Grand Plans for the Canyon

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 | by Sean Paige

But Bruce Babbitt and GCNP superintendent Robert Arnberger insist that the plan will enhance the Grand Canyon experience for the millions who visit there annually. Unless something dramatic is done, park overcrowding only can worsen over time, they say, degrading the property and disappointing visitors.

Development on the park's periphery is inevitable, they further argue -- and in fact already is occurring in the existing gateway community of Tusayan -- so why not do it in an environmentally conscious and aesthetically pleasing way? It is time for the park to revert to a more pristine, uncluttered state, according to the plan's proponents, by removing parts of the small city that has grown up over the decades on its south rim, making the job of park superintendent more like that of a mayor than a ranger.

Yet among the plan's most potent critics is the man responsible for setting it in motion-- recently retired U.S. Forest Service employee Dennis Lund, who gives Insight a revealing look at what he sees as a process run amok. Lund believes that CFV, the light-rail system, Babbitt's drive toward "deurbanization" and the private/public land swap upon which the vision hinges are unnecessary and ill-conceived, serving the interests of neither the taxpayers nor park visitors.

Lund is an unassuming and conscientious federal worker who specialized in the arcane art of trading public lands for private "inholdings" (islands of private property surrounded by seas of national forest). He was working at Arizona's Kiabab National Forest in 1989 when De Paolo materialized, asking how he could get a road built to an inholding he was hoping to develop near the park's south gate. But Lund gave De Paolo an even better idea: If the developer somehow could secure the rights to a dozen other inholdings scattered within the Kiabab, Lund said, he might arrange to swap those properties for national-forest acreage abutting the gateway community of Tusayan ... and right at the doorstep of the crown jewel itself.

It was a fateful meeting -- one that Lund says he has come to regret. "It was my idea, unfortunately" he recalls of those early discussions. "If I had known 10 years ago what I know now, I probably wouldn't have wandered off into the swamp." But life is lived forward and understood backward, so Lund initially was delighted when De Paolo began snatching up inholdings, eventually acquiring rights to 12 separate parcels totaling 2,200 acres (including several purchased from members of northern Arizona's ubiquitous Babbitt clan).

The years since have been filled with proposals and counterproposals, appraisals, reappraisals and environmental-impact studies as CFV moved fitfully forward, morphing many times while controversy grew about the land swap. But last summer -- in an exchange USFS deemed equitable but others have questioned -- the Kiabab finally agreed to trade 272 acres of public land near the park entrance for De Paolo's 2,200 private acres.

But as a deal began to take shape, merchants in Tusayan were growing wary, worried that their private, 144-acre island of prosperity was about to be challenged; likewise, the merchants in nearby Flagstaff and Williams, who recognized CFV's profit-draining potential. When Tusayan attempted to incorporate better to control its own destiny and make community improvements, De Paolo sued and successfully blocked the move, arguing that the town would use its new status to zone him out of business. Bad blood has flowed freely between the two factions ever since, as each offered its own proposals for improving the gateway community and engaged in an escalating war of words, lawyers, "experts" and lobbyists.