JACKSON, Wyo. — Four candidates, including three incumbents, are running for three open seats on the Teton Conservation District (TCD) Board of Supervisors.
David Adams was first voted onto the board in 2002, and he has only lost one election since then, in 2010. Adams first started working in Jackson in the early 1970s, and spent time on a cattle ranch and doing construction. After discovering a love for science and geology, he earned a master’s degree at Montana State University and later a doctorate in Oregon. He told Buckrail that he has spent 35 years collaborating on geologic research with universities and others. He also currently serves on the Teton County Water Quality Advisory Board.
“I think I started interacting with the conservation district back in the late ’80s,” Adams said. He described a project he worked on with David Love, a renowned geologist and environmentalist who penned more than 250 geological publications, including two geological maps of Wyoming. “Dave Love and I … were trying to put together a study of the drinking water aquifer. We were trying to determine how deep it was and stuff like that. And we started raising some money for that, then I went to the conservation district and they matched those funds, and we went to the [U.S. Geological Survey], and they matched that, so we got a geophysical study done then.”
Adams said that water quality is one of his conservation priorities, and a main part of the conservation district’s work. He said that TCD spends time doing stream testing and surface water quality testing. TCD Executive Director Carlin Girard said at an election forum last week that drinking water issues, like the recent E. coli scare, are typically handled by public works and public health departments, but TCD does collaborate when necessary.
Conservation districts originated in the days of the Dust Bowl, Adams said, when agriculture systems and natural resources were struggling. There are now around 3,000 conservation districts across the country. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that TCD finally started receiving its mill levy.
Every four years, the public votes on whether TCD can continue to be funded by a conservation district tax, up to one mill. TCD has not recently exercised its right to the full one mill, instead seeking 0.67 mills in 2025 and 0.49 mills in 2026. Adams believes that the vote every four years is a good way to justify the existence of TCD, but he said the continuity of the agency is important.
“If you’ve got a long-term data set on water quality or any other kind of scientific process, if you have a big gap in it, because you can’t collect samples or whatever, it really ruins the validity of the whole data set,” Adams said.
Adams is facing off against incumbents Bob Lucas and Cate Watsabaugh, and newcomer Lee Bauknight.
