One of your priorities was to expand staff enough to where we could get a lot of these bases covered. That seems like it is a related theme, the fact of getting funds, just like the housing?
You do have to hustle a buck. There is no question about it. And there are ways to hustle a buck and there are ways to hustle a buck. And part of it is through the person, and part is just through the planning process. In other words, they can go clear back to Connie Wirth (8). He used to say, “1 know, by gosh, some day there’s gonna be money to develop the national parks. And I’m going to have the plans on the shelf so that when that day comes and there’s money, I’ll have the plans done.” I think that probably this is not totally as altruistic as it may sound. I think he also was a planner by nature, and he had an awful lot of landscape architects and architects around the Park Service. But the point is, he did do a lot of planning.
One of the things that we did in every area that I was superintendent of, certainly Crater Lake, was we had plans. We had plans for everything. And we worked really, really hard at making sure that that planning was in place. You’d be surprised how much money we got at Crater Lake because we had plans and some other area didn’t. I used to manage to screw some of the other parks out of an awful lot of coin because I had the plans and they didn’t. So when there was money around, late in the fiscal year or any other time, I happened to have a plan where I can use that money. With the proof, all we had to do was go and build it or go do it.
