17 



some criticisms to offer of alternatives to the Meyers bill, and I 

 want to be as specific as I can about the kinds of improvements 

 that I think are necessary. 



At the outset, I would like to speak to the matter of conformity 

 and uniformity. We all want to get to a place at which those serv- 

 ices which are similarly performed by each of these agencies are 

 operated on similar standards. Our sense that this bill this time 

 should be limited to the Park Service arises from our view that 

 these are very different outfits doing very different things. 



For instance. Fish and Wildlife Service has a very small oper- 

 ation involving a number of boats largely. You can't even buy a 

 granola bar from the Fish and Wildlife Service's concessioners. 

 They are just in the get-there business. 



The Bureau of Land Management has innumerable very small, 

 very efficiently issued special-use permits — 10,000 to 12,000 of 

 them — which they issue on a local, easy basis, a single sheet of 

 paper, and they get the job done, and people don't get bothered. 

 They just do that. Those folks are radically different from the much 

 larger operations that we are running. 



We have nearly $700 million worth of business with people in the 

 hotel business and hugely complex operations, some of them run- 

 ning up to gross revenues of $60 — $70 — $80 million a year. The 

 Corps is in an entirely different business than we are in. There are 

 some overlaps, and I think we should strive to get the overlaps 

 dealt with similarly. 



Our recommendation would be that we get on with a bill — last 

 year's bill, which a whole lot of people understand now — Mrs. Mey- 

 ers' bill — that gets it right, gets some real competition in the Park 

 Service., gets some revenue back to the Park Service, puts some 

 term limits for concessioners, and lets us get on with that, and 

 then strive for the overlaps with the other agencies, and that we 

 will achieve conformity by working together where the overlaps 

 occur, but they are really negligible. The areas of overlap are very, 

 very small. We are in very different kinds of businesses. 



Now, if I may, I would like to proceed to state why we think the 

 Meyers approach — last year's consensus approach — is the best one 

 for each of the things that I think we all agree we want to achieve, 

 and those things are that we really don't want to put in the fix on 

 the right of renewal. We want to remove the fix. 



We know that all of us want to get rid of the possessory interest. 

 It is obsolete, and it is in restraint of trade. We want to get rid of 

 a system in which concessioners could set any price they want to 

 for the public with no redress by the public, and we certainly don't 

 want to permit there to be perpetual contracts at the whim of a 

 Secretary of the Interior. 



We also don't think that anybody in this room wants to have an- 

 other layer of bureaucracy and yet another appeals group which 

 encourages perpetual litigation. Let me try to be a little more de- 

 tailed with what I think is a better way of approaching each of 

 these objectives than some other proposals before us. I am advocat- 

 ing the Meyers approach. 



As to the automatic right of renewal, there is another approach 

 before us which suggests essentially that all other things being 

 equal — if Mrs. Chenoweth and I were together in the ski shop busi- 



