San Francisco, CA…Restore Hetch Hetchy put out a call to action in a special fundraising appeal to ‘outbid San Francisco’ for the rights to the Hetch Hetchy Valley last month and nearly 200 people responded bidding $63,684 – more than twice what San Francisco pays annually in rent to the National Park Service. The funds will support Restore Hetch Hetchy’s ongoing mission to return the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to its natural splendor while continuing to meet the water and power needs of all communities that depend on the Tuolumne River.

“We created this auction to shed light on what we consider to be one of the greatest blemishes on a national park: the damming and flooding of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley,” said Restore Hetch Hetchy Executive Director Spreck Rosekrans. “And although one does not normally assign a price to a place such as Hetch Hetchy Valley (described by conservationist John Muir as ‘a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples’), the Raker Act did just that: $30,000 a year (about $20 an acre) is all San Francisco has to pay in rent to use this beautiful valley as a storage tank. We thank our supporters for participating in this auction and for helping us further our mission of restoration.”

The 1913 Raker Act authorized the damming and flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Despite the urgent pleas of John Muir and other wilderness-lovers, as well as the unprecedented opposition of more than 200 newspapers across the United States, in 1913 San Francisco clear-cut and flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley for use as a reservoir. Backlash over the decision prompted Congress to create the National Park Service and helped spark the birth of modern environmentalism.

For the privilege of using Yosemite as a water tank, San Francisco pays only $30,000 per year – the cost of a modest one bedroom apartment in the city. The city’s costs for operations, security and watershed protection run into the millions of dollars, but San Francisco’s obligation to the united States remains only the modest $30,000 fee that was required by the Raker Act 100 years ago.

ABOUT RESTORE HETCH HETCHY: The mission of Restore Hetch Hetchy is to return the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to its natural splendor while continuing to meet the water and power needs of all communities that depend on the Tuolumne River.