Interior weighs a Yosemite strip for a Nevada developer's private road

The Trump administration has spent more than a year studying how to transfer a small strip of Yosemite National Park to a company controlled by Kingsbarn Realty Capital so the firm can build a private road to land it owns just outside the western boundary. NOTUS reported the work on Friday from agency documents and people familiar with the talks. The New York Times and the Washington Post confirmed the outline with federal officials and filings sent to Congress.

Kingsbarn bought two 40-acre parcels in early 2024 for $4 million through an LLC named Sanctuary at Yosemite. The previous owner spent decades asking for a road into the park and lost in the Park Service and then in federal court, twice. Jeff Pori, Kingsbarn's chief executive, wants a short connector from those lots onto a central park route. Lanny Davis, the Washington lobbyist and former Clinton adviser now speaking for the firm, said the plan is an upscale mix of cabins, homes and commercial buildings. He argued a shorter road would cut pollution from the longer public approach.

The proposed swap would send the park a piece of land of equivalent value, either near Yosemite or elsewhere in California. That is the legal clothing. The political clothing is thinner. Pori made regular small donations to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, more than $4,000 in total according to the Times. The Park Service rejected the same access request for more than 20 years. NRDC said Interior has now leaned on park staff to reopen it.

Don Neubacher, a former Yosemite superintendent who sits on the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, told the Times the idea made him sick. Bobby McEnaney at NRDC called it a validation of warnings that the administration would treat public land as inventory. Yosemite is not a generic unit. It is the park that taught the country the national-park idea. Carving a road parcel out of the western edge for a private gate is the kind of change that does not stay local. Other inholders will read the file.

Nothing has been signed. The Times stressed that the deal is not final. That is the fact that keeps this from being a completed transfer and the fact that makes Friday's reporting useful. Once a plat is drawn and a value assigned, the swap becomes a paperwork exercise. Until then it is a test of whether the Park Service can still say no to a project the courts already buried.

Davis's pollution argument is the one to watch in any environmental assessment. A private connector reduces vehicle-miles for the people who will live in the cabins. It also creates a second entrance that the park did not design, staff or price. Equivalent-value land elsewhere in California does not replace a boundary strip that controls access. Land swaps work when both sides gain habitat. They fail when one side gains a road and the other gains acreage that was never in dispute.

Congress has already seen documents. That means the fight will not stay inside Interior. House and Senate members from California will have to decide whether a quarter-mile of park is a rounding error or a precedent. The previous owner's court losses are the cleanest record in the file. A new administration can reopen a rejected permit. It cannot pretend the rejection never happened.

Yosemite's western boundary is not wilderness in the popular poster sense. It is the working edge where private lots, park roads and concession traffic already rub. That is why Kingsbarn bought there and why a short road looks cheap on a map. The cheap road is the point. If the strip moves, the cabins get a park address. If it stays, the $4 million lots remain what they were when the last owner lost in court: land next to a park, not inside one.