A message from House of Representative candidate Shannon Brennan:
JACKSON, Wyo. – Can we live with more traffic? Can we live with inadequate housing? Can we pay more property taxes? Can we move over on the trails to accommodate more hikers? Absolutely.
Just put your head down, adjust your transit schedule to earlier in the day, do some Swedish Death Cleaning (yes, it’s a thing) and move into a smaller home if you can find one, put your tax bill on auto pay – come what may with your bank balance, and skip the trail and say hi to the treadmill.
This is neither the community nor the lifestyle many of us want. These degraded conditions arose in Teton County and the surrounding region over the past five years as a result of unexpected and accelerated growth, driven in large part by the pandemic and the ensuing adjustments to where folks are now able to work and live.
During that time, many newcomers discovered Jackson and simply decided they wanted to live here. The at-will decisions to move from place to place that have characterized American mobility in the past do not work for mountain resort towns in the 21st century, especially those like Jackson that are severely land-locked. There is a clear negative correlation between numbers of people in Jackson and essentially our quality of life.
There have been few controls in place to meaningfully and transparently manage this aggressive growth, and the region continues to receive new residents and visitors without bounds. Our community Master Plan does address growth, but not of this size and speed. Our commissioners, councilors and legislators, have few tools to halt or slow this growth.
The trends will not level off on their own. To the contrary, the pressure to grow will only increase as the people in places like Sheridan, Casper and Cheyenne have seen. We are headed toward a very different Jackson and Teton County, one that will be pleasing to very few, losing the very things that brought us all here in the first place.
We know that our realtors, local businesses, hoteliers, restauranteurs, and the like benefit from growth. We also know that well-paced change can rejuvenate Jackson and make it more vibrant as we have seen with the performing arts center and the County Library.
So where do we go from here? We need to:
- Acknowledge the problem formally and publicly
- Identify solutions for the near-term
- Update our Jackson-Teton County Comprehensive Plan and agree on our vision of the future
- Find or create a master community model that will work
We need town hall meetings, written citizen input, and an aggressive schedule by which stakeholder input will be received, processed, and assimilated into proposals that can be put before the electorate.
Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room, but we have no choice. This cannot be done fast enough.
Visit Shannon Brennan website for more information: https://sabrennanforwyhouse.com
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