When can a community afford to say no?
Teton County Subdivision Moratorium Leaves Question: Where to Go?
By Lucia Stewart, 6-12-08
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A moratorium on all new 20-acres or more development applications in Teton County, Wyoming until Dec. 31, 2008 has left a litigious air in the majestic Jackson Hole Valley.
Teton Meadows Ranch filed a lawsuit last week to reverse the moratorium, which was approved by commissioners one day prior to the development’s scheduled hearing.
The moratorium has essentially killed their 500-unit, 288-acre development in South Park, 4miles south of Jackson, which contained the condition to rezone the rural 50-home zoning allotment — a density 10 times more than is currently allowed. In exchange, they proposed 250 units for affordable housing, those with the annual income of $47,700-$149,000.
But the moratorium also bans the use of up-zoning tools to increase density until the 1994 Jackson/Teton County Comprehensive Plan is updated (completion is projected Fall 2008).
Many residents began “emergency” conversation with the commission in March when two additional projects, both in the South Park area, submitted plans for rezoning to allow 614-units, a total of over 1,000 new residences projected in the area.
Jackson faces a tough challenge of how and where to grow. Overflow from Teton County, Wyoming over Teton Pass into Teton County, Idaho has become rampant.
The joke is often, “the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires” who are moving over the hill to Victor and Driggs, Idaho, driving up land values, leaving these small towns with huge overhead in new infrastructure, while the commuters are not assisting in driving the local economy except in gas and tire sales.
This created the small staff of the Teton County planning board to also become knowledgeable on development moratoriums. In March 2007, after 6 new subdivisions with 4,224 lots were submitted, county commissioners decided to place a 182-day “emergency” moratorium on ALL new development. It made for long public meetings, threats and police protection to commissioners, and a contentious air that has still not settled.
The Sonoran Institute recently put out a report, “Growth Impacts in the Teton Region of Wyoming and Idaho,” which discusses commuter economics, bedroom communities and a working wage in an overpriced market. Dennis Glick, Director of the Northern Rockies Sonoran Institute, expands on this report in an interesting Western Perspectives article on Headwater’s News today, click here.
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They must want to raise housing prices beyond the astronomical and encourage long commutes across the pass.
Comment By nazoosh, 6-13-08Methinks astonomical housing prices and pass commutes have been the non-encouraged norm for a decade there. With all the money that flows from development and realestate in JH, I don't expect that county commissioners have much choice when faced with a littany of lawyers pressing their developments. Money is to be had/made...and stopping that bulldozer will take some uncommon political will.
Comment By Monty, 6-14-08Wallace Stegner wrote the following to describe this run-away growth machine: "we in our lives are witinessing: more mouths to feed, a greater and greater demand for energy to run our industries and our homes, more digging for minerals and coal, more cutting of timber, more drilling for oil on and off-shore, more automobiles to carry us around and foul the air, more paving over of land for freeways, roads, driveways, parking areas and tennis courts, more orchards and fields gone into subdivisions or industrial plants or shopping centers, more ski resorts in the mountains, more smokestacks and dirty air, more Love Canals and toxic waste sites and more dirty politics to cover them up, less green, less space, less freedom, less health, more intensive working of the soils still left in agriculture, a longer and longer stretching of a runbber band not indefinitely stretchable, a temporary more comfortable, ultimately less plentiful, increasingly less spiritually rewarding life."
Comment By goof houlihan, 6-14-08"more mouths to feed"
So what are you advocating as a solution to "more mouths to feed" monty? You, and Wallace, suddenly sound like an elitist Ebeneezer. What would you like to do with the "surplus population"?