The Park Service Has Spent More Than a Year Working to Hand a Quarter-Mile Strip of Yosemite to a Las Vegas Developer — and California’s Two Senators Answer That the Park “Is Not for Sale”
NOTUS reported on August 28, 2026 that since the spring of 2025 the National Park Service has been working, at the direction of Trump political appointees at the Interior Department, to cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite National Park to a company controlled through a web of limited-liability companies by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Las Vegas-based real-estate and investment firm run by Jeff Pori. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Hill matched the reporting the same day. In 2024 Kingsbarn bought 83 acres of undeveloped land immediately outside Yosemite's western boundary, roughly five miles from one of the park's groves of ancient sequoias. The parcel has no direct road connection to Highway 120, the park's main thoroughfare. The exchange under discussion would give Kingsbarn a strip of park land to build that connection; in return the company would buy land of equal value elsewhere in California and turn it over to the Park Service. Interior floated paying for the exchange out of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, money Congress set aside for conservation on public lands. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, objected and kept the deal off the subcommittee's endorsed project list. Career Park Service staff told NOTUS the directive was unprecedented and that Interior leadership pushed them to move faster. Ceding park land to a private party runs against roughly 150 years of practice in which national park boundaries have expanded, not contracted. Don Neubacher, a former Yosemite superintendent, said the transfer is "basically illegal" and warned that the specific area is habitat for Pacific fishers and great gray owls. Cicely Muldoon, another former superintendent with 40 years in the Park Service, said the agency's "basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations." The Interior Department denied the reporting, calling it a story built on "anonymous allegations to manufacture a political narrative." Lanny Davis, a Democratic lawyer who identified himself as counsel to Kingsbarn, confirmed after publication that the company was pursuing the exchange and said he — not Trump — had brought the proposal to Interior, framing it as "a pro-environmental decision." California's two Democratic senators and the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee all came out against the deal within hours. Padilla's office said it was working with Senate Appropriations staff to block it.
“Yosemite is not for sale.”