Foundation to Buy Yosemite Concession

The Yosemite Park & Curry Co., owner of the hotels, restaurants and stores at Yosemite National Park, will be sold to a nonprofit foundation for a “bargain” $49.5 million under an agreement reached Tuesday between MCA Inc. and the U.S. Interior Department, Interior officials announced.

“This is a very good deal,” said National Park Service spokesman George Berklacy. Paul Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn., a park watchdog group, called it “a hell of a bargain.”

MCA, which was formally purchased by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan last week, has estimated that the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. was worth more than $100 million.

The agreement ends weeks of confusion and bitter exchanges over the fate of the nation’s premier park concession and appears to represent a victory for Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr., who had campaigned against Japanese ownership of a park concession.

“MCA is very pleased to get this matter behind us,” said MCA spokeswoman Christine Hanson. “ . . . The company feels they have a made a very good deal.” The deal will give the park service substantially more authority over the future of development and operations within Yosemite.

Under the agreement, the park concession will remain under Japanese ownership until the Yosemite Park & Curry Co.’s contract for the concession expires Sept. 30, 1993. The company will be sold to the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit group chartered by Congress to accept private support for national parks.

Donald Green, executive director of the Yosemite Restoration Trust, maintained that the agreement also benefits MCA by giving the corporation the concession’s profits--estimated at $9 million to $15 million annually--for nearly three years. Under an earlier agreement, MCA had agreed to sell the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. within a year of its takeover by Matsushita and give the interim profits to the park foundation.

Green, whose group has expressed interest in operating the park concession, noted that the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. actually will cost the park foundation closer to $60 million because of the interest. Green’s group had calculated that the company was worth closer to $40 million, an amount Lujan used as a negotiating figure. The foundation will finance the deal over 15 years at 8.5% interest, which will begin accumulating Feb. 1.

As part of the deal, MCA also will donate $6 million to the foundation during the next three years, Interior officials said. The foundation, whose officers include Lujan and National Park Service Director James Ridenour, quickly will donate the company’s Yosemite buildings, including the Ahwahnee Hotel, the Yosemite Lodge and the park’s historic tent cabins, to the National Park Service. It is expected that a new contract for operating the concession will be open to bidders at that time.

In the interim, members of the park foundation will join the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. board of directors and will exercise some influence over how the company is run until 1993.

The agreement means that no bidder will be given preference when a new contract is put out to bid in 1993. Previously, preference always went to the incumbent concessioner.

In owning the park buildings, the park service also will control their future. Although a 1980 park master plan calls for razing several of the buildings, the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. has continued to use them.

Environmentalists, accusing the company of impeding the plan, have long argued that the park service would not be able to control development within the park until it owned the buildings. Until this agreement, the park service owned the land but the hotels and other commercial buildings belonged to MCA.

Park service Director Ridenour said the agreement “sets the stage” for tearing down many of the concession buildings as called for in the master plan.

Environmental activist Patricia Schifferle said the deal had made her “optimistic” about Yosemite’s future.

“I’m ecstatic,” she said. “I think it’s got a real potential to take off the shackles of commercialism in the park.”

The future of the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. had been unclear ever since Matsushita took steps to purchase MCA last fall. Park officials had first called on MCA to keep the park concession in American hands and later insisted that the company also sell its assets at a bargain price to the park service.

Lujan, deriding the prospect of Japanese ownership, announced last week that he would try to revoke MCA’s contract for the park concession unless the corporation sold the Yosemite buildings to the park service.

“I think the secretary turned up the volume and I think the negotiators tuned in,” said park spokesman Berklacy.

MCA, in turn, accused Lujan of “Japan-bashing” and “extortion” before returning to the negotiating table on Saturday. The agreement was negotiated by attorneys for MCA, the park service and the park foundation and representatives of the Yosemite Park & Curry Co.

Berklacy said the foundation does not anticipate any problems meeting its payments and predicted that the next concessioner will pay the federal government substantially more in revenues. The Yosemite Park & Curry Co. now must pay only 0.75% of its gross revenues to the federal government each year in the form of a franchise fee. Berklacy estimated that the next concessioner will be required to pay at least 16%.

“The financial return to the federal government will be substantial,” Berklacy said.

BACKGROUND

The future of the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. has been in limbo since Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Japan’s largest electronics firm, took steps last fall to acquire MCA Inc., the Curry Co.’s parent company. Although MCA initially suggested that it might be willing to donate the company, which owns and operates Yosemite’s commercial buildings, to the National Park Foundation, federal park officials declined. Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr. subsequently decided that he wanted the donation after all, but MCA and its new owner resisted. After weeks of bickering over what should be done, MCA and Interior officials began negotiating anew Saturday and reached a settlement Tuesday.