Grand Targhee Expansion Objection

Teton County is preparing a formal objection to the U.S. Forest Service's approval of the Grand Targhee Resort expansion. The resort sits on the Wyoming side of the state line, while the workers who staff it live in Idaho and strain its housing and services. Roughly 65% of the tax revenue the resort generates accrues to Wyoming, the county's draft objection states, and Idaho sales tax is pooled in Boise and returned to counties by formula, so a busier Targhee does little to change what Teton County collects. The Forest Service, the county contends, counted the project's benefits and dismissed the local costs as "outside the scope" of its decision.

The Forest Service itself acknowledges, the draft notes, that the county receives no property or sales tax from the resort yet must house its employees and absorb its impacts, then leaves mitigating those harms to local government. The county's objection, a working draft dated June 19, frames that as a violation of federal environmental law, arguing that the agency "arbitrarily and capriciously" relied on the project's recreation benefits under a national executive order while disregarding the socioeconomic costs. Short of asking that the project be denied, the county wants enforceable conditions written into a binding memorandum of understanding, with a phased build-out tied to measurable local benchmarks for road capacity, emergency response, and workforce housing.

The draft spells out the strain it expects. The Grand Targhee expansion is projected to create 614 new full-time-equivalent jobs at an average wage of $40,500, dropping workers into a market where 37% of Teton County renters are already cost-burdened, on top of 450 housing units and 150,000 square feet of commercial space planned at the resort base. The objection faults the Forest Service for making "no attempt to quantify" those cumulative housing burdens, and for setting aside added demands on the sheriff's office, ambulance and fire response, and search and rescue as "beyond the scope of analysis."

Commissioner Ron James put numbers to that case at the June 22 commission meeting. By a county chart he cited, the expansion would add between $900,000 and $2.4 million a year in expenses for sheriff's patrols, fire and emergency medical response, dispatch, road maintenance, the landfill, and emergency management, against about $275,000 a year in new revenue. "We're going to end up eating $2 million," James said.

County administrator Billie Siddoway and the commissioners also weighed the strain on emergency services. The resort would be built to accommodate roughly 8,000 skiers at a time, Siddoway noted, compared with a county that can shelter about 1,200 people in an emergency. James pointed to the last week of the ski season, when several ambulances were pulled up to Targhee, thinning in-valley coverage. That strain runs both ways, unlike the other lines on the county's ledger: Teton County, Wyoming, pays about $580,000 a year for fire and ambulance service on its side of the state line, so the fire district is compensated for responding across it.

Beyond money, the objection turns to habitat and water. It cites the Forest Service's own finding that expansion into the South Bowl and Mono Trees areas "has the potential to result in an overall decline in the population of the Teton Range Herd" of bighorn sheep, objects to cutting endangered whitebark pine, and challenges a proposed amendment to the 1997 Forest Plan that would exempt the project from established wildlife-protection standards. On water, the draft warns that the project sits on porous Karst terrain uphill from Teton Canyon, the source of the City of Driggs's municipal water, and faults the agency for deferring its groundwater analysis and for withholding a groundwater-impacts report from the public during the comment period.

The county's objection is its own; the City of Driggs is weighing a separate one. The Forest Service approved a modified version of the Grand Targhee expansion in a draft Record of Decision this spring. County clerk Kim Keeley flagged the deadline. The objection is due July 13, days after the board's next regular meeting on July 8, and she suggested the commissioners finish and sign it at a short special meeting before then. The July 13 cutoff covers the project and its five species-specific Forest Plan amendments; the objection to the broader programmatic amendment, a reclassification of 694 acres of national forest for resort use, is due July 28. Siddoway said she had a cover letter formatted for U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo and would prepare versions for the state delegation and the governor.

Even as the county drafts the objection, it is working with Wyoming on a shared response. Teton County, Idaho and Teton County, Wyoming are co-funding an interstate workshop, catalyzed by the same federal decision, to work out who pays for the growth's cross-border costs; the Idaho board voted 3-0 in May to put $5,000 toward its $30,394 budget. Facilitators from the University of Wyoming and the University of Idaho are organizing the session, which the counties aim to convene in late July. At the June 23 meeting, the commissioners asked county department heads to attach dollar figures to the expansion's impacts to carry into it. Wyoming officials have signaled a willingness to look for fixes on their side of the line, from revenue sharing to having the resort pay a larger share.

James said the county would not "give 'em a rubber stamp" on the Forest Service's approval. "I'm not gonna do that," he said, pointing to the letters the county is sending to its state and federal representatives. "This is interstate commerce, and this is something that we can't negotiate on our own, but we have to have it because we need to keep this county viable."

Teton County, Idaho Drafts an Objection to the Grand Targhee Expansion Over Local Costs

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