Mass Firing Costs Sitkan Her Dream Job

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Category: News

Created on Tuesday, 04 March 2025 15:47

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GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer

Mass firings that swept through the federal civil service in mid-February left a number of Sitkans scrambling to find new employment, threw careers off course and triggered a rebuke and legal challenge from a union representing federal workers.

Kevyan Greenley, who until recently was customer service representative for the USFS Sitka Ranger District, is one of the Sitkans who were fired. Among her daily duties were greeting visitors to the district office on Halibut Point Road, answering the phone, conducting inventories, and handling tasks as they arose in a busy office.

The Sitka Ranger District Office Building on Halibut Point Road is pictured today. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

In Sitka, Greenley was one of eight U.S. Forest Service employees, and two at Sitka National Historical Park, who received impersonal emails two weeks ago, telling them that their service was no longer needed.

The firing left Greenley disappointed and in a challenging situation in her personal life.

“I would have loved to retire at the Forest Service. I liked the environment; the people were great,” Greenley told the Sentinel on Monday.

The terminations, part of President Trump’s campaign to “cut waste, fraud and abuse,” slashed through federal agencies of all kinds, many of them having an outsize effect on Alaska, which is heavily dependent on federal programs and receives about two-fifths of its annual state budget from Washington, D.C.

The wave of cuts that hit over President’s Day weekend terminated probationary employees across the civil service. In federal jobs, workers typically serve a one-year probationary period after their initial hiring, but Greenley was hired under authority of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which comes with a two-year probationary period. She would have hit the two year mark in May.

Greenley, originally from Togiak, came to Sitka as a junior at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, graduating in 2020. She lived in places across the state before deciding that Sitka was where she wanted to stay.

Hired as a customer service representative at the ranger district, Greenley also was working on the housing shortage for USFS staff in town.

“I was working on several projects, trying to improve the housing situation, at least for bunk houses,” she said. Her job, as a public-facing member of the office, also involved Federally Designated Hunter paperwork. A Federally Designated Hunter is one who has a permit authorizing them to take game on behalf of others, using the harvest tickets issued to those individuals.

She was fired on Sunday, Feb. 16, by phone and by email, though the stock email misstated her job position and pay grade, repeating a tale of error-laden termination form letters sent out to federal workers across the country.

“I got a call from Eric (Garner, Sitka District Ranger). I was instructed not to answer that call, and I got the voicemail,” she said. “And as far as I was concerned, even if I didn't answer the phone, I was terminated, and it was followed up by an email. What was listed on the paper, it didn't even list my job, customer service representative, it listed admin support assistant.”

She worked at the GS-5 pay grade, but noted that the email listed her incorrectly as a GS-6.

Nationally, the termination wave caught up about 3,400 USFS workers, including around 90 on the Tongass National Forest. In Sitka, the firings axed the ranger district’s entire five-member cabins and trails crew.

She already was aware of the mass firings that were getting underway, and her termination didn't come as a surprise. "I was certain I was going to get let go,” she said, and had already started looking for a new job. She has since accepted a position at SEARHC and will start work there in a week, she said.

Even so, she will miss her old position with the Forest Service.

“I love that they cared about their people, their employees and the community, and how they cared for the land,” Greenley said.

She is planning for her wedding in June, she noted, and she and her partner recently bought a place in town, which has caused a degree of financial stress. Greenley worried for Forest Service workers living in trailers and RVs on agency land adjacent to the office, concerned they might have to move as a result of their termination.

“I think the worst part is, for the people who have just bought trailers on Forest Service property that according to the books, it's supposed to be 60 days, but it sounds like that time might be cut, and they're either going to have to vacate and figure it out, and they have thousands of dollars that they owe to the bank,” she said.

Under that housing arrangement, workers own their trailers but the Forest Service owns the land, and the employee pays a modest rent.

Dismay at the Union

Though Greenley was not a member of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents numerous federal workers, many USFS employees are union members.

Ken Dinsmore, who was president of NFFE Local 251 before retiring from his four decades of service with the Forest Service, said the mass firings caught him by surprise.

“I've never seen anything like that before," he told the Sentinel. "It's unprecedented, and we feel it's unlawful, so therefore, (the union is) going through the courts. We'd like to see Congress take a more active role in stepping up and speaking out where they see these sort of a blatant mass firing of people in their probation.”

Specifically, he hopes to see Alaska’s U.S. senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, members of the Republican majority in the Senate, take action on the issue.

Last week, a federal district judge ruled that the mass firings were illegal and issued a temporary restraining order against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to block further firings of probationary workers. NFFE, among other unions, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. The judge did not order terminated workers to be reinstated, however.

Dinsmore started work in Sitka in 1978 as a seasonal workers and eventually became a fulltime employee working on timber cruising and harvesting in the last years of large-scale industrial old growth timber cutting. The pulp mills that fueled that industry, one in Sitka and another in Ketchikan, closed in the 1990s.

The Tongass, he noted, has long been a political hot potato, and management has shifted with presidential administrations.

“We certainly saw the days of the industrial logging here, throughout the Tongass, operating at a much lower scale now,” he said. “And you know, there's different administrations that would come into play and we would find ourselves trying to increase our level of harvesting, and then another administration would come in, and it would be a totally different approach to it.”

Dinsmore’s father and grandfather were union men in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In Sitka, Dinsmore joined NFFE Local 251 in 1998 and served as president, steward, vice president, secretary and treasurer over the years. He retired from the Forest Service in 2022.

“A lot of times when there was an administration change, they might put on a hiring freeze because they wanted to get a look at where there might be some areas where they could reduce or make some savings,” he said. “But it wouldn't last very long, and certainly they didn't start off with firing probationary people."

In fact, the unions believe this is unlawful, he said.

The boilerplate letters sent to probationary employees included nonspecific language citing “performance” as a cause for termination, but did not elaborate.

“The way the terminations are all reading is based on performance,” Dinsmore said. “Well, there's many documented cases that I've been seeing now… where the people who were terminated for poor performance were given awards for efficiency or good performance.”

Though a tenth of Forest Service staff was fired last month, Dinsmore sees deeper cuts in the future.

“Looking forward, it doesn't look good. We see reduction in forces coming in different agencies. Don't know how that'll play out here in Sitka or Alaska, but that's certainly on the table,” he said.