Fighting For Yosemite's Future

By Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

Few vacation spots can match Yosemite National Park's rare combination of wild beauty and civilized comfort. At the Ahwahnee Hotel, guests book reservations a year in advance to watch the alpenglow off the majestic Half Dome from cozy rooms equipped with TVs and minibars. When not ice skating, skiing or hiking through the mountain slopes clad with ponderosa pines, visitors can patronize a pizza parlor, a gourmet deli, a one-hour photo service, an automatic bank teller and, of course, a gift shop full of coffee mugs and T shirts with the Yosemite logo.

Is the commercialism encroaching on the nation's wild lands a good thing? If it is, who should reap the profits? Those issues gained new urgency last week, when Matsushita, the Japanese electronics giant, took control of MCA, the California-based entertainment conglomerate. MCA -- and now Matsushita -- owns the Yosemite Park and Curry Co., which operates the park's lodging facilities, restaurants, shops and services. In 1989 those concessions generated about $78 million in sales and an estimated $14 million to $17 million in profits. But under its sweetheart contract with the National Park Service, the company had to pay the government only $635,000. Such a huge private profit from a national resource is questionable enough, but the possibility that the money might flow to Japan is doubly troubling to many Americans.

Eager to avoid criticism, Matsushita offered to sell the park-concession company to a U.S. firm within a year. But that pledge was not enough to satisfy Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., whose department includes the Park Service. Lujan threatened to cancel the Yosemite company's contract, which still has two years to run, on the ground that MCA and Matsushita did not get government permission to change the management of the concessions. The Interior Secretary appears to be playing rough in an effort to persuade Matsushita to donate the park company to the government or to sell the operation to a nonprofit group at a below-market price.

The dispute over Yosemite's profits throws a spotlight on a problem all too common in the biggest national parks. The Park Service has been lax in monitoring the concessioner contracts and ensuring that the government gets a fair share of the income. According to an Interior Department report, the concessioners reaped revenues of $500 million in 1988 but paid the government only $12.5 million in franchise fees. Environmentalists view the sale of the Yosemite company as an opportunity to revamp the process and shift the management philosophy of the parks away from excessive commercialism. "The parks should be the environmental reservoirs of the world, places we populate with songbirds and other species," says Paul Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Association. "They are not there to provide more accommodations for visitors and more tourism dollars."

Though the concessions in 80% of the parks are mom-and-pop operations, the Yosemite company is not the only Park Service contractor reaping hefty revenues. TW Recreational Services rang up $49 million at Yellowstone in 1989, and Amfac Resorts, which runs the south rim of the Grand Canyon, pulled in $23 million. Such firms contend that their size and financial strength have helped to make the parks more attractive places.

) "One of the reasons national parks are liked so much is that they have the greatest visitor facilities because the private sector has put money in," says Rex Maughan, chairman of the Conference of National Park Concessioners. "If we go to another system and the government gets involved, we will see the degradation of our national parks."

Theoretically, the Park Service has the power to approve everything from the rate of return on a contract to hotel-room decor. Over the years, though, the concessioners have become a powerful lobby in Washington, and the Park Service a pushover. "((The concessioners)) are to parks what the defense industry is to the military," says Pritchard. In 1989, for example, Edward Hardy, president of the Yosemite Park and Curry Co., won $1.5 million in congressional appropriations for a new concessioner-employee dormitory at a time when Yosemite's $13.9 million budget was stretched to the limit.

Hardy and former California Congressman Tony Coelho are reportedly teaming up in an effort to buy the company from Matsushita. But there will be other bidders. A coalition of preservationists has formed the Yosemite Restoration Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to buy the concessioner and put into effect a 1980 federal plan for reducing commercialism at the park.

The group would be hard-pressed to hold back the crush of tourism. During the peak summer months, 7,000 visitors a day transform Yosemite Valley into an urbanized village of noisy bumper-to-bumper traffic and bicycle jams. To many nature lovers, the land that pioneering preservationist John Muir extolled for its "spiritual glow" and "sublime mountain beauty" has already been irreversibly damaged.