It's been just over 10 years since Congress passed Rep. Nancy Pelosi's Presidio Trust legislation, effectively creating the first privatized national park in the United States (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96). The results are pretty clear: Just cruise through the Presidio and check out the gigantic new office complex George Lucas has built. In fact, the private business interests that were given control of the park in 1995 now oversee more than 80 percent of the 1,408-acre parcel. The goal of the privatizers: raise enough money from development, leases, and other real estate deals to pay the entire cost of running the park by 2013. That's what Pelosi's legislation requires.

It's a terrible disaster for San Francisco. And at the time we warned it would set a terrible precedent for the nation: Once you turn the national parks over to private interests and require the parks to pay for themselves, you'll get the equivalent of Nike Corp. putting logos on the Grand Canyon and casinos demanding concessions at Yosemite.

Guess what? Just as we had feared and warned, the Republicans have discovered Pelosi's lovely precedent, and are looking at ways to privatize 350 million acres of public land. A rider by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) that would have allowed big corporations to take over public parcels for almost nothing nearly snuck into a 2005 budget bill. And earlier this year, Rep. Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican, introduced a bill that would in many ways mirror Pelosi's model for the entire national park system, by cutting back on park funding and requiring the parks to find corporate sponsors to make up the difference.

This is a gigantic leap from the philosophy behind the formation of the national park system a century ago. National parks aren't supposed to be revenue generators. They're supposed to be publicly supported and publicly controlled places where the public can enjoy the natural world.

For years, the right wing of the Republican party has been trying to undo that social contract: When Ronald Reagan was president, his interior secretary, James Watt, proposed letting Disney take over the Grand Canyon – but the idea was so roundly dismissed as lunacy that it never went very far.

In fact, nobody really took it seriously until a San Francisco Democrat, a woman who is now the highest-ranking Democratic politician in Washington, decided to give it liberal credibility.

. . .

The Presidio Trust Act emerged from the fray that erupted after the Pentagon decided it no longer needed the San Francisco headquarters of the Sixth Army. Under legislation authored by the late Rep. Phil Burton, the Presidio was supposed to become part of the national park system the moment the military marched away.

But as soon as this stunning parcel – perhaps the single most valuable chunk of urban real estate in the world – popped up on the horizon, private interests in San Francisco began to eye it greedily. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. cut a backroom deal to have the Army spend $5.5 million upgrading the electrical grid on the base – and then pay PG&E $4 million to take it over. That was the first sign of trouble: For half a century the Army had run a public power system at the Presidio, and now it was going private, at public expense (see "The Presidio Power Grab," 1/12/94). Soon, a special planning council headed by the chair of Transamerica Corp., and involving the Gap's Don Fisher, PG&E executives, the University of California, the Energy Foundation, and other big interests, was poised to set the Presidio's future – and Pelosi was carrying the water.

Pelosi argued that the only way to save the base as a park was to let private businesses raise money through development and real estate deals to cover the operating costs. If that didn't happen, she argued, the conversion to civilian use would never take place – or, she even warned, Congress could try to sell it to the highest bidder.

Yes, there was a Republican-controlled Congress. But the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, wasn't likely to sell the Presidio – and the public would never have tolerated it. That was an empty threat used to promote her privatization initiative.

But the scare tactics – and arm twisting – worked: By the time the bill got to Congress, virtually every major environmental group, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, backed it. So did almost every elected official in San Francisco. Willie Brown, John Burton, Carole Migden, Kevin Shelley, and the Board of Supervisors all signed on. All the big neighborhood groups, including San Francisco Tomorrow, supported it. The San Francisco Examiner and the Chronicle blacked the story out.

Only a small band of neighborhood types, led by Joel Ventresca and Neil Eisenberg, along with some animal rights activists and veterans, tried to fight the plan, but they got no support or political traction.

Now, of course, almost everyone who initially backed the plan has seen what a disaster it's become. The Sierra Club has completely reversed its position, decrying the overdevelopment of the park and the precedent it sets. But the damage is done: The Republicans have been able to take a Democrat-sponsored plan and turn it into a model for destroying one of the nation's most precious (and irreplaceable) resources.

Pelosi and her House colleagues will no doubt bitterly oppose the Pombo and Souder bills, and they'll decry the attack on public lands and lay it at the feet of the Bush administration. We're the first to agree that Bush wants to privatize almost every aspect of American life. But in this case, if Pelosi and her allies want to be consistent, they need to move – now – to repeal the Presidio Trust bill and ferociously oppose any idea that requires national parks to pay their own way through corporate sponsorship.

But if somehow the Republicans manage to turn the national park system into a subsidiary of Disney, Halliburton, or Microsoft the way the Presidio has become a private office park for George Lucas, the blame for laying the groundwork will lie with the Democratic representative from San Francisco.

PS: In the 1970s, when the right wing was on the run and looking for ways to become a force again in American politics, much of the intellectual work was done by a series of foundation-funded think tanks. When Pelosi was preparing to the privatize the Presidio, the local foundations and nonprofits that were supposed to be in the progressive camp went right along with her. The Energy Foundation and the Tides Foundation, for example, were key to the bill's support – and they both wound up with cozy leases at the Presidio (see "Pulling Strings," 10/8/97).

And, of course, the entire Democratic Party operation in San Francisco signed on.

That's how the insidious, creeping privatization of America happens.