EVERY COMMUNITY HAS A POWER OF PLACE
Steve Duerr’s Thin Green Line:Part Two
By Todd Wilkinson, 10-06-06
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Friday October 6, New West proudly commences its first conference on real estate and development meant to help broaden the discussion about how we live and profit from the landscape around us. Among the very distinguished speakers is attorney, conservative Republican, and former Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce Director Steve Duerr, who is known nationally as one of the greenest promotors of commere in the country. Duerr’s approach also speaks to the spirit of our conference. Below is part two of an expanded version of a profile that New West' Todd Wilkinson wrote for Jackson Hole Magazine. Click here to read part one.
During the late 1970s, Jackson Holeans were given a sobering reminder of how fragile their tourist economy could be when they awoke to discover that an energy company wanted to drill for natural gas in the Cache Creek drainage along the foothills of the Gros Ventre mountains within miles of east Jackson. It held out the promise of good paying jobs and more taxes paid to local government and more business for local shop owners.
The plan called for construction of drilling rigs, widening a beloved bucolic road to accommodate industrial trucks and potential construction of pipeline that would bring noise and air pollution, and visual disturbance in an area that had been a favorite backyard recreation area.
More troubling, however, was the concern from some geologists that the gas pockets being targeted had the potential for containing lethal "sour gas" which, if it escaped into the surface air, could kill or sicken people who breathed it.
Once again, it was a classic case of jobs versus environment. In this case, the latter won out.
Citizens mobilized and their opposition was expressed in two forms: a business petition drive against drilling led by the Chamber of Commerce membership and a groundswell that resulted in creation of the chamber’s current sometime nemesis, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. "The fear over sour gas was real," says former Chamber of Commerce director Suzanne Young. "It was a lifestyle protection issue, but it was also a concern for the tourist economy. Business owners recognized that if gas development proceeded and worst case scenario, a sour gas accident occurred resulting in casualties, tourism would be devastated by the negative publicity."
Steve Duerr says the controversy registered deep in his marrow though it would take more than a decade before he had the courage with act on it through the Power of Place campaign.
Jackson Hole, says Carol Waller, has evolved and it is struggling with its growth issues but she praises residents for having a higher level awareness than many communities.
Back in the late 1980s, Waller was Suzanne Young’s sidekick at the Jackson Hole Chamber serving as its marketing director. Waller parlayed her pivotal role in helping to orchestrate the chamber’s monumentally successful promotions campaign, which reached nearly every major newspaper and magazine in the country, into a string of professional opportunities. Today, she is executive director of the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber of Commerce.
Waller doesn’t try to hide the fact that she believes in landscape protection, an ethic that started for her, too, in Jackson. She says that local citizens, including the majority of chamber members in Sun Valley, have embraced regulation. The Blaine County master plan calls for no commercial development except in the city core; no buildings on prominent hillsides; and height restrictions in the towns. "Those have been among the smartest decisions elected officials have ever made," Waller says.
Sun Valley, a glitzy ski resort town, and neighboring Ketchum, best known as the ville where Ernest Hemingway retired and took his own life, have resisted the invasion of big box stores. Between them Sun Valley and Ketchum are visitor hubs; Haley is a working person’s town where many service-class employees live and there is tiny Bellview down the road. All four towns exists along a corridor that is barely 15 miles long. Sun Valley has a lot of natural assets but it doesn’t have the Tetons.
"When the Jackson Hole Chamber came out with Power of Place, I noticed it and thought it was a really good idea," Waller says. "It was impactful and provided a vehicle for the community to rally around itself."
Most Chambers of Commerces are bottom-up driven organizations. While leadership is important, so are members who speak up. A chamber of commerce should be as dynamic as the people living in the community.
The real test of whether Jackson Hole's POWER OF PLACE slogan has teeth or gets dismissed by critics as just another jingo will be determined in what, if any, action items the Jackson Hole Chamber adopts to make Power of Place tangible, Waller says. "It’s a fine line. What we [the Sun Valley chamber] always have to work against are the perceptions of people who think we only represent corporate greed," she says. "The chamber is an organization of neighbors and friends who have kids in the same schools and happen to own businesses."
During the early 1990s, the Sonoran Institute staged a workshop in Jackson to gauge the social pulse of the valey and try to pinpoint the economic catalysts in the here. "The emphasis of those discussions had been on Jackson’s position as a national park gateway community and in providing visitors with opportunities to view wildlife," says SI’s founder Luther Propst, who lead the discussions.
A dozen years later, Sonoran returned and met with community leaders again. Mom and pop shop owners were reeling. "Things have changed dramatically and the issues are much more like you’d find in a wealthy suburb or a large city. The new discussions are not about what time the wild West shootouts are taking place. Businesspeople are talking about workforce shortages and an influx of immigrant workers from Mexico. Jackson has grown up and it is no longer the cute little tourism community it once was," he notes. Hispanic owned and operated businesses also are chamber members.
Propst says Jackson Hole’s economy, in the form it assumed going back to the 1950s, was fated to decline no matter what the chamber did or did not do, he says. "Frankly what has happened is beyond the chamber’s control. A shift away from the old tourism economy was inevitable because of changing national demographics and lifestyle priorities and pressure being exerted by the retiree community upon it. In fact, it’s hard to think of a single community that has remained popular as a traditional tourism stop. Every tourist community I know is transitioning. In place of selling cheap souvenirs, Jackson Hole is selling its landscape for multi-million-dollar dream homes and vacation retreats. It’s been lucrative for some, yes, but it’s full of tradeoffs, some of which may not be very pleasant for mom and pop tourism purveyors."
Propst admits that his analysis might be difficult for some to swallow. "This isn't going to provide much solace for people but the rest of the world is dealing with the same kinds of change and isn't solving its land use problems very well either," he says. "The key to Jackson Hole’s future is related to its ratio of public to private land and protecting the quality of the commons. That's not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. As long as the public land is taken care of, this valley will remain a desirable place to be."
However, he notes that real estate values are also shaped mightily by the character of the urban blueprint and its impact on public lands.
Jonathan Schechter, who regularly examines the relationships between property values and lifestyle, recites the old saw that economic growth hides a lot of sins. When Jackson Hole’s economy was roaring in the 1990s, propelled largely by soaring real estate sales, it cloaked, somewhat, the recession settling in upon tourist-related retail downtown. It also left shop owners praying for a turnaround based upon the belief that if only the chamber did a better
job of promotion more visitors would come.
"A lot of accumulated dreams and frustrations and fears and expectations come together in the chamber membership," Schechter says. "If there is a level of anxiety, then the chamber is an obvious place to look for it. Many chamber members are probably asking: ‘What am I paying my dues for?’ but, of course, a membership in the chamber of commerce is no guarantee for prosperity."
Duerr knows keenly who the core of his Chamber membership was--the small shop owners that anchor the traditional tourism economy--and he’s not about to neglect their needs, or the services they expect for paying their
membership dues.
For his part, Duerr tried to leverage the revenues generated through Chamber membership dues--totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars annually--to give them more punch in the organization’s national tourism PR campaigns. However, ingenuity landed Duerr in hot water, or in this instance, boiling java.
In 2003, Duerr found himself at the center of the ‘local business versus national chain store’ debate when he proposed a three to five year deal, in conjunction with Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, to sell Starbucks Coffee at venues around the valley in exchange for Starbucks paying a $100,000 sponsorship fee (which would have been split between the ski resort and chamber coffers).
Owners of local coffee bars, who happened to be chamber members, were incensed when details of the proposed pact were made public. Duerr says he was only attempting to increase the chamber revenue stream as a way of delivering more services to members. Critics saw the gesture as a betrayal of local mom and pop coffee bars and succeeded in having it killed. The controversy left a stain on Duerr’s otherwise fierce reputation as a creative wheeler dealer, and gave some ammunition to question the merit of Power of Place. They weren’t alone.
Conservationists, too, voiced skepticism about Power of Place’s ability to chart a fresh direction for the business community that yielded tangible dividends for landscape protection. Engineer Pete Jorgensen, a state legislator and trustee on the University of Wyoming’s board of regents, says the chamber continuously needs to demonstrate in action, not words, that it is committed to making tough decisions which may not make sense over the short term for free enterprise but protect, long term, the essence of Jackson Hole.
The chamber’s position on environmental issues in the past has been spotty and inconsistent. Jorgensen says that if the chamber had guts, it would oppose attempts to lengthen the main runway at the Jackson Hole Airport which resides inside Grand Teton Park. He believes it should endorse strict zoning and planning, take a bold stand against industrial-strength oil and gas drilling on national forest lands surrounding the valley (which it has done),
scrutinize the retail development plans at Teton Village, and more forcefully advocate for working class families on housing and wage issues because they represent the backbone of the service industry.
"I’ve always been suspicious that the Chamber can’t live up to what it says it is behind," Jorgensen says. "Steve Duerr is an interesting, complex guy. He is smart and intelligent. And he can be really supportive of principled statements but in the position he was in, you’re up against the money. This place any more is about money. One of the best things I’ve read in a long time is the book, Downward Slide, by Hal Clifford, which talks about the
greed of ski resort towns. The only thing that saves us from destroying ourselves in Jackson Hole is the abundance of federal land."
"When I get worked up, I have to remind myself that it’s always easy to tell other people how to run their lives," says legendary Jackson Hole river guide Frank Ewing. "At the same time everybody says they know what it is that makes Jackson Hole special but no one wants to limit their own opportunity to make a buck. They always rationalize their actions by saying that if they don’t take advantage of opportunity, someone else will. With that kind of
mentality, everyone will lose the very things they love about this place."
Fifty years ago this May, Ewing moved to Jackson Hole from his native Kentucky. In 1957, he started his famous namesake dude rafting business that offers guide floats down the Snake River. Ewing the businessman paddles in that delicate current between using the river to make a profit and fighting to ensure the Snake isn’t loved to death. A former active board member with the chamber, he acknowledges that age has steeled his conviction as a
conservationist.
During his lifetime, Ewing remembers when it was rare to see a pronghorn antelope in Grand Teton Park. He has watched the pronghorn herd grow since the 1960s but today, as those animals have their historic migration route pinched in and potentially severed by oil and gas drilling, he rues that he may also see the same herd wither and vanish "Even though we have vast areas of public land, you wonder how much more pressure the wildlife can take," Ewing says.
Ewing is an admirer of Duerr and he, like former chamber director Suzanne Young, is also a member of both the Chamber and the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance which routinely finds itself coming under withering attacks from some of Duerr’s members.
"The Alliance has taken its fair share of criticism for allegedly being resistant to the economic welfare of the community, but I sort of feel like we’ve reached a new point now where the Alliance has regained or won anew the respect of a lot of people," Ewing says. "It is a champion of the lifestyle values that the business community markets to the outside world. While certainly the Alliance’s primary motivation as an organization has never been to prop up property values, the victories that it has achieved with promoting more thoughtful planning and keeping industrial activity in check has had that effect. If you’re a person who owns property in this valley and sees it as an investment, you ought to be thankful for the alliance, not critical of it."
"If you want to cast a favorable eye on what’s happened here, we as a community have been as progressive and self restrained as any other in the decisions being made about development," says Alliance executive director Franz Camenzind, who was invited by Duerr in the focus groups that lead to the chamber adopting Power of Place. Camenzind has also been ridiculed as being anti-business by chamber members. "Between the tracts being protected in conservation easements through the Land Trust and the passage of local zoning laws, we’ve been ahead of the curve. Could we do more?" Camenzind says. "The future of the valley and the survival of the few things we haven’t degraded depends upon it."
When the Yellowstone Business Partnership was founded, it was touted as a green alternative to local chambers of commerce. Today, it has hundreds of members. Half are from Montana and a quarter each are found in Wyoming and Idaho. Worth noting, its director Jan Brown suggests, is that the Jackson Hole Chamber was among the first to sign on. The Cody Chamber, led by Gene Bryan who formerly oversaw tourism promotion for state of Wyoming, joined, too. Twenty different Jackson Hole businesses, many of them somehow related to tourism, are members.
"There is a suspicion in some of the rural communities that we are too green and places where people accuse us of not being green enough," its executive director Jan Brown says. "One of the first things I learned is that we are not going to change the way we think and talk about issues overnight. This is a long term process." She says that many other chambers closely watched Duerr and were inspired by him.
The kind of battles raging in outdoor recreation meccas like Jackson Hole indeed became canon fodder for Hal Clifford in the critically-acclaimed "Downward Slide," a damning indictment of the downhill ski industry. According to Clifford, Jackson Hole is fighting for its soul in a Faustian deal it struck with the real estate and downhill ski industries to put itself on the map of the rich and famous.
It’s not that Jackson Hole isn’t still visually inspiring, he says, but throughout the Rockies there’s always been the sense that a cheaper, better place to call home exists on the other side of the mountain if one’s own community goes to hell.
During the 1970s, Clifford notes, Coloradans held up Wyoming and Montana as venues where a person could flee after one cashed out in Aspen or Vail. Today, disenchanted Wyomingites and Montanans are pulling up stakes and fleeing to Alaska, which represents the end of the line.
"If you’ve owned property in Jackson Hole and your asset has appreciated in value many times over, you’re sitting pretty and it’s hard not to think about taking the money and leaving," Clifford says. But when one’s community identity is guided by the worth of real estate investment and not by one’s desire to plant longterm roots in a place, it starts to feel like a suburb. The cut and run mentality undermines social stability and multi-generational connection, he says.
With respect offered to Duerr, Clifford admires the rhetorical stand he’s taken but he’s dubious that any head of a chamber of commerce in a resort community like Jackson Hole can convince his membership to think about a time span longer than their own lives. It cuts against the grain of human nature, against the history of what has happened in every other community, and against the raison d’etre of the chamber itself. Duerr thinks Clifford is bit too jaded but he believes that any Chamber of Commerce director should be involved in local planning and zoning issues not as antagonist who represents the view of developers but as an ombudsman who recognizes that ong-term financial rewards will reach a wider suite of members if the natural assets of a town are safeguarded.
"When I interviewed people for my book, folks in Jackson Hole had epic questions before them that I think are still unresolved," Clifford says. "The first question is whether they had come here to settle or simply camp, play, and hang out for awhile? The second question, much more meaningful, is whether they’re willing to take a stand, in front of their community, and fight for the values that make Jackson Hole a good place to raise kids and grandkids.
In my research, I did not see enough people interesting in answering the question of what place do they want Jackson Hole to become in 20 years."
If there's a punchline, it's that Duerr, besides being an idealist, is also a pragmatist whose own life is tempered with reality. He recently resigned his post from the Chamber. Why? Because with four kids in college his Chamber salary wasn't enough to pay the bills for their tuition. He returned to a job that intersects with the law, financial planning and real estate. He hasn't, however, stopped agitating for local businesses to think greener and he's one of the most vocal supporters of the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative.
He says that Chamber of Commerce directors who openly use their platform to attack conservation efforts in a knee-jerk way are not only narrow minded but their doing their members a disservice. Pleasant communities, attractive ones, are places built upon peace and dialogue, not war and name calling.
Can the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce itself answer the question posed by Olaus Murie? "How can we encompass it in words?" he asked in 1943. "I have heard reisdents try to pin it down in outbursts of enthusiasm, but they couldn't find the words...No, we can not describe the spirit of Jackson Hole—the "Spirt of Place'—but many of us FEEL it."
All of us feel similarly inadequate to put into written form what it is that brought us to a place and keeps us there.
In 2025, Steve Duerr sees world leaders assembled at Jackson Lake Lodge solving the world’s problems, with the summit of the Grand Teton silhouetted on the tarn’s smooth pristine surface. He sees his valley at the center of the human universe with people from around the world wanting to come here, like they do to Geneva, based upon what it symbolizes. Already, Jackson Hole, through the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs, has been used as a venue to promote clean coal technology in the U.S. and the world’s most populous nation, China, that is considered a vital linchpin in any attempt to address climate change before it is too late.
It's value is because it will be a contrast set against the wreckage of other places on earth that did not bother to plan ahead.
To some, Duerr’s POWER of PLACE platform is a pipe dream. For others it’s the only hope a citizen has for a bright future in the place that continually calls them home.
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