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Border Walls, Backroom Deals, and a Park Service Reorg: Three Stories You Need to Know · Ranger PamPaw's Park Report

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A wall goes up in the desert as court-ordered pause runs out.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: A backroom land deal at Yosemite draws fire from both parties, and Washington quietly drafts a plan to redraw how every national park is run.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is the park report.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Mark Tetzel.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Park Report for September 30th, 2026.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: First up, construction is underway on a new border wall in far west Texas, and today a federal pause on work inside Big Bend National Park itself is set to expire.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where things stand.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Back in August, a federal judge in San Antonio, Orlando Garcia, issued a temporary restraining order halting construction inside the park.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: That order has been extended twice, most recently through today, September 30th.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It covers two specific projects that touch the park boundary.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Outside the park, work hasn't stopped.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: CBP says crews are actively building 30-foot steel panels on a 47-mile stretch in Hudspeth County, part of a five-project plan running about 600 miles from Hudspeth County to Valverde County.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Roughly 65% of that land is privately owned.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Two separate lawsuits are working through federal court.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The first, filed in mid-August by tribal nonprofit and a river outfitter, argues construction inside the park threatens archaeological sites and religious freedom.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's the suit that produced this restraining order.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: The second, filed September 14th by Conservative Big Ben and six landowners, argues the government's own numbers don't support labeling the region an area of high illegal entry.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The legal trigger DHS needs to waive dozens of federal laws.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: By CBP's own data, the complaint says Big Ben has recorded the fewest apprehensions of any Southwest border sector for 53 years running.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the opposition isn't only from one side.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Texas Land Commissioner Don Buckingham, a Republican, has said a virtual wall makes more sense in far west Texas and sent CBP a cease and desist letter in July after a contractor cleared state land without permission.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Greg Abbott has made a similar comment, and Senator John Cornyn pushed back before CBP first paused at work.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So watch for an update today.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: If the Big Ben pause isn't extended again, construction could resume inside the park itself.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Next, for more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly negotiating to hand a strip of land inside Yosemite to a private developer.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the opposition now spans both parties.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the deal.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: First reported by notice, Kingsbarn Realty Company, a Nevada company, owns an 83-acre property called Hazel Green Ranch just outside Yosemite's western boundary.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Kingsbarn wants to build a road under a mile long, connecting that property to one of the park's main roads.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: In exchange, the Park Service would give up a roughly two-acre strip of parkland and Kingsbarn would hand over land of equal value elsewhere in California once that land is appraised and identified.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Interior says no final decision has been made, and that if the proposal moves forward, it will go through the standard environmental review and public comment process.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: The pushback has been notably bipartisan.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: 157 members of Congress signed a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Bergum opposing the swap.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: 61 California state legislators, led by a Republican Assembly member, sent a similar letter.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Congressman Tom McClintock, the Republican whose district includes the park, has reportedly said the deal is dead.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, in the news, internal Interior Department documents obtained by the outlet notice describe a plan to reorganize how the entire National Park Service is run.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: The plan would move the agency to what the documents call a hub and spoke model.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some parks would become hubs, setting priorities and direction for smaller spoke parks that would report to them.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The regional system stays in place on paper, but power shifts towards the hub parks.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: The document also describes folding the agency's culture and science functions into a new office called Resource Stewardship and replacing the current visitor and resource protection office with a new law enforcement safety and health division.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: MPS says it doesn't expect layoffs in the short term, though internal talking points tell officials not to promise that outright.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Planning meetings that were scheduled with superintendents for mid-September were canceled, so the timeline is still unclear.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't coming out of nowhere.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty retired park superintendents sent Secretary Bergum a letter warning that, quote, an ill-advised and hastily planned reorganization could dismantle the structure that lets each park serve its own community.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Jeff Moes, former superintendent of Glacier, put it this way: Top-down initiatives from Washington rarely account for how different one park is from the next.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: A federal employee union representing Park Service workers says the plan will make existing staff shortages worse.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Interior didn't respond to a request for comment on the reorganization reporting.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now from the Rangers chair, and this is my opinion and mine alone.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I went through a lot of reorganizations over my career, mostly at the park and office level, but also a fair share at the regional and Washington levels.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I learned.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Reorganizations handed down from Washington almost never deliver the efficiencies they promise.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be fair here, there are real inefficiencies in how the Park Service set up today.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: You've got parks sitting near each other that each run their own duplicate headquarters functions, their own HR shops, their own budget office.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's a legitimate problem worth fixing.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: But this plan doesn't look like it was built to fix that problem.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like it was built somewhere else by people who don't spend their days running a park.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: The superintendents and staff who actually know where the duplication is, who could tell you exactly where a hub and spoke model would help and where it would hurt, haven't been part of this.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty retired superintendents just told Secretary Bergham that in writing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: When the people with the good ideas aren't in the room, what you get isn't efficiency.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a political move dressed up as one.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Parks aren't neat boxes you can rearrange on an org chart without consequences for the communities and the resources on the ground.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: What to watch this week?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or in this case, really what to remember.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Two park birthdays.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yosemite turns 136 tomorrow, October 1st, and President Benjamin Harrison signed the act creating the park in 1890.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: But five days ago, on September 25th, Sequoia National Park quietly had its own 136th birthday.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most people don't know this one.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sequoia actually came before Yosemite.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's the second national park in the country, right behind Yellowstone.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yosemite gets all the fame, but Sequoia beat it to the bunch by less than a week.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Corrections! Well, there's nothing to correct from last episode, but if you catch something I got wrong, email parknews at rangerpampall.com.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the park report for this week.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Look for the newsletter later today with more on all three of these stories.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And join us next Wednesday for the next episode of the Park Report.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, go find your park.