Interior Secretary James Watt’s speech to the Conference of National Park Concessioners in March triggered fresh worries about this administration’s attitude to public lands. “We are going to ask you to be involved in areas that you haven’t been allowed to be involved in before,” he told the park businessmen. “We need an aggressive program with the private entrepreneurs who are willing to invest and manage resources in the National Park Service for people.”

Environmentalists were horrified. “It’s abominable,” groaned Ronald Tipton, national parks specialist for the Wilderness Society. “I’m appalled that Watt would even consider giving the concessioners more power to run the parks.” Former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathaniel Reed called the speech “one of the most fawning, disgusting performances ever given by a Secretary of the Interior. He was so eager to please that he all but gave away the park system.”

Watt’s remarks interrupt nearly a century of efforts to restrain the power of the profit motive in national parks. Though it isn’t clear what he meant…at the very least he seems likely to cancel the progress made by the Park Service in recent years towards stricter concessions control…

According to the 1916 National Park Service Organic Act, national parks are “to provide for the enjoyment of visitors” while at the same time leaving natural and historic objects, wildlife, and scenery “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”   The Park Service has been struggling to adhere to both of these mandates ever since, and concessions have always been a major battleground for inevitable conflicts between preservation and use.

Steven Mather, the first director of the park service, recognized early that if the parks were to survive they would have to appeal to a wide range of visitors, and he promoted high-quality concessions in the parks to help drum up public support. For the most part, environmentalists today admit that Mather was right. “I don’t object to concessions,” said Friends of the Earth founder David Brower. “There should be a chance to watch the days and weeks come and go, to experience the moods. There should be an opportunity to do more than just day visits.”

But the businessmen who operate hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, grocery stores and other tourist facilities within park boundaries have always been difficult to manage.   Parks were set aside in the first place to prevent their exploitation by early entrepreneurs, and federal protection has not always stopped this from happening. In the 1880s, hotelkeepers and stagecoach companies plowed under many of Yosemite’s meadows to grow hay for their horses and built barbed wire fences to keep tourists out of their fields. Competing concessioners at Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain vied for passengers getting off the trains with slick sales pitches that were seldom matched by good service. To attract visitors to Mt. Rainier, one clever entrepreneur dreamed of building a tramway to the summit, which would be enhanced by a monument tall enough to make Mt. Rainier (at 14,410 feet) the highest mountain in the United States (surpassing Mt. Whitney at 14,495 feet). A plan to install a cable across the Grand Canyon to allow visitors easy passage between rims was proposed in 1916 but squashed by Mather…

In these early days of national parks, competition was relied on to keep concessioner quality high and prices low. More often this resulted in chaos, as when 27 separate concessioners operated in Yosemite in 1906. Mather instituted the policy of a “prime concessioner” to simplify administration and reduce the amount of space concessions consumed. But as profit-motivated monopolies, concessions continued to cause headaches. The Park Service had to stave off plans to lure more visitors by supplementing the parks’ natural features. A few such schemes included a 1933 proposal to dam Yosemite Creek so that the falls would run all year, a tramway to connect the rim and shores of Crater Lake, and night floodlights to illuminate the General Grant sequoias.

Concessioners have consistently pushed for the expansion of their facilities. In 1973, Russell Train, the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, exposed concessioner plans to build motel units, a parking lot, swimming pool, and employee housing on the rim of Crater Lake without the opportunity for public review that such construction on public land requires under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act.   In the same year, the Fred Harvey Company in Grand Canyon signed a 30-year contract specifying $5 million of new developments on the South Rim, including a cocktail lounge, trailer camp, gift shops and employee residences.

The danger of allowing businesses to meddle in park affairs has been exacerbated in recent years. Many small “mom-and-pop” concession operations have been engulfed by huge corporations with considerable political clout, ready access to capital for expansion, and primary responsibility to their shareholders rather than the public at large…

…the most blatant and deservedly famous example of corporate abuse is MCA’s (Music Corporation of America) activities in Yosemite. Soon after acquiring the Yosemite Park and Curry Company in 1973 for $13.2 million, MCA began an aggressive marketing campaign to promote business in Yosemite…Frustrated visitors found the already challenging task of making reservations worsened by the booking of such groups like Pickle Packers International, etc.  Tempers also rose over MCA’s filming of the television series “Sierra” in Yosemite Valley.

Public outrage peaked when the 1975 draft of the Yosemite General Management Plan was released laden with such MCA pet projects as the construction of a viewing shelter, curio shop and snack bar on Glacier Point; the development of fragile Tuolumne Meadows as a winter ski resort; and the upgrading of 150 rustic tent cabins in the Valley to modern motel units, with a similar upgrading in price. MCA was intimately involved in the master planning process from the start, while the public was only called in to comment after a draft had been drawn up…

The revelation that MCA had contributed $160,000 to Nixon’s re-election campaign added further spice to the ensuing controversy and the scandal hastened Park Service Director Ron Walker’s resignation… The entire master planning process was begun again from scratch, this time with extensive provisions for public participation.

Attempts to regulate concessions are as old as the parks themselves. In 1865 Frederick Law Olmstead Sr. warned of the consequences for Yosemite if park values were ever sacrificed to the “convenience and bad taste of present visitors.” In his 1918 administrative guidelines for park policy, Interior Secretary Franklin Lane stated that “the national interest must dictate all decisions affecting public or private enterprise in the parks.” In 1934, Secretary Harold Ickes proposed nationalization of concessions, and his successor Julius Krug, with Park Service Director Newton Drury at his side, announced in 1946 that they would work toward government ownership of facilities with private or non-profit operation. Former director Horace Albright agreed with the wisdom of this is 1948, though he cautioned that buying out all the concessioners would be prohibitively expensive. But the Eisenhower Administration and Mission ’66, a ten-year plan for the national parks that included extensive prodding of private business to develop facilities, quelled talk of government acquisition for a time.

Much of the current problem of inadequate concessioner control stems from the Concessions Policy Act of 1965. Noting the rapid increase in park visitation since World War II, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Morris Udall (D-AZ) said, “We need more and more facilities, more and more hotels, more and more restaurants, more campgrounds.”  The act encourages private business to invest in “necessary and appropriate development” in the parks.

One way it does this is through the possessory interest clause, which gives the concessioner all incidents of ownership except title for any construction of new facilities or improvements in existing ones that he pays for. Unfortunately, this has cost the Park Service meaningful control over concession activities…

The Concessions Policy Act also grants a preferential right of renewal of contract to a concessioner who has performed satisfactorily.  Since until very recently the Park Service lacked guidelines for evaluating concessioner performance, contract renewals were seldom questioned.  Competitive bidders, already deterred by the need to buy possessory interests of established concessions, are further discoursed by this policy…

Another privilege in the 1965 Act that has caused mischief is the preferential right to run a wide range of services in a park, including any new ones deemed necessary. MCA has written into its contract the exclusive right to provide bus service into Yosemite, so that other scheduled companies, such as Greyhound, cannot enter. This has helped promote use of the automobile as the main means of transportation to Yosemite. Passengers of charter tours once had to disembark at the park boundary and wait for an MCA bus to take them the rest of the way. Though now charter lines can drive into Yosemite Valley, they pay a surcharge to MCA for this privilege, which of course is reflected in higher fees for the passenger.   

These provisions of the 1965 Act, along with contract lengths of 20 to 30 years, have led to the comfortable entrenchment of concessioners. But our ideas about park concessions have not been as fixed. As the parks grow more crowded we find swimming pools and movie theaters to be less appropriate. Yet the law makes flexibility in concessions decisions impossible—once a concessioner builds a beauty parlor or a golf course, it is a gigantic task to get rid of it.   

The 1974 MCA scandal brought the weaknesses of the Concessions Policy Act into the limelight. It catalyzed a GAO investigation and an Interior Department Task Force report in 1975, and extensive hearings by the House Committees on Government Operations and Small Business. The committees declared in a 1976 report: “Park Service policies have made a mockery of competitive free enterprise in national parks and have hindered effective management of concession operation.” They strongly recommended a crackdown, including better monitoring for safety and health, more stringent performance evaluations, adjustment of rates and franchise fees, guidelines for convention use, shorter contract lengths, and improvements in the Park Service’s own concession management staff. Pointing out that other federal agencies that manage concessions, such as the Forest Service and BLM, do not grant such prerogatives as possessory interest and preferential rights, they called for a complete overhaul of the 1965 Act to eliminate these clauses. Indignant concessioners defended their positions in hearings before the subcommittees on parks and recreation…Though no action was taken on bills to amend the Concessions Policy Act…the Park Service did begin asserting more control over concessioners. Inspections increased and the standard concessioner contract language was revised to change, among other things, the preferential right of renewal to the right of first refusal. But concessioners did not yield power easily. When Director William Whalen was fired in 1980, it was in part because his tough stand on concessioners had stepped on too many political toes.    

In 1979, Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-AR)…called yet another series of oversight hearings on the Concessions Policy Act. After hearing the same issues rehashed with fresh examples, he ordered a second GAO investigation, which appeared in July 1980 and confirmed the need for legislative reform as the only real way to strip concessioners of their inordinate power…

But this drive has been thwarted by Secretary Watt.   It is unlikely that he will enforce some of the recent Park Service improvements in concessions control.    On the contrary, he intimated in his March speech that Park Service employees who make trouble for business are in danger of losing their jobs. “If a personality is giving you a problem, we’re going to get rid of the problem or the personality, whichever is faster,” Watt promised the concessioners, inviting them to bypass usual Park Service routes and appeal directly to the Cabinet level for favors…

However, Watt’s remarks were so incendiary that some concessioners may have gone home apprehensive of the uproar his statements were sure to cause. Understandably wary of adverse publicity, MCA’s Ed Hardy withdrew his original proposals for Yosemite, scaling them down to more modest suggestions for consolidation of fire, telephone, reservation, and warehousing services, and claiming that the only interest he had in campgrounds was “raking the ground and cleaning the toilets.” But whether concessioners in less publicly visible parks will feel the constraints MCA feels remains to be seen.

Friends of the national parks need to vigilantly watch for outrageous concessioner proposals. Any new duties assumed by concessioners will only magnify the already excessive role they play in parks. Far from giving up, we must redouble efforts to amend the Concession Policy Act of 1965. Until meaningful changes in concessions legislation occur, the threat of insensitive, profit-motivated development in our national parks will continue to dog us.