Yosemite: Jewel About to Lose Its Crown? : Why National Park Service has to be watched carefully
With an impending change in management of its food and lodging concessions, Yosemite National Park has a chance for a new lease on life.
But environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Yosemite Heritage Trust say that there is no guarantee of a happy ending. At a minimum, they argue correctly, Californians must watch the process like hawks to make certain that this jewel among wilderness areas that are in easy reach of ordinary people is not treated like just another profit center.
Three factors make this a turning point for the narrow valley nestled in the Sierra Nevada among sheer granite walls nearly 4,000 feet tall.
The first was a realization some years ago that growing numbers of visitors, souvenir stands with the frantic atmosphere of shopping malls on holidays and growing pollution of both air and water could result in Americans loving the park to death.
The second was the creation of a new general plan for Yosemite, designed to reduce congestion, smog and traffic and restore some of the natural beauty that led California to make it a state park in Civil War days.
The last was the purchase of MCA Corp. and its subsidiary, Yosemite Park & Curry Co., which has held the park’s concessions for many years, by Japan’s Matsushita Electrical Industrial Corp. Japan’s misgivings about even appearing to own a U.S. national park made it possible to dismantle Curry and put all potential concessionaires on the same footing when its lease expires.
Curry will manage Yosemite’s tourist operations until late 1993, at which point lodgings, restaurants and other facilities will be sold to a new bidder for $62.5 million. The Yosemite trust, Curry executives who would create a new company, and others--including the Walt Disney Co. and Marriott Hotels--may also bid.
Last week, as a first step, the National Park Service released a copy of the general plan designed to take some of the pressure off Yosemite--a plan that by now is 10 years old.
Environmentalists welcomed some changes. But they also were disturbed at how murky parts of the plan remain, partly because the Park Service wanted it that way.
Park officials refused to let representatives of environmental groups attend the press conference at which the plan for Yosemite was made public.
Park activists will not have the last word on the Yosemite plan, but they were a good place to start looking for a second opinion on how the plan compared with what they expected. Barring them from the press conference made it impossible for them to discuss it in a timely fashion.
It appears also that the Park Service will hold public meetings and not public hearings on the plan in Los Angeles and San Francisco later this year. What’s the difference? At meetings, federal officials tell the public what they intend to do. At hearings, they ask the public what they should do.
The future of Yosemite is of intense interest to millions of Americans. That future must engage the broadest possible discussion by the people to whom the jewel ultimately belongs.
