JACKSON, Wyo. — Nine Teton County Board of County Commissioners candidates are competing for votes in the upcoming Aug. 18 primary election.
Buckrail sent a five-question survey to the nine candidates. See where each candidate falls on these five topics in articles posted daily. Today, compare and contrast the way each respondent tackled the following prompt:
Of the current housing policies in place, please highlight one policy you think works well, and one that doesn’t.
Buckrail sent the survey to all nine candidates: Democrats Dr. Brent Blue, Karyn Chin and Ali Dunford; incumbents Wes Gardner, Mark Newcomb and Luther Propst; Independent Alex Muromcew; and Republicans Melchor Dylan Moore and Vicky O’Donoghue. In alphabetical order below, see unedited answers from candidates who replied in time for publication.
Blue:
The County housing for its own employees is working well. It goes haywire when the County attempts to provide housing for employees of private businesses. That is the job of the private businesses. The County can help with zoning and permits but not pay for the housing for profit making businesses.
Chin:
One policy I think works well is housing mitigation. It’s based on a simple principle: growth should help pay for the impacts it creates. We shouldn’t allow new development to shift the cost of housing onto working families and longtime residents. That principle is under direct attack in the Wyoming Legislature, and I believe one of a County Commissioner’s most important responsibilities is advocating for Teton County’s interests. We can’t afford to sit back and hope these tools survive. We need commissioners who understand the legislative process, build relationships in Cheyenne, and fight to protect the policies our community depends on.
Where we’re falling short is that we’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to build the kinds of housing our community actually needs. I live in a tiny house on wheels because one landowner fought through years of bureaucracy to make it possible. That shouldn’t require an exception. We should be making it easier to build ADUs, tiny homes, workforce housing, and other creative solutions instead of treating them like special cases. We don’t have a shortage of ideas — we have a shortage of political will.
Dunford:
What’s working: neighborhoods with market-rate and deed-restricted units intermixed. The Daisy Bush neighborhood is an excellent example of this. The market-rate and deed-restricted units are woven into the same neighborhood and the community has meaningful diversity, depth, and character as a result.
What’s not working: the sustainability of the housing we build. All publicly subsidized affordable housing should prioritize the highest green building standards, design for net-zero energy, and use regenerative design principles: passive solar, water catchment and grey water recycling, integrated food growing space, native species, etc. These design standards will help with occupant energy bills, health and comfort, resilience to heat and smoke, and the overall wellbeing of occupants.
Gardner:
Generally speaking, our housing program works really well. Mitigation generates meaningful dollars and units as development occurs. Those lucky enough to inhabit deed-restricted units are happy with the opportunity. We just need to make smarter decisions with our revenue.
While public-private partnerships have helped us develop a significant number of units, I question at what cost. The recent negotiations for development at 90 Virginian Lane are instructive. What began as an exciting RFP response ended with increased public subsidy and dramatically less affordability. As it became apparent that the private developer was not negotiating in good faith or prioritizing affordability over profitability, I led the charge to end negotiations.
I argue that we should pivot this development to a publicly funded, built, and managed project, one that will serve the community for decades not only providing homes to hundreds of residents, but also emerging as the foundational asset in our housing portfolio. Imagine a financially sustainable housing program in which profits go to fund future housing projects instead of lining the pockets of investors.
Moore:
Moore suggests that an adjustment be made to the Land Development Regulations – Section 3 Governing Workforce Housing, which currently reads that Accessory Residential Units (ARUs) are permitted to provide occupancy to “local county employees,” which he suggests to read “employees within the local county.” This change in wording would allow for a broader inclusion of the labor pool that requires short-term and seasonal housing to provide services to local business and government.
Enforcement of the Planning and Building Department’s short-term rental regulations, including Land Development Regulations (LDR) § 6.1.4.A., should prioritize absentee-owned corporate operators using platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO, while recognizing that locally owned business owners create jobs, support the local economy, and generate sales tax revenue for the County.
Newcomb:
The policy of building housing with public private partnerships (PPPs) has worked and can work well. Jackson Street Apartments and Mercill are two good examples of it working well. Private partners leverage public dollars by bringing substantial capital to the project, allowing for larger projects and faster timelines. But execution is critical. The policy can go awry — 90 Virginian being an example. That missed opportunity had several facets, but one of them was that a private, for-profit developer was on the other end of the deal, creating questions around cost of capital, financing and pushing the project toward the upper echelons of affordability in order to “make it pencil.” To improve, when working with a for-profit developer the timeline must be much shorter than the years long process of 90 Virginian. The vision at the start must be clear, the process must be fair and transparent, and the project must be executed within the promised timeline. A one or two-day intensive workshop, backed by updated data on housing needs, to lock in a vision at the very start, would be a vast improvement. Count PPPs as a policy that can work well. One policy that may not be working well is the zoning incentive known as the 2-for-1 bonus. That allows private, for-profit developers to build to four stories (“fill the box”) so long as for every 2 feet of market residential square footage they build one foot of workforce deed restricted square footage. This has increased the supply of one- and two-bedroom units, but only about 40% of the total resulting units are deed restricted and only at the least affordable, Workforce level. The benefit is that the deed restricted units are built without public subsidy. But that benefit is dramatically watered down by the relatively small percentage of deed restricted units and the job generation from the market units.
Propst:
Taxpayer approved funding measures (i.e. the SPET or Special Purpose Excise Tax) to build deed-restricted housing works well to provide essential housing for school teachers, hospital employees, and county and town employees as well as to acquire land for community housing. This approach works best when coupled with philanthropic funding, e.g. hospital housing at the Hitching Post and the partnership between Teton County and the Cumming Foundation to build the Jackson Street Apartments and rent them at below market rates.
Coupling deed-restricted workforce housing with new hotels and new market housing does not well serve the community.
The most promising housing tool, which has been severely underutilized is Housing Preservation, that is preserving, adapting and reusing existing housing or hotels for affordable housing. This approach is also called Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) and has significant unrealized potential.
