Interior Department Weighs Handing Yosemite Land to Developer With GOP Donor Ties

The National Park Service has spent more than a year quietly working on a plan to give away a piece of Yosemite National Park. This is according to four people directly familiar with the discussions and agency documents reviewed by NOTUS, which broke the story.

The deal would carve a roughly quarter-mile strip of land out of Yosemite and hand it, or an easement interest in it, to a company controlled by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada-based real estate and investment firm. In exchange, the Park Service would get land of equal value somewhere else in California, though that parcel hasn't been identified.

Kingsbarn CEO Jeff Pori owns an 83-acre plot just outside Yosemite's western boundary, about five miles from the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, the ancient trees President Abraham Lincoln protected by grant in 1864. Right now getting from that property to Yosemite Valley requires a 90-minute drive because the only access road sits more than 10 miles from a park entrance. Pori wants to build a short road connecting his land directly to Yosemite's Big Oak Flat Road, according to NOTUS and confirmed by documents reviewed by the LA Times.

That would give whatever gets built on the property, a hotel, resort, or private residence, direct private access through a national park. Nobody currently has that.

This isn't new. It's been rejected before.

A previous owner of the same 83 acres, Lewis Geyser, pushed for this exact kind of road for decades. The Bush administration said no. The Obama administration said no. Courts rejected his appeals too, according to Breitbart's reporting on the history.

So the question is why this is moving now. Federal election records show Pori has donated repeatedly to the Republican National Committee and Trump-aligned fundraising committees, according to Breitbart. NOTUS reports Pori has business ties to people in Trump's orbit as well.

None of that proves a quid pro quo. Donating to a political party isn't illegal, and plenty of real estate developers give money to both parties. But when a rejected proposal suddenly gets revived under an administration the developer has financially supported, that's a fact worth putting on the record, not an accusation.

What Interior says

The Department of the Interior pushed back hard on the characterization that this is a secret backroom deal. Spokesperson Aubrie Spady told the Guardian there "has been no political pressure to reach a predetermined outcome" and called suggestions that the department is "secretly working to hand over National Park Service land to a private developer" false.

Interior told the Washington Examiner and Breitbart that any deal would go through "required environmental review and public notification processes" and that "no final decisions have been made." A proposal under review is not a signed deal.

But NOTUS reports something Interior's statement doesn't directly rebut: that political appointees inside Secretary Doug Burgum's office have required NPS staff to send regular progress updates, and that staff have occasionally been "berated by political staff" for moving too slowly. "The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual," one person familiar with the discussions and the park's history told NOTUS. Another said, "They want us to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists or people."

Those are anonymous sources. NOTUS says four people directly familiar with the discussions independently described the same dynamic, and the Daily Beast, LA Times, Guardian, and Washington Examiner all cited the same NOTUS reporting rather than independently confirming it themselves. This is one investigation, carried widely, not eight separate confirmations.

Who's objecting, and why

California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, learned about the deal earlier this year from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and are working with Senate Appropriations Committee staff to block it, according to the LA Times. Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman called it selling park land "to Trump's ultra-wealthy friends to profit off of."

Cicely Muldoon, who spent five years as Yosemite's superintendent across 40 years at NPS, told NOTUS the deal cuts against the entire premise of the park system: "Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit."

The National Parks Conservation Association's Mark Rose called it a "secretive, backroom deal." The Yosemite NPS Employees Union said it was "appalled."

The developer's side

An attorney for Kingsbarn told the LA Times the deal has nothing to do with politics and is actually "environmentally friendly," because it would cut down significantly on driving for anyone who eventually lives on or visits the developed property. A direct road is shorter than a 90-minute loop, and it deserves to be weighed against the precedent concerns, not dismissed.

Kingsbarn did not respond to Breitbart's request for comment.

What happens next

Any land swap has to clear federal land-exchange law, which requires the government to receive land of equal value, plus environmental review under NEPA and a public comment period, per Interior's own statement. That process hasn't started in any formal, public way yet. Padilla's office says it's actively working to get language into appropriations bills that would block the swap outright. Whether Congress moves before Interior does is the open question that will decide whether this becomes the first time in 150 years the federal government subtracts land from Yosemite instead of adding to it.