JACKSON HOLE, WYO – When town leaders first struck a deal with the Jackson Hole Airport to allow use of parking spaces at its parking garage for the Ride2Fly shuttle program, no one was really using the garage.
Just a few years ago, town was happy to give up spots on the 3rdand 4thlevels of the municipal parking building on Milward and Simpson in order to facilitate mass transit to the airport and relieve parking congestion there.
Times have changed. The structure has gone from underutilized to somewhat oversubscribed on some days and town leaders balked recently at signing a new 3-year lease with the airport—even when airport director Jim Elwood offered to pay the town $52,457 a year for what was previously gratis.
“I don’t find this to be the best use of the parking garage,” Mayor Pete Muldoon said at Monday’s town council meeting, adding that the town was, in effect, subsidizing airport parking.
Muldoon, who moonlights at the airport as a baggage handler, said he did some quick math to determine the town was getting shafted. According to Muldoon, rental car companies pay about $4 a day for a space at the airport while Elwood’s proposal amounted to about $1 a day for each of the town’s 71 parking spaces.
Councilman Jim Stanford felt the deal was fair but the airport should be starting to think about a future that did not include offsite parking crutches like the town garage.
Elwood assured the council his board has already been studying how people will get to and from the airport in the future, saying, “ground transportation in general is in a dramatic transition time.”
Elwood pointed to Uber, Lyft, and other options that may foretell a time when “this lease or any physical parking may not be required.”
Ever the peacekeeper, councilman Don Frank suggested, “This is a collaborative partnership. It is not adversarial.” He added that as long as a lease agreement was written with an escape clause that allowed the town to quit the deal at any time with 30-days notice, he would consider it a win-win.
Ultimately, town leaders sent Elwood back to the airport without a deal as they preferred to reexamine a contract they have already approved.
Ride2Fly is operated via subcontractor by the airport after local carrier Alltrans backed out and START said it could not operate the shuttle feasibly within the program’s cost parameters.
