A conference table fills most of the office formerly occupied by retired 20-year Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich, who has not worn a uniform since last summer.
The table won’t be replaced by a desk anytime soon. A budget cut and inflation are the reasons.
“With the current budget, I couldn’t fill the position,” explained Lakeshore superintendent Scott Tucker. “We’re going to leave it open this year even though I had 21 very qualifi ed candidates. I had to make a difficult decision.”
That decision was prompted partially by a 1.2 percent% cut in the Lakeshore’s 2024 operating budget. But the bigger culprit was a 5% cost-of-living raise provided all federal employees on Jan. 1 with no offsetting revenue source for local units.
“It’s not ideal, but it’s a placeholder. Visitors should not notice a difference from services they have come to expect,” Tucker said.
That’s because the Lakeshore’s current management team agreed to step up to fill any administrative holes created by the loss of the second-highest position at the park.
“Otherwise, we would have to do something different with our full-time staff,” Tucker continued. “The management team looked at our option, and everybody found a missing piece of the puzzle they could help with.”
The Lakeshore will continue to employ 57 full-time people to keep the park open as well as 78 seasonal workers — the identical staff size as last summer.
The Lakeshore is also leaning on its “friends” to pitch in a little more, as in the Friends of Sleeping Bear and Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear nonprofits. While both have played critical roles in helping the park run smoothly and expand visitor experiences, they will be picking up the cost for more new equipment and projects to keep the Lakeshore moving ahead with a skinny budget this summer.
The Friends group will be playing a bigger role in hosting star parties for heavenly watchers, providing assistance for interpretative programs, helping with accessibility programs, and donating one or possibly two new golf carts to facilitate a volunteer program to clean sites vacated by campers.
“Every year we ask the Lakeshore management for a list of projects and materials that they can’t fit in their budget,” said Kerry Kelly, president of Friends of Sleeping Bear.
On a typical year the Friends allocate $50,000 toward the management’s list. This year, however, the organization also secured $50,000 in grant funding for other projects including a survey of endangered and invasive plants in the Lakeshore.
Those projects are funded in addition to established Friends programs to adopt highways, a beaches and rivers. “Anything in sight in the Lakeshore, and we’ll adopt it,” quipped Kerry.
Historic Sleeping Bear is stepping up by providing an environmental monitoring system for the Lakeshore museum, buying humidity detectors and temporary lighting systems for historic buildings that lack power, and installing a historic gas pump in front of the Sleeping Bear Inn in Glen Haven.
The Lakeshore budget for fiscal year 2023 was $4.9 million. Tucker has not received official notice for the current year budget, which was only recently approved, but expects it to total only $4.7 million.
