A press release from the Cape Cod National Seashore appeared in my inbox the other day promoting the value of the Park to the local economy. A new report from the National Park Service says that the Seashore’s 4 million visitors in 2022 spent $548 million locally and supported 6,680 jobs.
Supt. Brian Carlstrom is quoted: “People come to Cape Cod National Seashore to relax on the beaches, recreate on trails, learn about its history, and immerse themselves in the diverse culture of this special place.”
The timing of the press release seems a little odd. Carlstrom is about to leave Cape Cod for his next assignment in Colorado, and the community here is struggling to understand the reasoning behind the Park Service’s decision to award dune shack leases based, at least partly, on how much money is bid for them.
Carlstrom has said the Park’s choice to permit high bids was a “sound business practice.” As for the parking lot problem at Eastham’s beaches, I’m sure Carlstrom will, as he told Provincetown’s select board, “get back in touch with you very soon.”
Relations between the Park and the local community are at a low point. At last week’s select board meeting in Provincetown, Josiah Mayo, who has been a caretaker of one of the shacks to be leased, called on officials “to repair this critically important relationship between stakeholders and Seashore administrators and staff.”
It’s easy to see both the bureaucracy and Carlstrom as the villains in this drama, given his slippery performance in evading questions and his insistence that the Park’s leasing program complies with the Dune Shacks Historic District Preservation and Use Plan — which it doesn’t. It seems clear that Carlstrom knew all along that he was up for a promotion and that his job in this moment was simply to parrot the company line.
But for 57 years the Park operated mostly in collaboration rather than conflict with the community because of the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission. “The most important and complicated problem before us is to preserve the scenic and historic features of Cape Cod without injuring and unduly restricting the towns and individual citizens directly concerned,” said Sen. Leverett Saltonstall when the Seashore was proposed.
The Advisory Commission existed to help mediate that problem. But federal advisory commissions nationwide were strangled by the Trump administration in 2018 in the name of “less government.”
I am not the first to notice that less government doesn’t lead directly to better government. But the lines here are surprisingly clear. The ham-fisted abuses of the Park Service, boarding up dune shacks and discarding the Use Plan, would have been much harder to perpetrate if the National Seashore Advisory Commission had been meeting regularly and face-to-face with Park leadership.
Former Advisory Commission chair Rich Delaney warned us in 2019 that “it will take a long while to undo the damage that’s being done.”
Depending on who wins leases for the dune shacks, a “long while” could be just the start.
