Yosemite Concession Fee Disclosed

Ending many decades of mystery, the National Park Service has disclosed that the controversial monopoly on hotels, restaurants and ski tickets at Yosemite takes in at least $78.6 million a year but pays less than $600,000 in fees to the park.

How much profit is made by the Yosemite Park & Curry Co., the subsidiary of entertainment giant MCA Inc. that controls most businesses in the park, was not revealed and remains a secret. But the disclosures are sure to add to a raging controversy over the company’s role in running Yosemite.

A leading conservation organization charged Friday that the Curry Co.--as it is informally known in the park--makes a profit of $10 million to $20 million a year.

“It’s shameful and obscene that we would allow a concessionaire to make that much profit while so many Yosemite resources are in need of preservation,” said Patricia Schifferle, Western regional director for the Wilderness Society. “It shows the greed of the Curry Co.”

Curry Co. officials acknowledged that the payments made to the government under its long-term contract to operate in the park are low. The company said it had offered to increase the fees in exchange for an extension of the contract--a claim that a former top Park Service official disputed.

Attacks on the company and its special status in Yosemite have intensified since last summer, when Park Service officials in San Francisco announced that an ambitious plan that called for removing most car traffic, some motel rooms and employee housing from Yosemite Valley was in jeopardy.

Some conservation groups blamed the company for stalling the plan, which was adopted in 1980 after years of emotional testimony from citizens around the country. Now that the amount of money at stake is known, critics say, the Curry Co.’s motivations are more understandable.

Still, the disclosures are expected to add momentum during the park’s 100th anniversary year to a fledgling effort by some environmentalists to form a nonprofit rival that would attempt to take control of hotels and other concessions at Yosemite. The nonprofit company, which exists only in the dreams of key activists, would return its profits to the park, which saw its budget last year drop to $10.6 million.

Officially, the Park Service released data only on the annual franchise fees paid to the government by the Curry Co. Last year the fee for being allowed to operate in the park totaled $590,000, up from $551,000 in 1987 and $517,000 in 1986.

The 1963 contract that gave the Curry Co. virtually exclusive rights to make money in the park set the fees at 0.75% of the gross sales collected by the Curry Co. Computing based on that formula, the gross sales appear to have increased over the last three years from $69 million to more than $78 million.

Wayne Schultz, who oversees the Curry Co. contract for Yosemite, said the sales figures were “in the ballpark.”

Company officials refused to say if any of the numbers were accurate. “We don’t comment on financial information--not to confirm or deny,” Executive Vice President Dan Jensen said Friday.

However, Jensen said it is generally acknowledged that the franchise fee paid by the company is low. “The fee is unrealistically low by today’s standards,” Jensen said.

The fee will next be up for negotiation in 1993 when the Curry Co.’s contract is scheduled to expire. The new Yosemite Park superintendent, Michael Finley, recently said he considered the low fee “obscene,” Yosemite spokeswoman Lisa Dapprich said.

Unusually strong high-level criticism of the Curry Co. was leveled this month by Howard Chapman, retired director of the National Park Service region in San Francisco, which has responsibility for Yosemite.

Chapman said the Curry Co. has been asked to raise the fee it pays the government every five years, as permitted in the contract, but consistently has refused. “They have never agreed to even discuss it, much less negotiate,” Chapman wrote in a commentary in the Fresno Bee.

Asked Friday to reply, Jensen said the company has offered since 1974 to pay a higher fee but only if it was given a new, longer contract in exchange.

Jensen said the Curry Co. was informed Thursday that the fees had been declared public information--after years of being treated as confidential--after the Los Angeles Times requested the numbers from the National Park Service in Washington. The Park Service ruled that a recent court ruling required the fee information to be released, Jensen said.