Interior Secretary James Watt’s March 9 address to the Conference of National Park Concessioners was – well, disconcerting. In one short speech he proclaimed his love for outdoor recreation (“I don’t like to paddle and I don’t like to walk”), his capacity for thoughtful judgments (“I make lots of mistakes, ‘cause I make a lot of decisions”), and his philosophy in steering the Interior Department to wise land stewardship (“We’ll use the budget system to be the excuse to make major policy decisions”). He then invited the businessmen who operate hotels, souvenir shops, and snack bars to join his “crusade” to appear fashionably frugal before the OMB. “You folks are going to play a tremendously important role and a growing role in the administration of our national parks,” he told them. “We need an aggressive program with the private entrepreneurs who are willing to invest and manage resources in the National Park Service for people.”
No wonder environmentalists seized upon his remarks as further proof that Watt represents the worst threat to public lands since the invention of the bulldozer. In the tizzy that followed, a few concessioners claimed that they were just as surprised at Watt’s exhortations as everyone else. “He sent me home very concerned that this was not the time to expand commercial operations inside the national parks,” said Ed Hardy, the president of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company (a subsidiary of the Music Corporation of America).
However, three days before the speech, Hardy had submitted to the Park Service a proposal for MCA to take over entrance stations, campgrounds, and some interpretive functions. “A talk on wildflowers of the high country can be done just as well by an employee of the concessioners as it can by a Park Service staffer,” he stated.
The concessioners may have been shocked by the speech, all right – they probably couldn’t believe that Watt had so imprudently spilled the beans, thrusting any quiet takeovers they might have hoped to engineer into the public limelight.
What would be the consequences of the private sector gaining a stronger foothold in national parks? Watt’s suggestions wouldn’t seem so absurd if they didn’t come after nearly a century of efforts on the part of the Interior Department, Congress, and environmental groups to curb the power of the profit motive in the parks. A pile of evidence indicates that concessioner influence needs to be toned down, not exacerbated.
In the early years of parks, various entrepreneurs fenced in Yosemite’s meadows to grow hay for their horses, dreamed of building a monument on top of Mt. Rainier to make it the highest mountain in the U.S., and proposed building a cable across the Grand Canyon to allow visitors easy passage between the rims.
In more recent times, concessioners have ignored fire and safety standards for their buildings (National Park Concessions, Inc., at Mammoth Cave), forced the Park Service to abandon plans for the phasing out of some visitor facilities in parks (TWA Services in Bryce Canyon and Zion) and dictated what the future development of a park ought to be (MCA at Yosemite).
Not all concessioners are unscrupulous rascals out to spoil the parks with rampant commercialization and poor service, of course. The problem lies in the present system of concessions management, as set forth in the 1965 Concessions Policy Act, which gives concessioners an inordinate amount of power in deciding how the parks are to be run and developed. Concessioners are businessmen with primary responsibility to their shareholders, and cannot be expected to make decisions regarding the parks that are in the best long-range public interest if they conflict with maximizing profits.
The 1965 act, however, grants concessioners a number of privileges and rights that protect them from meaningful control by the Park Service and from having to be accountable to the public. The accumulation of possessory interests, the preferential right of renewal of contract, the right to run any new services in the parks, and contract lengths of 20 to 30 years all contribute to the complacent entrenchment of concessioners as profit-motivated, government-subsidized monopolies. Even though Watt declared that “we have a bias for private enterprise,” current concession policies (which he wants to maintain and enhance) make a mockery of any competition for contracts. Whether Watt will become too worried about the philosophical implications of his statements is doubtful, however.
To further add to the problem, in the past decade many small, family-owned concession operations have been engulfed by huge conglomerates with considerable political clout, ready access to capital for expansion, and their own ideas about how the park’s profit potential can be increased. When MCA bought out the Curry Company in 1973, it made no secret of the fact that, first and foremost, it wanted to make money. Soon business conventions clogged hotels and restaurants, television crews moved in to film the short-lived television series, Sierra, and the infamous conforming of the Master Plan to MCA’s desires began.
The resulting scandal hastened park Service Director Ron Walker’s resignation, forced the entire master planning process to start again from scratch, and prompted a GAO investigation, an Interior Department Task Force study, and extensive congressional hearings on the subject of concessions management. The reports released from these investigations all said the same thing—concessioners wield an unhealthy amount of influence in the parks.
Concessioners protested indignantly, of course, and though a few positive steps were taken within the Park Service’s own management, legislation to amend the 1965 Act, though introduced, went nowhere. In 1980, Park Service Director William Whalen was fired, in part because concessioners didn’t care for the changes he tried to make in their comfortable status.
Watt’s suggestions represent a startling departure from the department’s own attitude towards concessioners. What will actually come of them will depend in large part on public pressure. Concessioners who have been stung before by adverse publicity are wary of more; MCA’s Hardy withdrew most of his controversial proposals for Yosemite in the wake of Watt’s speech, and he now denies that he even suggested usurping the traditional roles of park rangers. To prevent the dangerous expansion of concessioner roles in parks, we need to vigilantly watch for other such proposals, expose them and help to squash them.