Donald Trump nominated executive Scott Socha – whose company was previously sued acquisition of trademark rights in the name “Yosemite National Park” – to lead the National Park Service.
The nomination of an outsider who has a business relationship with the agency he will oversee comes at an important moment for the service, which was lost by a quarter of its staff under Doge’s civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to delete mention of historical events from NPS sites that portray Americans in a bad light, such as slavery.
US national parks have historically been managed by people with experience in conservation and land management, with nominees over the past three decades mostly emerging from within the agency’s ranks.
Socha, by contrast, spent the last 27 years working for Buffalo-based Delaware North, a food and hotel management company that provides hospitality services to seven national parks and runs arrivals operations in five national park gateway communities, according to the company’s website.
Socha has been in charge of the development of businesses in and near national parks since 2017. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.
“The executive of the private park concessionaire [Scott] Socha has no experience in public service or conservation,” Save our Parks spokesman Jayson O’Neill wrote in a statement. “Instead, he has made a career out of extracting maximum profits from our national parks, not protecting them, making it clear that he will do the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.”
Delaware North is well known in conservationist circles for a trademark case involving Yosemite national park. After the company lost a $2bn bid to renew its contract to operate hotels and restaurants in Yosemite to competitor Aramark in 2016, Delaware North sued, arguing that the company held intellectual property rights to various names used in the park worth more than $50m – including the terms “Yosemite National Park”, “Ahwahnee Hotel” and “Curry Village”.
Those signs were named for a while, until the lawsuit was filed settled in 2019.
“Senators should approach this nomination with the utmost skepticism given Scott Socha’s history and the current state of our national parks,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, wrote in a statement.
“Our public lands belong to all Americans, not concessionaires trying to trademark and cash in on the names of our nation’s crown jewels.”