$441 Million Revamp Looks to the Past for Park's Future Babbitt's blueprint seeks to reduce human footprint by Eric Brazil San Francisco Examiner - November 15, 2000 YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK - As U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Bab bitt well knows, the closest thing to perpetual life in the national park business is the argument over the future of Yosemite Valley. Yosemite's friends are "a cantankerous, eccentric, passionate, irrational, idealistic, quarrelsome, impossible crowd of people," Babbitt said in closing the latest chapter in the long-running debate over balancing public access and amenities with preserving the Valley's natural splendor. The final Yosemite Valley plan - six volumes, 20 pounds - delivered Wednesday by a proud National Park Service, will guide what Babbitt called "the rebirth of the Valley floor." At a cost of $441.7 million, the plan proposes to shrink visible human impact on the 7-mile-long Valley, reducing the number of living units, cars, bridges and campsites, and eliminating a dam. But even as Babbitt spoke to a friendly crowd of about 150 on a snowy patch in the shadow of Half Dome, a line of 30 polite demonstrators from Friends of Yosemite Valley made their displeasure with the plan emphatically clear. "STOP BABBITT'S DEVELOPMENT PLAN," said a long banner encapsulating the group's criticism. Protest against draft version Friends of Yosemite Valley were not protesting the Park Service's plan - one that they had not in fact read - but a draft version released last March. Greg Adair, the group's director, said the final plan was more of the same - just more expensive. Park Superintendent David Milhalic disagreed. "The final plan is not a draft plan. It is a different plan and it is a better plan," he said. "I hope we don't let perfect become the enemy of better." The final valley plan has been a work in progress for nearly 30 years, but what focused the Park Service's attention - and Babbitt's - on completing it was the Merced River flood of 1997. By ravaging campgrounds, hotel rooms, housekeeping cabins and employee housing in its corridor, the river gave the Park Service a more or less clean planning slate. "The flood brought us all to our senses and made us ask the right questions," Babbitt said. As planner Chip Jenkins and resource chief Russell Galipeau explained Tuesday during a show-and-tell bus trip for Babbitt and reporters, the river told them where not to rebuild. Consequently, about 300 riverside campsites, some 200 Yosemite Lodge rooms and hundreds of employee housing units were lost. Most of the land on which they stood will be restored to its natural state. Economy housing units The final plan is more generous to economy housing units - housekeeping cabins, tent cabins, Camp Curry - than the draft plan was, and it reduces Yosemite Lodge from 386 units to 251. Joyce Eden, of Friends of Yosemite Valley, said the final plan is a marginal improvement over the draft plan in that it creates more affordable units, but "they could have had 800 campgrounds" if more clustering were employed, instead of adding new "hard housing" at Yosemite Lodge. Jenkins said the flood gave planners the opportunity to re-think the location of some structures - not only those along the river banks - that would serve the valley someplace else. Among them was the grocery store. "We found that 50 percent of the grocery store business is from the campgrounds and Curry. So we're going to move it near Curry Village," a move that figures to reduce vehicular traffic significantly, Jenkins said. A visitor center will be built to replace the grocery store. Yosemite Valley draws nearly 4 million visitors a year, but Babbitt said "the problem at Yosemite is not too many visitors. The problem is too damn many cars. . . . We have an obligation to invite visitors away from their cars." The Park Service has not quite figured out how to do that, although the final valley plan makes an earnest stab at it. Parking at Badger Pass Among the first items on its to-do list are opening the Badger Pass out-of-valley parking area, designed to handle about 420 cars, and buying a fleet of low-emission, handicapped accessible buses to build a shuttle fleet. Jenkins said the target date for opening the Badger Pass lot is 2003. "We could start Badger Pass next year; the facility is there, but there's no money for buses or drivers," park Superintendent Milhalic said. No matter what, he said, "we will move fast to replace diesel buses with alternate fuels or electric hybrids." The final plan contemplates out-of-valley parking lots at El Portal and Hazel Green, a privately owned parcel outside the park gate on Highway 120 west, as well as at Badger Pass. There will also be a 550-space parking lot in the valley. Asked how a family of four, heading into the valley, will know if the valley parking lot is full, Jenkins conceded that the Park Service hasn't quite figured that out yet. It may opt for "an incentive system - it would cost more to park inside," Jenkins said. Babbitt said he believes that when the Park Service finally has a transportation plan in place for the valley, it will resemble the 1905 plan. Visitors were then brought to the valley by train, he said, and cars were not allowed. "We are going forward to recapture the past," he said. The estimated cost of the plan is nearly $100 million more than the estimate for the March draft. Babbitt said the increase resulted basically from a more intense - and realistic - study of the cost of providing employee housing. Friends of Yosemite Valley has sued the Park Service to compel the completion of what it contends is an inadequate Wild and Scenic River management plan for the Merced River - a legal prerequisite to adopting the final valley plan. Whether it will sue to block implementation of the final valley plan is uncertain, but Friends of Yosemite Valley attorney Julia Olsen said "we see no change in this final plan which would remedy those violations." Les Wilson of Berkeley, a mountaineer with 17 first ascents, mostly in the Sierra Nevada, to his credit, was among the protesters Wednesday. "This is a development plan, not a preservation plan," he said, adding that he has children who he hopes will be able to enjoy Yosemite as he has. "I hope there's something left," he said. Babbitt said while the form and substance of the plan owe a lot to the vigilant monitoring of Yosemite's friends and environmental activists, "there were times in this process when I didn't have warm feelings about environmental organizations." Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, is completing his second term as secretary of the Interior. He hasn't decided yet what to do when the Clinton administration ends, but "two things I'm not going to do are practice law or lobby," he said.