the downward incoming condescending words. Not just Al, but his syncophant as well.
It does; I've dealt with worse. Thanks, Rick B.; you hang in there yourself.
As for Lynne's complaint, which remains legitimate, yes, we want sexaul harrassment in the parks to end. But there again, it is not the only issue facing Grand Canyon--or any park.
My point is we all know sexual harrassment and discrimination exists, but the park level is pure AMETEUR compared to the DOI level of tightly institutionalized complete suffocation of complaints. After 18 years in Washington DC for the NPS as an EO counselor in the parks, a DOI Conflict Resolution mediator, a member of the Union for 18 years I can say with 100% confidence and certainty DOI has no intention of permitting this cycle to cease.
Phil Francis, Chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks:
"Ed Keable is not qualified to manage and lead a complicated park such as the Grand Canyon. While Mr. Keable may possess the 'passion' and 'leadership skills' that Acting Director Vela referenced in his statement, it does not mean that Mr. Keable has the knowledge, skills, and ability to be superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the most high-profile, complex, and heavily visited national park operations in the System.
Individuals named to Senior Executive Service (SES) level positions have historically demonstrated significant skill in complex park management, earned through experience working in the field. Mr. Keable's selection sets a terrible precedent and robs the National Park Service (NPS) career workforce, who have decades of expertise working in national parks, of opportunities to lead the agency in senior superintendent posts.
In addition, Mr. Keable, who has worked closely with Secretary Bernhardt for years, will need to contend with efforts to develop a resort in Tusayan, just outside the gates of the park. Coming as no surprise to anyone following Secretary Barnhardt's actions at the helm of Interior, Secretary Bernhardt's former law firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, has been hired to lobby for its development. At this crucial time, when leadership is desperately needed, Grand Canyon needs an experienced and strong advocate, not a politically appointed superintendent.
On the heels of Secretary Bernhardt showing such disregard for NPS employees during the escalating pandemic by keeping parks open and putting their health and safety at risk, the decision to put someone with no national park experience in charge of a crown jewel of the National Park System is appalling."