For the last two months, Laborers’ Local 485 member employees with Metro Park and Nature and the Oregon Zoo have been working under an expired contract with Metro. Negotiations are ongoing, and employees are asking for hazard pay when working in extreme weather, extra days off when dealing with extremely traumatic situations in the workplace and higher pay across the board. Marina Garcia is the guest services lead at the Oregon Zoo. Kendra Carrillo is the maintenance lead for Metro Parks and Nature. They both join us to share conditions they and their teams are facing and what they want out of negotiations.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For the last two months employees who work at Metro’s nature parks and at the Oregon Zoo have been working under an expired contract. Employees are asking for hazard pay during extreme weather, extra days off when dealing with traumatic situations on the job, and higher pay across the board. Negotiations are ongoing. We wanted to get a sense for how these jobs have changed in recent years and what they are like for employees. Marina Garcia works in guest services at the Oregon Zoo. Kendra Carrillo works in operations for Metro’s Parks and Nature. They both join me now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Marina Garcia: Hi, thanks for having us.
Kendra Carrillo: Thanks.
Miller: Thank you. Kendra, first. What was your path to get you to Metro? What was your path to working at Metro?
Carrillo: Well, I suppose I’d say my path was working in natural areas and my passion for working around people. My background’s in natural resources, I have a degree in wildlife management, and coming out of college, I was hired on with Metro working out at Oxbow Regional Park. I worked out there as a lead park ranger for a number of years and have been with Metro for about 18 years. But that was sort of my pathway in. And yeah, a lot has changed over the course of those 18 years. Specifically, the last, I’d say probably, four to six years.
Miller: Well, I’m curious about when you started. What was the job like?
Carrillo: The job was primarily visitor engagement, working out at Oxbow Park, it was a lot of river safety. It was facilities maintenance and grounds maintenance and just providing a sort of welcoming experience to visitors, being available to answer questions, all of that sort of good stuff. A lot of trail work. So those are the primary responsibilities at that time.
Miller: And you said that about four years ago, that’s when things changed. What kinds of changes did you first notice?
Carrillo: Well, I think the biggest changes that we’ve seen in the Portland Metro area have been the sort of added responsibilities that are associated with the houseless crisis, also huge increases in opioid use and drug addiction and also mental illness. And so staff has taken on a lot of added responsibilities associated with some of those new types of visitor interactions.
Miller: It seems fair to say, certainly based on the way you described your own path to starting work, that those challenges seem very different from what you thought you were getting yourself into, if you came from sort of a wilderness management or park employee mentality?
Carrillo: Yeah, the uptick in emergency response in our day to day work and also the social work associated with the visitor engagement piece has all changed drastically. It used to be a lot of education around natural resources and protecting our valuable resources. And now it’s a lot of social work in trying to understand, really working with visitors through a trauma-informed care lens. We’re trying to become experts in that subject matter so that we can keep ourselves safe and also help the community. So yeah, big changes.
Miller: I want to hear more from you and about the current job. But as I noted, Marina Garcia is with us as well. She works in guest services at the Oregon Zoo. What about you? What was your path to becoming a zoo employee?
Garcia: Well, I came from a customer service background. I joined the Zoo in 2021. I also have a degree in biology, so I definitely had an interest in working around other people that cared about what I did, mainly being conservation. So, yeah, that’s how I came to be at my place at the Zoo.
Miller: How long have you been there?
Garcia: About two years.
Miller: OK, so a shorter time to see changes than Kendra has seen. What’s an average day like right now?
Garcia: I’d say an average day as a guest service lead would definitely be a little overwhelming. We’re already helping our team with their daily jobs, providing backup to help with some not-so-happy visitors, ticket issues, membership problems, website issues, as well as helping with emergencies that will sometimes require us to call in direct emergency or even lead respond into the Zoo, as well as answering and directing calls for the entire Zoo. Additionally, in the past couple of years, management has introduced a “help” feature on our website that we manage as well.
We definitely picked up a couple of responsibilities when the education department dissolved in 2020. They’re just now starting to rebuild, but we’ve basically taken over for all of the field trip organization and payments. And we’ve also had some similar issues with the membership department since they’ve gone to work-from-home. We don’t have any representatives on site. So Guest Service Leads have essentially taken over that position.
Miller: You mentioned sometimes dealing with not-so-happy visitors or actually having to call in police. How common is that?
Garcia: It really depends on the day. Sometimes, if the weather is worse, we’ll end up having a lot more medical emergencies where we will have to call EMS.
But I’d say as far as police response, it’s not too often.
Miller: Kendra Carrillo, I wanna play folks a part of testimony that was given by Samantha McCarroll who is a Metro park ranger. This was to Metro councilors not long ago:
Samantha McCarroll [recording]: I was hired as a park ranger pre-pandemic. The expectations have changed immensely since then. We work in the midst of the houseless and mental health crisis, making contacts and trying to help people in need.
We clean up camps and post constantly. We are tired. My feelings are tired. My compassion is exhausted. They are working on us carrying Narcan to deal with people overdosing in our parks and our cemeteries. We clean up hypodermic needles strewn through the parks. I have pulled a half dead woman out of a car with a needle in her arm to perform CPR, waiting for the paramedics. I’ll never forget her face.
Miller: How common are stories like Samantha’s?
Garcia: Unfortunately, these are very common. When I hear these, when I hear this one specifically from Sam, it kind of chokes me up a little bit. But this is the reality. These are things that we’re dealing with weekly. It is truly as she describes it. We talk a lot about maintaining a mental wellness within our own work groups and what it means to have compassion fatigue. And so we’re working amongst ourselves to just try and continue doing what we love doing, which is working in parks and working with the public and serving our visitors to the best of our ability. But this is, what Sam describes here is something that occurs almost weekly and sometimes multiple times in a week. So in varying degrees it presents itself in different ways. But yeah, this is what we’re doing in the parks that we’re providing services for right now.
Miller: What kind of toll does that have on you and other staff?
Garcia: To be quite honest and frank, it has a very severe toll. So our staff is constantly cycling in and out of needing to take extra days off to maintain positive wellness. So we’re in a constant cycle of employee shortage. We’re never fully staffed. We’ve seen impacts with our seasonal employees in the summer who have come on, initially thinking that they’re gonna be working in parks and doing trail work. And then they’re kind of in the thick of it with the full time staff and the ranger teams.
Miller: If you’re a part of hiring these days, whether it’s for seasonal staff or full time, how much of a heads up do you give people about what they really should be expecting?
Garcia: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we do let our staff know or potential employees know that these are some of the associated job duties. But I don’t think they quite understand what that means or how that affects them until they’re in it. Also, training has been very challenging when we haven’t been able to hire people in one large group. So our training has been pretty scattered and resources have been limited. So it’s been tough. I think that it is coming out of the pandemic things are getting a little bit easier and we’re kind of moving back into more of a scheduled program. But it’s been very, very challenging. While our seasonal staff may know we can talk through it, once you live it, it’s a different scenario.
Miller: What are you hoping for from Metro as a response to this?
Garcia: I think, [what we are hoping for is] for Metro to truly understand the changes in our job responsibilities, to provide hazard pay where hazard pay should be given, also to continue training and education around what’s happening in the city and to provide financial support to our staff members, whether that’s in paid days off to manage our own mental wellness or additional compensation for these traumatic incidents that staff are going through.
At the end of the day, with wages and inflation that we’ve seen over the last few years, there’s nothing worse than working through a very traumatic situation only to come home and go through your own trauma when you’re barely able to afford to pay your bills. And so we’re looking for some compensation and some acknowledgement that these positions are difficult, and continuing to support staff and training and resources.
Miller: Marina, I wanna play one more excerpt from testimony that was given to Metro Council. This is Jason DeLibero, who is a zookeeper:
Jason DeLibero [recording]: Over the last few years, we faced a global pandemic, an increase in local wildfires and related poor air quality, extreme temperatures and national and local political unrest. During that time, we were asked to do more with less and we did. We sacrificed. We were flexible. We were understanding. We risked our health and safety. We were patient amid countless changes.
Now, Metro’s refusing to discuss and negotiate safety, protections and pay. They’re showing their appreciation of our efforts by communicating that they have no desire to pay for work done in hazardous conditions. We have no desire to work in hazardous conditions. But the reality is that that is required of us.
Miller: So Marina, Jason is talking there about hazardous conditions like extreme temperatures and bad air quality. What has that meant for Zoo employees?
Garcia: A lot of times it means that employees are suffering heat or cold related illness or sometimes even having to go home early because they’re feeling ill from such terrible air quality. For a lot of people that means losing out on hours, for some variable hour employees who definitely need it at times like these.
Miller: My understanding, my assumption is that some of these jobs are necessarily outside, not always, but at times. I mean, what exactly would you want the Zoo or Metro, the parent large organization, to do in terms of whether it’s air quality or very cold days or very hot days?
Garcia: I think we’re definitely looking for hazard pay in instances of cold weather and poor air quality. And Metro management has not only, like Jason said, told us that they have no desire to compensate us for working in hazardous conditions, but they’ve said that the pay that we receive already factors in the hazard of working outdoors. And Guest Service employees are currently making $16.55 an hour. So I’m not really sure how that factors in outdoor hazards.
Miller: I should note that we did reach out to Metro, in anticipation of this conversation. And they sent us this statement: “We continue to meet weekly at the bargaining table and both parties are negotiating in good faith. We hope to reach an agreement soon.”
Marina, we heard just now from Kendra about inflation and pay. How has a couple years of really intense inflation affected Metro employees?
Garcia: It’s definitely hit a lot of us very hard. I know that myself and a lot of my coworkers have to work outside to supplement our incomes. Personally, I donate my plasma as often as twice a week to be able to afford some of my expenses and to be also able to have some savings available in case of an emergency. Because most of us are working paycheck to paycheck.
Miller: Kendra, is that true for [Metro] Parks and Nature employees as well?
Carrillo: Absolutely. Yeah. All the folks that I’ve talked to are in very similar situations where they’re utilizing some resources for supplemental food to get their families through the month. I know, for me personally, over the course of the last three years, I’ve taken on three roommates just to be able to maintain paying my bills and being able to feed myself and get myself to work each day. So, yeah, it’s absolutely true. And there’s a lot of stories very similar to mine and to Marina’s out there.
Miller: Kendra, would more money, whether it’s just as base pay or specifically tied to traumatic situations that employees are necessarily responding to, would that be enough to have you and other people continue with these jobs where you regularly encounter overdoses or people in the midst of serious mental health crises? Is money enough for you to keep doing this?
Carrillo: Well, in a lot of cases, absolutely not. I would say that the position, as it is today, takes a certain type of person to be able to manage day in and day out. I think that over time, the job is very taxing mentally. And I think that’s also why we’re talking a lot about increasing vacation time and providing some supplemental days off for mental wellness of staff, not necessarily sick days, but days where they just need to take some time for themselves to be with their friends or family or be in a space that brings them some happiness or peace.
But in terms of the pay itself, I think you’re really just trying to get these wages up to accommodate for, as I mentioned earlier, the inflation. We’ve done several comp studies and I can provide you with an example of that. So Metro park rangers and maintenance staff, prior to the increase of the City of Portland, were at about 10.5% more than the City of Portland. And that was, in fact, because of the duties and the responsibilities and licenses and certifications that Metro Rangers have over any other park ranger within the Portland metro area.
But since the City of Portland recently agreed to their wage increases, City of Portland rangers are now making about 17% more than Metro Rangers. And that’s really only if we were to receive just a 2.5% COLA [Cost-of-Living Adjustment], which would have been on July 1st as Metro had originally proposed. So you can see that really there’s a huge gap there. And we just really need to get back to a baseline to make up for the cost of living increases and also the compensation. Studies that we have done show Metro rangers have a much wider, broader variety of responsibilities and licenses that they have to hold so that’s why those were historically paid so much more.
And rangers are being paid so much less now. And with all the added responsibilities, the added social work that’s happening, and the emergency responses that we’re dealing with, it’s huge. It’s a lot. So it’s definitely not gonna be for everybody, day in and day out. And I think it will take a certain person to continue working in this kind of environment, if we don’t see some changes.
Miller: Kendra and Marina, thanks very much.
Carrillo: Thank you.
Garcia: Thank you.
Miller: Kendra Carrillo works in operations for Metro Parks and Nature. Marina Garcia works in guest services at the Oregon Zoo.
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