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ness, which both of us have been in, and we wanted to get up and 

 do business on a larger scale, let us say, in Mr. Cooley's district 

 where we are going to want to get into business at Crater Lake, 

 if we wanted to compete with the existing excellent concessioner, 

 but if we wanted to compete with them, all other things being 

 equal, the language of one of the proposals before us says that you 

 are going to have to have a 5 to 20 percent better deal offered by 

 the contender than that which is offered by the person presently 

 in occupation of that facility — that present concessioner. 



That is almost as bad, and maybe it is worse, in effect — we don't 

 know what the economic effect is, but it looks pretty bad to us — 

 that is almost as bad as the current situation in which if Mrs. 

 Chenoweth and I as relatively small businesspeople went in 

 against a big guy and we thought we could get up and do business 

 in a place where somebody much bigger than we were operating, 

 we would have to spend a whole lot of money trying to find out 

 what their numbers were. We would hire lawyers and accountants 

 and get all of this proposal together, and then we would put it on 

 the table. 



And as it currently operates, we have got to change this. All they 

 have to do is say, "Fine. I will match it. I will match it. Go away." 

 After we have spent all that money on all of those accountants and 

 lawyers getting all that stuff together, are we going to compete? 

 No, we won't. And what is the proof of the pudding? People haven't. 

 There isn't competition now as Mrs. Meyers pointed out in her tes- 

 timony. The proof of the pudding is nobody is going to do that. 



Now, let us talk about the possessory interest. It is entirely true 

 that in one of the proposals before us there the language says that 

 the possessory interest is eliminated. Mrs. Meyers' proposal is that 

 you eliminate it by amortizing it over 30 years. My own sense of 

 that, having looked at the numbers, is that 30 years is a good num- 

 ber, 40 years is a good number, 50 years is a good number, but let 

 us get rid of it because as it is, nobody understands it except the 

 lobbyists. They understand it very well. We don't. It is very, very 

 hard to determine the value of a possessory interest — extremely 

 tough. 



And there is a proposal before us in one of the other pieces of 

 legislation that says although we wipe out the possessory interest, 

 here is what has to happen. If, once again, somebody is at the end 

 of their term, they are getting close to the end, they — like the pre- 

 vious concessioner in Yosemite — have a three-quarter of a percent 

 return to the government, we know perfectly well that at the end 

 of that term any sensible person is going to try to raise that rate 

 of return to the government, let us say, to 4 percent. 



Under this arrangement, buying out that person by a new com- 

 petitor would require that it not be the new rate of return but the 

 old rate of return, which everybody knows is going to change, that 

 is embedded in the price that you are going to have to pay to get 

 them out of there. It embeds the history of an old obsolete and ex- 

 cessive return to the concessioner, and it does not recognize that 

 the time has come to change it upward. 



Now, let us look at pricing. I know I have got two more minutes 

 to go here. As to pricing, Mrs. Meyers' bill says that the Park Serv- 

 ice and others will continue to watch pricing to be sure it is really 



