Okay, ‘mitigation’ isn’t the easiest topic, but it’s vitally important. What’s mitigation? It’s the ‘housing’ a new building project must provide in order to gain approval. And our local requirement is pitifully low. Let’s say a developer wants to build a new hotel that will need a staff of 80. Our current 25% mitigation means the developer must provide housing […]
START has problems, we all know that. We see the empty buses endlessly circling town. No riders! That’s the problem. When you’ve got no customers you’re out of business. That’s how business works. Not so for government, they can hold onto a failed idea for decades. It’s easy when it’s not your money. Even by ‘Mountain Ski Town’ standards, START […]
In his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln emphasized a ‘Government of, by and for the people.’ Have we drifted away from that? Too often we’ve become a government by the consultant and for special interests. The ‘Bigger and Grander’ agenda has never been on the ballot, but it’s what our local electeds keep promoting. If we were truly a ‘Government of, […]
Front page news like last week’s “Muldoon studies Aspen’s parking fix” is evidence the “Last of the Old West” needs defending. Without certain nonprofit advocate groups making quality of life an issue there would be no opposition to Town’s rush to massive growth. Jackson’s Mayor wants to bring paid parking to downtown Jackson. He got his idea from Aspen—a mountain […]
Note the time and date: It was a historic moment to be sure. On October 16, just past 4pm, town councilman Don Frank uttered a truly profound statement. Something that, if only heeded decades earlier, could have helped Jackson Hole avoid its current housing crunch. “Suggesting that a ‘fee-in-lieu-of’ is actually going to park a car is not realistic,” Frank […]
“Time runs out for Bar J plan. Developer withdraws application.” That was the front-page headline in last week’s News&Guide. Lawyers for the developer are calling it a defeat by delay. It isn’t so. Excessive greed killed this development before it had an opportunity to kill countless moose, deer, elk and all the other animals that depend on the Bar J […]
There are real crises: hurricanes in Florida, wildfires in California… they’re sudden and unpredictable. Local elected officials pushing a housing agenda is very predictable. The false narrative that sees subsidized housing as a be-all, end-all solution for what ails us in Teton County rings of manipulation, not crisis. The truth is: Private, for-profit businesses should not expect to house their […]
Local government keeps ‘solving’ the housing problem, but it isn’t getting solved. It’s getting worse. It’s much worse today than when they first started ‘solving’ it over two decades ago. Maybe they’ve taken the wrong approach. It’s tough to solve an economic problem while ignoring economics. Truth is, local government’s real objective is growth – more, always more. Our tight […]
Could a remake of the classic sci-fi movie “The Blob” be playing out at Snow King? In the original version, the Blob is defeated and the people keep their town. In the remake, it looks like Snow King’s insatiable appetite for more and more commercial entitlement has it oozing and schmoozing its way to a hostile takeover of a residential […]
Is Town a community or commodity? A community to be enjoyed by its residents, or a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, which is it? A very public battle over that question is being waged, with gusto, right now. The third and final round is Monday, the 25th, at Town Hall. Two weeks ago Town Council was blindsided […]
