There's an element of Disney buying Lucasfilm that hasn't made the news yet: The giant SoCal outfit is now inheriting Lucas's nifty annual tax break, cheating San Francisco out of property taxes worth about $60 million. See, part of what Disney gets is that shiny Lucas building in the Presidio -- a private office complex built in a national park. Read more »

The Sierra Club and the Presidio Historical Association have filed suit in federal court charging that the Presidio Trust violated environmental laws when it approved a new luxury hotel for the Main Post area.

The suit reflects the essential problem of the semi-private trust: When you force a national park to make enough money to pay its own way, and you stock the governing board with people who think like real-estate developers, then you create the near inevitability of serious problems.Read more »

So the Presidio Trust, the only private agency ever to control a national park, is going to make some cuts to meet its goal of complete economic self-sufficiency. But in tall the talk about this, it's easy to forget that the creation of the trust changed the mandate of the park -- and for the first time in the nation's history, established that a national park is all about making money:Read more »