JACKSON HOLE, WYO – “We’ve looked high and low,” Bob McLaurin readily admits.
McLaurin is the town manager who has become all-too-familiar with the ‘search’ that has become the norm for the past three years now every spring. Where to put a temporary summer workforce camp?
Yes, it’s come to this for at least the past two or three summers. As a super-heated economy continues to have its flames fanned by a lodging tax that keeps packin’ ‘em in, this summer with its solar eclipse event just might be, indeed, astronomical.
Now, throw in an unprecedented 20.6-to-1 ratio in column inches of help wanted to rentals advertised in the News&Guide now…in the offseason. Ouch.
Town officials kicked around a few of the same old ideas recently—a BLM parcel down Hoback way, Snow King Center, rodeo grounds—and none looked as though would pan out. All McLaurin could offer electeds was a 44-space slice of the Rec Center parking lot that Parks & Rec director Steve Ashworth admitted would take a bit of getting up to speed learning to be campground host for the pavement that usually serves as Home Ranch lot overflow.
McLaurin and Ashworth guesstimated they could make some kind of a mini-KOA work there for about $30,000 but there would be concerns about noise, lack of water and power, and the fact that every space bogarted by worker bee-cum-camper was one not available to a sales tax-paying shopper.
The issue has been dear to councilman Jim Stanford, who made the original pitch in 2015 to consider creating some type of temporary labor camp for the summer.
“My concern has always been one of compassion for the worker. I don’t think it is responsible of us to pretend they don’t exist or that simply going to the forest is some sort of easy or responsible solution, because it’s not. It’s detracting from the experience of everybody else who goes to the National Forest for very different qualities,” Stanford said.
Councilman Don Frank offered, “I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of people who need a place to live. But our community workers commute from as far as Thayne, they commute from Tetonia. Commuting from Curtis Canyon doesn’t seem to be as much of a hardship compared to those commutes.”
Shelter JH asked town leaders to consider overnight camping on city streets and parking lots this summer to help ease the anticipated strain. That request was in the form of a letter dated March 3. The discussion took place April 3, and still it was too late to do anything according to councilwoman Hailey Morton Levinson.
“This is the third year in a row that we’ve talked about this so obviously we are still interested in doing something,” Morton Levinson said. “But there are a lot of things to work out. We should start the conversation now for next summer; and I said the same thing last year at this time yet we haven’t looked at it until now.”
Frank agreed, saying he was a little frustrated no one had followed up on his suggestion last year to put out an RFP with the county to smoke out someone who might be able to offer land for campsites.
“Maybe Hailey’s right—that we’ve waited to long. For that, I apologize,” McLaurin said at the April 3 meeting.
Once again, the topic was put off—this time to a town workshop, scheduled for April 17.
