Dave Hallac, the new superintendent of the National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group, which includes the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, says he has been busy since he started his new job the first of the year.
On the day of this interview, Hallac said he had been making phone calls to seashore stakeholders and users to introduce himself and set up meetings to hear what’s on their minds. And he and his wife, Robin, registered their children in school in Nags Head.
The Hallacs have four children — a 10-year-old and two 7-year-old twins in elementary school and a preschooler who will be in kindergarten next year.
Hallac was named to his new position on Nov. 13 and made at least one visit to the Outer Banks in early December before relocating here with his family and getting down to serious work.
Hallac arrives at the seashore at an interesting time. Large issues are on the table now, all of which will demand his attention.
The park will probably have to sign on to parts of any negotiated proposal to end the legal impasse over replacing the aging Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet and bridging the “hotspots” that are frequently overwashed on Highway 12.
The Park Service will have to issue a special use permit if Dare County is to move forward with its plan to nourish the eroding beach in north Buxton to keep Highway 12 safe and open for travel.
And, finally, between the time Hallac was appointed to lead the seashore and his first day at work, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that would make some changes in the seashore’s Off-road Vehicle Management Plan.
That legislation, passed in December and signed by the President, obviously isn’t something that Hallac was anticipating, but he says it’s an assignment he is “happy to take on.”
Hallac isn’t a stranger to Cape Hatteras National Seashore. He grew up in New Jersey, just outside New York City, and his parents started taking the family to the Jersey shore on vacation when he was very young.
Eventually they discovered the Outer Banks and then spent many years vacationing in Avon. Hallac says he came here with is family until he went away to college and came back once with his wife after they were married.
He talked some in the interview about those visits, saying that he spent his days fishing in the morning and evening and surfing in between. If the shorebreak wasn’t very good in front of the beach house, he says he headed south to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse to surf next to the jetties.
Hallac describes himself as an “avid outdoorsman,” and fishing is one of his passions. He remembers one day of fishing particularly during his family’s Avon vacations.
It was a bright sunny day, he said, and the water was crystal clear. He was sitting on the beach after surfing when he noticed flecks of silver in the waves that were breaking on the beach. He realized the silver flecks were pompano and he grabbed his rod.
“I literally had non-stop pompano action for an hour,” he remembers.
Hallac says he “was born with some instinct to fish,” even though the other members of his family weren’t interested. And he adds that he’s often done “fairly well as an angler.”
He was “addicted” to striper fishing when he lived in Cape Cod, flyfished when he worked in Yellowstone National Park, and also fished while he was in south Florida. He also worked for a while after college as a fishing guide in Alaska.
With his interest in surfing and fishing, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hallac says he has had an interest in the “natural world” since he was a young child.
Though he pursued his natural world interest in college — he has a master’s degree in wildlife and fisheries biology from the University of Vermont — he didn’t set out to work for the National Park Service.
He joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and while he was in south Florida working, became acquainted with the Park Service, which he thinks is unique because when you are working in a park you have a piece of property “that you can fall in love with. You get to know it very well and care for it.”
He likes the challenge of having the “responsibility and pleasure of balancing … the preservation of resources we all love with access and the enjoyment of those resources.”
After a decade in south Florida with USFWS and NPS, Hallac headed west to manage the Yellowstone Center for Resources, the resource and science division of Yellowstone National Park. There he managed a staff of 150 in the summer and 90 to 100 in the winter.
“Yellowstone is an interesting place,” Hallac says.
It was the first national park, has a lot of history, has a lot of resources, gets intense use, and is immensely enjoyed by visitors.
The park is also in three states — Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho — which Hallac says gave him plenty of experience working with communities and state agencies.
“That’s a place where maintaining relationships is really a lot of work,” he says. “Almost everything in Yellowstone is challenging, and almost everything is controversial.”
Stakeholders there, he says, have many differing viewpoints on park management, which includes such issues as bringing back wolves, grizzly bear recovery, and re-establishing native fish.
The issues there are very polarizing, Hallac said, as they are in many parks. However, he thinks that people with different points of view “when they can be a little bit calm about it, though passionate, can bring better solutions to the table.”
“I really enjoy the opportunity to work with stakeholders, and, although it can be challenging sometimes to work with groups that are so far apart from each other, in terms of their philosophy and their views, it’s also a great opportunity…It’s always been my philosophy that you should take advantage of differences, try to establish dialogue, and find solutions almost everybody can accept.”
That is what he hopes to do at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, where he says establishing relationships is a “priority.” It’s fine he adds to do it in a meeting room or over coffee, but he also plans to get out on the beach with people, to walk or drive to “see things at ground level.”
At two big meetings later this month, Hallac will have his first opportunity to meet large numbers of community members.
On Jan. 27 in Manteo and Jan. 28 in Buxton, Dare County and the Park Service will be hosting open-house style meetings to get public input on an environmental study that the park must complete before it can issue a permit to the county to nourish the beach in north Buxton.
Hallac reiterated what his predecessor, acting superintendent Kym Hall, said last summer and fall — that the Park Service is committed to completing all the necessary studies as quickly and efficiently as possible to meet the county’s ambitious timeline of pumping sand on the Buxton beach by the summer of 2016.
However, Hallac’s biggest early challenge is going to be implementing the new legislation that could require changes in the ORV plan at the seashore. For the details of the legislation, you can go back to my blog from Dec. 19.
Hallac said that he is working closely with the director and others in the NPS Southeast Region office in Atlanta on the new law.
“What we’re doing now,” he says, “is reading the legislation very thoroughly and trying to better understand what it means to us as a national park.”
Hallac chooses his words very carefully and precisely as he discusses the legislation.
“We want to be sure that we interpret some of the language that’s in here — for instance, the language about ‘in accordance with all applicable laws’ — correctly, so when we move forward and implement the guidance that Congress has given us, that we do it in a manner that is most defensible, that uses best available science, and that also, whenever possible, includes public engagement, which is very important, as well.”
Then he addresses the brief legislation in parts.
The first part deals with adjustments to wildlife buffers, and he says that seashore officials are collecting “all the best available science.” Specifically, he adds, Congress specified “peer-reviewed” scientific data.
Also on buffers modifications, the Park Service is trying to determine the “most appropriate process” that should be used — whether the process should be a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process, a public process, or a process the seashore pursues on its own.
“I am working closely with our regional director Stan Austin to better understand what’s the most appropriate way to deal with that first part of the directive from Congress,” he said.
The second part of the legislation instructs the Park Service to coordinate with the state when considering buffer modifications.
“That’s something we would always do anyway,” Hallac said.
The third part of the legislation is” more clear when it comes to Congressional direction,” he says. The new law instructs the Park Service to address adjustments to night driving hours, seasonal closures, and vehicle-free areas through a public process.
“We’re trying to determine the most appropriate public process possible so we can hear from our users, our stakeholders, and get that moving.”
The last part of the new law instructs the Park Service to build new access ramps and roads as expeditiously as possible. Hallac says he has asked the seashore’s chief of maintenance to look at new accesses in the ORV plan and determine what funding is available and what can be done expeditiously.
“So we are actively working on all parts of the legislation, we’re taking it very seriously, and I’m going to be looking for ways to involve the public as we move forward.
“Further details to come,” he added.
Hallac said he was heading to Atlanta next week.
“The more input and guidance I receive from the regional office, the more I will share with the community,” he said.
Finally, the park will also be moving on the five-year review of the ORV plan, which will come in 2017.
“In many ways, the legislation from Congress could be seen by some as fast-forwarding the five-year review,” he said. “A lot of things we were planning to do as part of that review, we will probably do as part of the Congressional directive.”
You can listen to the entire interview with seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac on Radio Hatteras (99.9 and 101.5 FM) at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 18, and also on Sunday, Jan. 25.
The audio from the interview will also be posted the first of next week on the Island Free Press.
