Great American Outdoors Act results in new job opportunities at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge

 

Ohio is all ready a beneficiary of the recently enacted Great American Outdoors Act.

The 10,828-acre Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and its components in Lucas and Ottawa counties has been selected to hire three new full-time maintenance positions, the positions fueled by the Act. This Act was passed by Congress and signed into law last year by then-president Donald Trump.

Its chief ingredients are to fully and permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million per year. The second prong is to provide over a five-year period $9.5 billion, earmarked to reduce a maintenance backlog at American national parks and other holdings – including the 562-unit national refuge system.

The Act was heavily supported by sportsmen and conservation groups which all acknowledged the crumbling infrastructural state of affairs within the country’s national parks, refuge and wild areas.

Linda Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, even said the Great American Outdoors Act was “..the biggest land conservation legislation in a generation.”

And now the rubber is meeting the road at the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge.

Ottawa’s yet-to-be-hired employees are expected to utilize heavy equipment and various trade skills to perform earthwork activities, as well as basic carpentry, masonry, plumbing and electrical work, said the refuge’s Deputy Refuge Manager, Karl Fleming.

“We’re looking to advertise the positions in early April and hire by June,” Fleming said. “And we’re looking for tradesmen with a wide spectrum of skill sets, though there will be a lot of on-the-job training.”

Fleming said the wages will be $28 per hour with full benefits including health care, though the Act does not make the positions permanent. Rather, the posts will be for a four-year period, based upon the Act’s language, Fleming said.

“After that, we’ll see what happens,” he said.

Once employed, the three new hires will spend 50 percent of their time at Ottawa with the remainder of the time being farmed out to largely work at other refuges within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Region Three (Great Lakes) district, Fleming said.

In all, the refuge has 18 miles of hiking trials and 60 miles of roads and dikes alone that require periodic attention, Fleming says.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done here; dikes that are failing that need repair or even replacement,” Fleming said.

Applications for these new positions will be accepted  through USAJobs, the federal government hiring website. If you have any questions, call Fleming 419-343-6793.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com