Grand Plans for the Canyon

Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 by Sean Paige

Interior Secretary Babbitt hopes to make the `jewel' of his home state a model for the park of the future. But critics say his new paradigm likely will mean a paradise lost.

Arizona's Grand Canyon is a picture window into the past. Peering into its depths, the astonished eye surveys 560 million years of Earth history in a passing glance. But look to its bustling south rim, where the most renowned of U.S. national parks is headquartered, and you can see into the future as well -- as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt plots the brave new national park of the 21st century.

As it has taken shape on the secretary's drawing board, the Grand Canyon National Park, or GCNP, of tomorrow -- like other "crown jewels" of the park system including Yosemite, Zion and Yellowstone -- likely will offer a far more costly, commercialized and controlled experience than it has in the past. Critics say this reflects Babbitt's environmentalist prejudice that people are a scourge to be coped with, cajoled and controlled -- like, say, a beetle infestation blighting the trees t rather than rightful owners of the "public" lands to be welcomed and accommodated in their efforts to experience nature's greatest wonders.

At the Grand Canyon of the near future, personal vehicles will be off limits to all who don't have reservations at one of the park's onsite lodges. But those accommodations probably will cost plenty, since some of the less aesthetic (and also less expensive) hotels, along with all but the most historically significant structures along the rim, will have been torn down as part of Babbitt's dream of "de-urbanizing" the parks. Visitors instead will mass at garages outside the park, as at Walt Disney World, where they'll board a light-rail system for cattle-car transport to several of the park's most popular points of interest, severely curtailing opportunities for spontaneous exploration.

That is, unless they're sturdy backpacking types, which the majority of day-trippers are not.

Recently increased entrance fees will have been raised further still (just how much park officials cannot or will not say) to pay for the light rail as well as the cost of razing certain park structures (the fire station, some employee housing, a school, etc.) and rebuilding them beyond the park's newly sacrosanct confines. They'll likely be relocated to leased spaces in Canyon Forest Village, or CFV, a $330 million commercial development being proposed by Scottsdale, Ariz., developer Tom De Paolo, for whom Babbitt was a paid consultant before he took his Cabinet position (see "High Plains Grifter?" March 20).

The 272-acre village will be equal parts campus, residential community and commercial enterprise where American Indian bracelets and baskets will be hocked alongside Benetton sweaters (De Paolo is joined in the venture by the Percassi family of Italy, which owns many of the clothing company's retail stores in Europe). And to ensure that CFV lives up to De Paolo's environmentally correct promises -- most notably that it will use no groundwater even if it means transporting CFV's water supply in by truck or train from the distant Colorado River -- the community's governing board will be well-stocked with representatives of environmental groups that have traded endorsements of the concept for a cut of the action and profits. These include the Grand Canyon Trust, cofounded by Babbitt.

And those profits could be considerable. The project will include 900 new hotel rooms (and possibly 250 more, when the park razes its existing lodges), 250,000 square feet of commercial and retail space, several thousand units of employee housing (some of which will be leased to the park at market rates) and the school, clinic and fire station that will have been evicted from the park. Profits shared with participating green groups easily could top $1 million annually, according to De Paolo's estimates, which the groups can use to "educate" (some fear propagandize) visitors steered through CFV's interpretive areas.

One group of environmentalists that won't be involved, however, is the Sierra Club, which is suing to block the development, as is a coalition of area business interests and nearby towns. The Sierra Club believes CFV still is too much development for the area, even with its ecology-conscious design and promises; nearby communities fear CFV's adverse economic impacts. "Building northern Arizona's largest shopping center at the entrance to the Grand Canyon is simply a bad idea" said Sharon Galbreath, state conservation chairwoman for the Sierra Club.

Yet despite such opposition and a promise by opponents to put the controversial matter to countywide referendum in the fall, CFV recently cleared a major hurdle by receiving zoning approval from the Coconino County board of supervisors, chaired by Paul Babbitt, the Interior secretary's brother. Although known as a longtime booster of CFV, Paul Babbitt at the last minute recused himself from voting on the matter after a Phoenix attorney advised that Babbitt family business arrangements with De Paolo presented at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.