The Valley Signal

Growth & Land Use

Teton Counties Hold First Joint Workshop on Paying for Growth

At the two Teton counties' first joint workshop, the growth-cost fixes with the most momentum were ones neither county could enact alone.

By Valley Signal Staff ·

DRIGGS — When commissioners from the two Teton counties sat down for their first full-day joint workshop on July 23, they spent seven hours sorting ideas for how Teton County, Idaho, might pay for the growth arriving on its side of the mountains. By the time the day's facilitators had ranked those ideas by effort and impact, the fixes that rose to the top were the ones neither county could build alone.

The Idaho and Wyoming boards convened after the U.S. Forest Service issued a draft record of decision on Grand Targhee's proposed expansion in May. The resort sits in Wyoming. The traffic, the housing demand, and the emergency calls its growth generates land in Teton County, Idaho, which reaches both the resort and the Wyoming hamlet of Alta only over Idaho roads. The county filed a formal objection to the proposed expansion this month over those local costs, then sat down with its Wyoming counterpart to take up the harder question the objection could not answer: how money can legally cross the state line to cover them.

The Grand Targhee expansion was the catalyst for the Teton counties workshop, but the conversation reached well beyond it. The resort sent no representative, and commissioners were quick to say the growth they were grappling with runs wider than one ski hill. Much of the strain on the Idaho side comes from the broader flow of visitors bound for Jackson Hole, Grand Teton and Yellowstone, a stream the county absorbs while collecting little from it.

To structure the discussion, facilitators from the University of Wyoming and the University of Idaho ran the day's accumulated ideas through an effort-and-impact grid, setting the low-effort, high-impact "quick wins" apart from the heavier long-term projects. With few exceptions, the ideas in the quick-wins corner depended on someone beyond Teton County, Idaho.

The front-runners included improving safety on Teton Pass, a highway Wyoming's transportation department controls; shifting the Grand Targhee Resort District, a Wyoming taxing entity, from two cents of sales tax to three, with the new third cent routed to Idaho for transit; and chasing federal transit dollars the county has left unclaimed. A fourth needed next to no effort: asking the two states' four U.S. senators to go to bat in Washington for avalanche sheds and safety money, with no new organization or statute required. Each of those levers runs through a Wyoming agency, a Wyoming taxing district, the federal government, or the congressional delegation.

Where a county reached for a tool it could use alone, the room tended to steer back toward a joint one. The idea of a round-the-clock deputy posted in Alta, which Idaho had favored as a way to stop responding across the line, gave way to a sheriff's agreement modeled on the counties' shared fire contract, the route the Wyoming board preferred. A state-line toll on Ski Hill Road, floated as a way to charge visitors while exempting locals, was recast as a bargaining chip to hold in reserve in negotiations with the Wyoming taxing district, then parked as a research item. A local-option sales tax, commissioners said, is a non-option as long as the current Idaho House Speaker holds his post. A lodging fee on short-term rentals has failed repeatedly in the Legislature.

The revenue tools aimed at visitors pointed at one side of the range. The added cent of sales tax would come from the Grand Targhee Resort District, and the toll from Ski Hill Road; the workshop floated no matching cent from the Teton Village resort district on the Jackson side, and no toll on Teton Pass, where much of the region's traffic crosses.

Lake Tahoe and Bear Lake, participants noted, built their interstate compacts and regional authorities around a single shared resource. The Tetons have no such organizing feature, no single lake or basin the two sides jointly protect. That is part of why the day produced a menu of fixes and no framework for pursuing them.

Nothing was decided at the Teton counties workshop. The boards cast two formal votes, each to adjourn its own meeting, along with an early motion to adopt the agenda; the facilitators reminded the room more than once that the workshop was not a decision-making body. The grid sorted the ideas. The boards adopted none of them.

The tools a county could use on its own didn't get far. Idaho's toll was parked for study, and its Alta deputy folded into a sheriff's agreement still to be written. What the room kept returning to were the fixes the two counties could build together.

What to watch: Commissioners floated standing up working groups to carry the sorted ideas forward, with a rough one-to-two-month timeline to report back. They also raised convening directly with the cities and the resort over the proposed expansion.

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