Traveler's View | An Unqualified Choice?

Remember when the National Park Service had to pay a ransom just to keep using the historic names of the 99-year-old Ahwahnee Hotel and other Yosemite National Park facilities after a departing concession company claimed the government owed it millions for trademark rights?

A top official of that concession company is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency that operates that revered Sierra park and the entire National Park System.

Trump’s nominee, Scott Socha, is a group president of Delaware North (DNC), which in 2016 lost its Yosemite lodging and dining contract to competitor Yosemite Hospitality LLC, but currently operates concessions in numerous other parks. In selecting him to head the Park Service, Trump has settled on a businessman presumably well suited to carry out the president’s own vision of public lands as moneymaking opportunities, but who appears unqualified under the federal requirements for the job.

Those requirements, as contained in the U.S. Code, state that the Park Service director “shall have substantial experience and demonstrated competence in land management and natural or cultural resource conservation.” The White House announcement contained no reasoning in selecting Socha or explaining his qualifications to meet those responsibilities. Socha's LinkedIn resume points to his expertise in financial planning, risk assessment, and managing travel destination properties, but seems to fall short of the director's responsibilities as dictated by Congress.

Could Trump’s extensive transformation of the National Park System be accelerated if the Senate confirms Socha?

In nominating Socha to run the Park Service, the president has picked an individual who was a top DNC officer when the company trademarked names from around Yosemite National Park and held them hostage in return for $51 million. The case ended in 2019 with a settlement in which the Park Service retained the historic names and the government and Aramark, parent company of the new concessionaire, agreed to pay DNC $12 million “to resolve any and all contractual disputes.”

It remains to be seen how soon the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which is chaired by Utah Republican Mike Lee, who has pushed legislation to privatize Western public lands, will consider the nomination.

But when it does, the senators should ask Socha — in light of his professional interest in catering to tourists — whether he supports the 1916 National Park Organic Act's directive that the Park Service's primary mission is to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein."

Let's hope the senators compare Socha's background against the requirements of running the Park Service and ask pertinent questions.

Will Socha, who’s spent his career in business, align with businessman Trump’s vision of public lands as moneymaking opportunities? Does he agree that some parks are "cost centers" and that there should be more privatization or turnovers to the states as Trump and Interior Secretary Burgum suggested a year ago when presenting Congress with the administration’s budget for Interior? (National Parks Conservation Association staff calculated that at least 350 of the 433 units in the park system would have to be handed off to states or closed to meet that budget.)

Senators also should ask Socha if he would recuse himself from decisions affecting DNC's operations in the park system in light of the company's loss of valuable lodging and retail concessions in Yosemite and its past financial donations to Trump, including $50,000 last year to his inaugural committee.

Given his background, Socha could be well-suited to steward the Interior Department’s just announced “Make America Beautiful 250” initiative that includes goals to expand and improve “public access to outdoor recreation on public lands and waters and modernizing national park and public lands access through common sense polices and technological innovation.”

But would he push to “modernize” national parks by building more lodges, roads, and marinas in them?

And where does Socha stand on upholding Park Service policy that commits the agency to protecting wilderness character in lands identified as eligible for that designation, not just those lands that Congress has already designated?

In his career managing DNC's parks and resorts business Socha has certainly been focused on driving business to the company's properties. Is that the best fit for a job that is facing decisions on how to address sea-level rise or other climate-change impacts affecting the National Park System and its landscapes, marinescapes, flora and fauna?

Indeed, the key question should be what on Socha's resume qualifies him to manage a federal agency with 433 individual park units, more than 85 million acres of lands, and a workforce struggling with poor housing and low pay while toiling for an administration that wants to shrink that workforce to the point where responsibly implementing its mission is all but impossible.

The challenge appears daunting when you must walk the White House line. As a retired park superintendent commented to the Traveler,  the orders coming from Interior demonstrate that those making them "don’t understand, or maybe worse, don’t care, about the laws and mandates of the NPS or the actual work NPS rangers, resources managers, superintendents and other dedicated agency staff bust their butts to do, day in and day out, to serve the public and protect America’s natural and cultural heritage for this and future generations." 

Given all this, does it make sense to bring in a concessionaire to run the parks?