The National Park Service is exploring how to give a quarter-mile parcel of land inside Yosemite National Park to Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada-based developer, according to agency documents and sources cited by Notus. The company's CEO, Jeff Pori, wants to build a short road connecting the firm's adjacent 83-acre plot to a central Yosemite route — a project the parcel's previous owner lobbied for unsuccessfully for decades. Kingsbarn bought the 83-acre undeveloped plot immediately outside the park in 2024. The current access road sits more than 10 miles from the nearest park entrance, making the land commercially inconvenient. A road through the park would transform the parcel's value overnight — converting remote acreage into resort-adjacent real estate at public expense. Administration officials have proposed a land exchange: the Park Service surrenders the Yosemite parcel in return for equally valuable land elsewhere in California. Interior Department political leaders support the deal, according to Notus sources, and the proposal has created internal tension within the Park Service. Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady denied political pressure, calling reports of a secret handover "false." The structural problem is not the land swap itself — federal land exchanges are a legitimate tool. The problem is the direction of the ask. A private developer buys land with a known access problem, then the federal government works backward from the developer's commercial needs to engineer a solution inside a national park. The land exchange framing disguises what is functionally a public subsidy: converting a quarter-mile of Yosemite into private road infrastructure. Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O'Neill framed the move as part of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's broader agenda to privatize national parks, accusing the administration of "secretly negotiating to hand a piece of Yosemite national park over to a well-connected developer." Both California senators and Representative Jared Huffman have expressed opposition. Huffman warned that Yosemite would be a domino: "every treasured park would be up for grabs." The Interior Department says no final decision has been reached and that any land exchange would be subject to federal laws, environmental review, and public notification. That procedural assurance means less when the political leadership has already signaled support for the outcome. The question is whether the process is being used to reach a conclusion or to ratify one. The precedent matters more than the parcel. If a developer can buy cheap land adjacent to a national park, then leverage political connections to extract park land for private road access, the template is replicable at every park in the system. The quarter-mile is small. The playbook is not.
