DRIGGS — The two Teton counties' first joint workshop ended July 23 with four small bi-state working groups. Commissioners from Teton County, Idaho and Teton County, Wyoming coalesced around them, each group asked to price out a single shared problem and report the costs back to the two boards. The commissioners aimed to form them within 30 to 60 days. The counties had spent the day looking for ways to move money across the state line, where Grand Targhee's growth costs fall on an Idaho county with fewer ways to tax for them (overview).
The workshop, held in the Driggs commissioners' room, took no substantive vote. The only formal actions recorded all day were the Idaho board's adoption of the agenda that morning and, seven hours later, each board's separate adjournment.
The working groups came out of a closing exercise in which the facilitators, Melanie Armstrong of the University of Wyoming's Ruckelshaus Institute and Katherine Himes of the University of Idaho's McClure Center, sorted the day's ideas by how much effort each would take against how much it would deliver. The low-effort column included a regional transit advisory board modeled on the cross-state fire and EMS deal the two counties already run, a common data dashboard to show where the valley stands now, a standing six-month check-in between the two commissions, and the four working groups themselves.