Yosemite plan is met with praise by Mike Lewis The Fresno Bee - March 28, 2000 SAN FRANCISCO -- Turning back the car culture that popularized Yosemite Valley while degrading its beauty, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveiled a proposed valley management plan Monday that seeks to radically reduce the number of automobiles allowed into the heart of the national park. The draft plan, released at a news conference in San Francisco following a speech by Babbitt, also would move hundreds of employees to lodging outside the valley, while reshaping roads and reducing campgrounds to let the Merced River more closely run the course it carved for itself before naturalists and Winnebagos settled in Yosemite. Babbitt and the environmental groups he long has sparred with over the correct way to manage the park hailed the plan as a vast improvement over current park management. "The problem isn't that there are too many people in the valley, but too many cars," Babbitt said. Under the draft plan, expected to cost about $343 million to fully implement, the Interior Department would reduce the 1,500 parking spaces in the valley to a 550-space lot at Yosemite Village. The department then would build three shuttle-served parking lots on Yosemite's exterior ring at Badger Pass, El Portal and Crane Flat with a total of 1,550 spaces -- a net increase in parking. Yosemite officials said the reduced valley parking would lower day-use traffic in the valley by 60 percent on peak summer days. From the parking lots, the shuttles would run every 12 to 15 minutes. Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society praised the plan as a dramatic step beyond earlier park management proposals that he and other environmentalists had criticized as inadequate to protect Yosemite, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, with 2.5 million annual visitors. "(The plan) emphasizes conservation and park protection," said Watson, who helped negotiate the draft. "I think a 60 percent reduction in traffic will change the face of Yosemite." The park also would cut nearly in half the number of employees who live in the valley. Along with Superintendent Dave Mi- alic, who was brought in specifically to see the draft to completion, 700 park employees will be relocated to lodging outside the 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide, granite-framed Yosemite Valley, an area roughly the size of Manhattan's Central Park but, as Babbitt dryly noted, "more developed." The park superintendent's home, staff headquarters, housekeeping, concessioners and entire campgrounds will be moved. The plan also calls for converting a 3.2-mile section of Northside Drive, a popular road through the valley floor, into a bike and foot trail. Now, the draft plan enters its critical 90-day public comment period ending July 7. Mihalic said that after the comment period, the park service will make any necessary modifications to the document and release the final management plan at the end of the year. As a result of the 1997 floods, Congress already has set aside about $100 million for removal of existing roads, bridges, campsites and housing in the Merced River floodplain. Babbitt said the completed draft owes a lot of credit to that 1997 flood, when the Merced River broke from its banks and destroyed much of the development along the river. After the flooding, the park service and the environmentalists for the first time in a generation began to cut the deals that would reduce development in the narrow river corridor by not rebuilding much of what was swept away. The plan contains five alternatives, ranging from the proposal preferred by the park managers to the possibility that the park does nothing at all. Under the preferred alternative, the valley would gain 121 acres of wetlands, gain more than 100 acres of restored Black Oak forest and see a net decrease of 71 acres of developed land. Praising the preferred alternative, Natural Resources Defense Council board member Christine Russell said: "You don't have to be a policy expert to see that this is great. Instead of noisy traffic, (visitors) will hear birds and waterfalls." Not every environmentalist was so moved. David Brower, one of the deans of the nation's conservation and environmental movement, said the proposal didn't go nearly far enough. Brower, who said he is old enough to have ridden the now- defunct rail line into the park, said managers should have worked harder to eliminate cars entirely from the valley as originally sought in the 1980 plan. "Rail wasn't even considered in this document," he said.