One of the immediate local impacts from the overnight partial shutdown of the federal government will be the shuttering of National Park Service facilities in metro Atlanta, including the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.
Personnel at Kennesaw Mountain closed the gates to the main parking lot of the park’s visitor’s center before daybreak Tuesday, but at Cochran Shoals along the Chattahoochee River, the parking lot remained open at 7:30 a.m.
That was welcome news to Brandon Tubandt, who said he has been running the Cochran Shoals trails three mornings a week for about four months, tracking seven miles each morning.
“This is convenient, close to my work,” Tubandt said.
The shutdown of the park “would force me to run other places,” he said. “It wouldn’t be nearly as convenient.”
The National Park Service’s Rudy Evenson told Channel 2 Action News that the 16 Park Service sites along a 48-mile stretch of the river — including Cochran Shoals — would indeed be closed by the partial shutdown of the federal government.
“They’ll all be gated and locked,” Evenson said. “The restrooms will all be shut and the boat ramps will be closed.”
Robin Rogers, who lives on nearby Columns Drive and can walk to the park, was defiant, saying that a closed gate across the parking lot entrance wouldn’t keep him from his daily run along the park’s trails.
“They can’t lock me out,” he said, adding that he would go around any closed gates.
“I’ll run on soft surface no matter what; no one ‘s going to keep me off trails,” he said.
“I’m not going to mess up my knees and shins,” said Rogers, who said he’s on the trails “every morning between 7 and 7:30, seven days a week.”
The thought of closing the recreation area, even temporarily, is “terrible,” Rogers said.
“I just don’t agree with it at all,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“You’re not going to keep me from exercising and using these natural resources,” Rogers said. “This is just one liberty we should always have.”
At the King Historic Site, superintendent Judy Forte was preparing Tuesday morning to send most of her 28 employees home.
“We are implementing our plan to shut down operations and employees have been given their furlough letters,” Forte said. “We will be putting up signs throughout the park saying that the park will be closed, and after that, they will be headed home.”
She said she delivered the news to park employees during a morning meeting in which the mood was one of “uncertainty about the future, how long this will last.”
“We told them to just be on standby, that as soon as we get the official word to return to work, we will notify them,” Forte said.
She said only three Park Service employees would remain on site to handle law enforcement duties.
“It’s very emotional when you have employees who depend upon work, and to tell them to go home and wait to be told when to return, knowing that there will be no pay associated with that,” she said. “But that’s what we have to do. I’ll be going home as well. I’ll be packing up and leaving shortly behind them.”
The shutdown will “definitely be a loss, because we have visitors from all over the world that come here to visit the place where Dr. King was born and the spiritual home at Ebenezer Baptist Church and where he is resting at the King Center,” Forte said.
One of those visitors who was disappointed to find the park closed Tuesday was Toshiya Enomoto, who came from Japan to catch some Braves post-season games.
“I just wanted to pay a visit to this historic site,” Enomoto said.
“I’ve always wanted to, but I never had a chance,” he said. “Why do they want to shut it down? Any volunteers who will work for free?”
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