Published September 7, 2004

What can you get for less than $85 in Yosemite National Park?

If you’re a member of the public, $84.70 will buy you and your family a night in one of the park’s tent cabins in Yosemite Valley. If that sounds like a bargain, wait until you hear about the deal San Francisco gets.

To enjoy free rein in Hetch Hetchy, the neighboring glacial valley that features Yosemite-like waterfalls and granite peaks, the city of San Francisco pays the federal government even less – $82.19 a day, to be exact.

Not that anyone from San Francisco – or anywhere else, for that matter – can see the Hetch Hetchy Valley as it once was, with its wildflowers, meadows and groves of oaks and pine. For $82.19 a day, San Francisco gets to submerge the valley under 300 feet of water.

Where else but Hetch Hetchy has a fee stayed the same since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration? In Yosemite Valley, lodging rates go up every year. Compensation for the loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, meanwhile, hasn’t changed since 1938.

The frozen fee reflects politics frozen in time. Congress in 1913 decided to sacrifice Hetch Hetchy, the roughly three square miles regarded by naturalist John Muir as Yosemite Valley’s smaller twin. San Francisco wanted to flood the valley to supply water and electricity to the Bay Area, and Congress agreed.

That 1913 decision locked in two fee increases that San Francisco pays the federal government, from $15,000 a year in 1918 to $20,000 in 1928, then to $30,000 in 1938, the equivalent of $82.19 a day. The fee, like the 1913 decision to flood the valley, has been untouchable ever since.

It is the only payment the nation receives for losing this valley.

San Francisco likes to point out that it also pays the park service about $3 million annually for rangers and high country maintenance, but this expenditure is entirely self-serving. It pays for patrols to keep any trace of human activity out of the super-pristine watershed. As a result, the water flowing from Hetch Hetchy is so pure San Francisco is spared the expense of filtering it.

Time for reappraisal

It’s only natural that San Francisco would want to hang on to that kind of deal. After 66 years of giving San Francisco such a bargain, however, it seems only reasonable that the park’s landlords–that is, the American public–should question whether they are getting their money’s worth.

Even in 1913, Congress haggled over financial and environmental tradeoffs.

During the Hetch Hetchy debate that December, Sen. George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, lamented that with “hundreds and thousands of horsepower going to waste in this valley,” it seemed to him “almost a sin” not to allow the dam to be built for San Francisco’s benefit.

Sen. Porter McCumber, a Republican from North Dakota, held a different view. He warned that Congress was about to turn over to San Francisco a valley “that which has great value, without the slightest idea among any of us of what the real value is.”

Nearly 91 years later, the late Sen. McCumber still has a point. But today there are differences: Other water options exist for San Francisco and economists have viable methods of assessing costs and benefits of public treasures.

When economists set out to value beautiful places, they consider two numbers. One could be called the “chamber of commerce” value for calculating any direct economic benefit. In Hetch Hetchy’s case, the number would correspond to potential tourism. Then there is what might be called the “John Muir” value: the estimate of how much the interested public would value reopening a beautiful place in Yosemite.

Today, the park serves nearly 4 million visitors a year. Roughly one in seven of them come from other countries; the interest in this park, and a restored valley, would span the globe.

Valuing Western gems

Economists have calculated similar values for other important Western landscapes. A generation ago, Mono Lake, to the east of Yosemite, was dying a slow death as Los Angeles steadily drained it. Courts stepped in and forced its restoration. A restored Mono Lake was valued by an economic study at $1.5 billion in 1987 dollars. Today, Mono Lake is a recovering oasis for millions of migratory and nesting birds.

The Elwha River in Washington state was once teeming with salmon, but that was no longer the case by the mid-1990s. In 1996 economists estimated the public value of restoring the Elwha’s fishery at $3 billion to $6 billion. Today, two dams are set to be torn down in 2008 to bring back the salmon.

So what would a restored Hetch Hetchy be worth? The valley and the public deserve such a modern-day study to answer the question.

At the very least, shedding light on Hetch Hetchy’s true value as the reunited twin of Yosemite Valley would help the public secure a suitable fee for a lost treasure. Maybe, at the end of a closer look, San Francisco, the valley’s occupant, would move on.