JACKSON, Wyo. — Town and County elected officials approved the ground lease option agreement for the 90 Virginian Lane Development on Dec. 2; the County unanimously approved the motion while the town voted 3-2, with Council members Jonathan Schechter and Jessica Sell Chambers voting against.
The 90 Virginian Lane development will build 200 deed-restricted workforce and affordable housing units in the “mid-town” neighborhood of Jackson, adjacent to the Teton County Library.
Affordable Housing Department Director April Norton has been working with the developer, Pennrose LLC,. to draft a ground lease option agreement after presenting the terms to the elected officials on Oct. 7.
Norton and Pennrose opted to move forward with a two-step ground lease process, which includes a ground lease option agreement that outlines the criteria Pennrose needs to meet prior to execution of the ground lease. According to the agreement, Pennrose has until June 30, 2026, along with one 12-month extension, to meet the criteria for the ground lease option. Norton noted that the ground lease option agreement will allow the Housing Authority to lease the property to the Virginian RV park during the summer of 2025 ahead of ground breaking and Pennrose can move forward with the assurance that so long as they are doing what they have agreed to do in the Option Agreement, the Housing Authority will lease the ground to them. According to Norton, the option agreement allows for flexibility while maintaining a sense of urgency in the development process.
Nikki Kaufman, Shelter JH Board Chair, Kelsey Wotzka, Shelter JH Board Secretary, Claire Stumpf, Shelter JH Advocacy Director and Whitney Oppenhuizen, Shelter JH Board Treasurer, spoke in support of the project, proposed density and advocated for continuing the project without delays.
Kaufman quoted a statement made by Schechter, in a memo to colleagues suggesting slowing the process down, “We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by ensuring we conduct the most thorough and thoughtful deliberative process we can,” Kaufman said.
“I’m going to read that again, ‘we have nothing to lose,’” Kaufman said. “I’m here today to ask who’s the ‘we’ in this statement? To me, it feels not only condescending to those of us who have already been forced to leave Jackson because of unaffordability, but it also highlights the entitlement of those further delaying this process.”
Wotzka followed up Kaufman’s statement, also sharing her personal experience with housing insecurity, and shared support for the units that are 500 square feet, which some have questioned: who will they serve?
“The apartment I currently live in with my partner is about 600 square feet and that’s more than enough for us,” Wotzka said. “He manages a small local business. I work for a restaurant, and we both work for Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. We live right across the street from the Virginian. As it happens, we can see the RV lot from our parking lot, and we both fall into the category of what a commenter in a previous meeting disparagingly called ‘liftees and restaurant workers.’ To answer a question posed by Councilman Schecter, we would be the very people served by the 500 square foot units. And I know it is sometimes hard to visualize that. So, me. We would be served by these units.”
Stumpf spoke to the needs of the 600 Shelter JH members she represents.
“We understand this development might not look like the dream home that everybody envisions for themselves,” Stumpf said. “No one has ever claimed that this project, alone, in and of itself, will solve our housing crisis. We are saying that locals need places to live, the Virginian will provide 200 of them and will also provide the people our community needs.”
“This is a very easy decision to make right now,” County Commissioner Natalia Macker said prior to voting. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on anything we do. There will continue to be uncertainty that we have to address. But what is certain is that 200 families and individuals that don’t have housing, will have housing when this project is built, and so it makes it easy to do. We can keep hammering out the other issues, but I think we’re only making it harder on ourselves to keep asking and answering the same questions over, and over, and over again. So I look forward to voting on this and moving on to the next stage and banging this out and getting these homes built.”
Councilmember Schechter said he could not support the item due to the process, not that he does not support housing. Sell Chambers also asked for the item to be continued. Commissioner Mark Epstein was absent from the meeting.
With the approval of the ground lease option by both boards, Norton will bring a draft development agreement back to the elected officials in February 2025, rather than in December as previously discussed.
“We have worked really hard, and we continue to work really hard, but I think it’s really important at this stage that we have all of the findings from our traffic impact study and all of the findings from our market study to inform those [development agreement] discussions, and we don’t have them yet,” Norton said. “So we are proposing that we push those [discussions] to February and March next year, giving everyone a little bit of time to digest that information.”
New members of the Town Council and Board of County Commissioners will get to weigh in on the process following the recent election. Outgoing Town Council members Jim Rooks and Jessica Sell Chambers will finish their terms at the end of December. Jackson residents elected Devon Viehman and Kevin Regan to fill their two seats. Current councilor Arne Jorgensen was elected Mayor and the new council will have to decide how to fill the vacancy left by Jorgensen who still has time on his term as a councilor.
Natalia Macker won her seat back on the Board of County Commissioners for her fourth term, and Len Carlman won the seat that will be vacated by Greg Epstein. Carlman attended the meeting, Monday, seated in the gallery.
Groundbreaking for the project is set for 2026.
