2 Lawmakers Urge Babbitt to Review Contract for Yosemite Concessions

Two congressmen whose committees oversee national parks have told Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt that the government’s process of selecting a new concessionaire to run Yosemite National Park’s hotels and other tourist operations was “deeply flawed.”

In a letter to Babbitt provided to The Times on Thursday, Reps. George Miller (D-Martinez) and Bruce F. Vento, a Minnesota Democrat, complain that a National Park Service team who evaluated the bidders for the Yosemite contract “misunderstood its responsibility to get the best deal possible for the taxpayer and for the park visitor.”

The letter stops short of asking Babbitt to throw out the proposed contract with the winning bidder, Delaware North Companies Inc., and reopen the process, a demand made by some environmental groups. Rather, it asks that Babbitt consider a long string of complaints about the bidding process before finalizing the contract and sending it to Congress for review.

“We found it astounding that such a precedent-shattering, unique and costly decision could be made with so little analysis and discussion,” the lawmakers wrote.

The proposed contract for taking over the tourist concession in October is supposed to be a model for agreements at other national parks. Environmental groups, which supported one of the five losing bidders, testified in opposition to the agreement at a recent joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Natural Resources Committee.

The congressmen complained that the Park Service, in its review of the bids, placed too much emphasis on whether bidders agreed to accept unlimited liability for cleaning up pollution from underground storage tanks and too little on the money and kind of “visitor experience” they could provide the park.

Miller and Vento said they did not conclude that Delaware North, a race track and food conglomerate, would be an unsatisfactory park operator.

“In fact, Delaware North may be more than a satisfactory (concessionaire),” the lawmakers said. “Unfortunately, the process designed by the National Park Service concession management team . . . (for soliciting and evaluating bids) was not intended to do anything more than produce a satisfactory (concessionaire).”

The two congressmen put the value of the Yosemite contract at $1 billion to $2 billion and complained that the selection was made with “an extraordinary absence of analysis.” The letter notes that park officials chose Delaware North only eight hours after receiving a staff recommendation and even though the bids involved about 50,000 pages of material.

But Yosemite Park Supt. Michael V. Finley said the Park Service had had only 3,300 pages of bidding material to review, some of it “fluff and supplementary stuff.” He said a team consisting of park officials and private consultants spent two weeks evaluating the bids before recommending Delaware North.

Finley, one of the park officials who selected Delaware North, attributed the congressmen’s objections to incomplete questioning by the committee at a March 25 hearing on the contract.

Although he has not yet seen the letter to Babbitt, Finley said he is recommending that the Park Service respond to the charges in writing.

“I am very confident the process was fair and comprehensive,” he said.