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Developer uses several tactics to discourage cars

Jackson Hole News & Guide, November 20, 2024

Transportation plan for Legacy Lodge gets county approval

Developers aim to disincentive tenants from parking multiple cars on site

By Charley Sutherland, GOVERNMENT REPORTER

A heavily litigated and controversial plan to transform the nowdefunct Legacy Lodge assisted living facility into housing in Rafter J took another step forward Tuesday, when county commissioners passed the developer’s plan to mitigate traffic.

Traffic has been a long-standing concern for Rafter J subdivision residents, who showed up in force to commissioners’ chambers Tuesday.

“With the increase in commuters coming from Alpine, [traffic has] become untenable,” said Sharon Mader, a longtime resident of Rafter J. “I am very, very concerned about it.”

Legacy Lodge owners Sadek and Dorian Darwiche aim to reduce traffic impacts in their transportation plan by disincentivizing future tenants from having multiple cars that they frequently drive in and out of the subdivision. The Darwiches, who also own Hotel Jackson, proposed 97 total parking spots.

Future tenants could purchase their first parking spot at a low rate and then could purchase another parking pass if they have a second car. However, that second pass would be more expensive than the first.

Some spots are set aside for guests.

“People don’t live in a vacuum,” Stefan Fodor, an attorney representing Stage Stop LLC, the Darwiches’ company, said. Most will have visitors who will need a place to park, he said.

Mader said she worries that tenants will just park all over the streets throughout the subdivision. She also said the intersection to enter the subdivision, at Highway 89 and Big Trails Drive, is dangerous. Making a left turn into Rafter J involves using the highway’s “suicide lane,” the twoway center turn lane, which Mader said can be quite frightening.

When Fodor responded to Mader’s on-street parking concerns, he spoke assertively.

“If anyone goes to park on Big Trails Drive, there’s one number to remember: 733-8697,” he said. “That’s Ron’s Towing.”

Commissioner Greg Epstein promptly disclosed his family’s involvement with Ron’s Towing, which fellow commissioners and county staff chuckled at during the meeting.

Initially, Stage Stop LLC will have to improve pathways to encourage bike travel, enforce parking rules and provide space for bike parking. Stage Stop will monitor traffic, and developers will be required to take additional measures to reduce traffic if it does increase significantly.

The threshold is an increase of 46 trips during the morning peak period or 53 trips in the evening peak period. Stage Stop would then trigger “phase II” mitigation measures.

There is currently no START bus service to Rafter J, meaning the owners would need to provide a shuttle to the Y intersection. But if START service is established, the Darwiches would be required to supply bus passes to residents.

Alternatively, Stage Stop could choose to establish a car- or bikeshare program.

Stage Stop’s first traffic monitoring review is set for January 2026. At that point, if traffic is above standards, the company can choose between transit incentives and a car- or bike- share program. If the development is not compliant in its second review a year later, Stage Stop would have to implement both.

While many Rafter J residents addressed the board, there were outliers who supported the transportation plan, citing housing needs. Judith Hernandez, a 30 year resident and mother, encouraged the commissioners to pass the Legacy Lodge plan. “I’ve been searching around for new housing, but it’s been very hard,” Hernandez said. As a potential tenant, she said she’d try to reduce her own car trips to and from Legacy Lodge. From personal experience, Hernandez said, she understands the traffic in the area can be dangerous but said folks like her need housing and those interests should be considered.

Cory Herrick commended Stage Stop LLC for listening to concerns raised by neighbors, winning lawsuits and being adaptable.

“You guys all ran on the pro-housing stances,” he told commissioners. “Please approve housing for the Legacy Lodge today.”

Mainly drawing from personal experience, several commissioners agreed with Rafter J residents that the intersection to enter Rafter J is especially dangerous, .

Over the summer, there was a big crash at the intersection, and it could’ve been even worse. A late maneuver by one driver avoided a T-bone collision, Charlotte Frei, the county’s regional transportation planning administrator, said.

The Wyoming Department of Transportation will be analyzing the intersection as part of “warrant study” to see whether a stoplight is called for, according to Teton County Engineer Amy Ramage.

Rafter J Homeowners Association Vice President Jessica Brown said Legacy Lodge’s additional housing would worsen an already congested and dangerous intersection.

“High-speed stop sign controlled intersections are one of the least safe type of intersections that we encounter as drivers,” Brown said.

How traffic is monitored and how traffic reports are presented was also a point of significant discussion. The HOA requested raw data from reports and a third party contractor to review it.

Brown also requested that commissioners include a stipulation that if some number of accidents or a single fatality occurs at the intersection, the board would re-review Legacy Lodge’s transportation plan.

Monitoring numbers would be publicly available, Fodor said. However, accidents or fatalities at the intersection could not be directly attributed to Legacy Lodge, and Fodor encouraged commissioners to proceed without any such stipulation.

Commuters and big trucks speed down Highway 89, going as fast as 80 miles per hour, according to Margaret Creel, a Rafter J homeowner. She also wasn’t convinced that the Darwiches’ cycling incentives would realistically reduce traffic, especially during the winter.

“Who rides bikes in Jackson Hole from November to April?” she said.

Board Chairman Luther Propst later said Creel made a good point.

“We’re not going to see a significant change in transportation by bicycle sharing,” he said, adding that he’d prefer transit incentives be included right away, instead of having them triggered by increased traffic.

After a lunch break, commissioners reconvened to issue a verdict. The board tweaked the transportation plan slightly, saying that even if Legacy Lodge housing doesn’t increase traffic enough to prompt further mitigation efforts, the board still intends to continue evaluating impacts. Just because Legacy Lodge doesn’t trigger additional traffic mitigation measures, that doesn’t mean traffic is “perfectly acceptable,” Commissioner Mark Newcomb said. The county should “strive to do better,” whether triggers are hit or not, he said.

Fodor said Stage Stop is happy to continue evaluating traffic.

Unanimously, with Commissioner Natalia Macker absent, the board approved Legacy Lodge’s transportation plan and the amendment aimed at continuing the conversation.

Contact Charley Sutherland at 307-732-7066 or county@jhnewsandguide.com.

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‘Jackson Hole is open’ to visitors as plan to address highway landslide takes shape, officials say

As three communities wrestle with destroyed mountain highway, leaders say residents primarily impacted; access is open to Yellowstone, Grand Teton parks.

By Angus M Thuermer Jr., Wyofile June 10, 2024

Teton County leaders declared Monday that Jackson Hole and Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks are open and accessible to visitors despite the destruction of a key regional highway.

A landslide Friday night severed the mountain-pass artery between Jackson Hole and Victor, Idaho, a vital commuter and commerce route that is one of five paved roads into the valley. As news of the landslide hit the nationwide press, worried prospective tourists peppered hospitality hosts, asking whether they could still come and reach the region’s recreational attractions.

“Jackson Hole is open,” Teton County Commission Chairman Luther Propst said during a hastily prepared briefing from a group of 10 emergency managers Monday morning. He led a discussion that included calls for aid to commuting workers across a spectrum of needs from housing to transportation, child care, carpooling and more.

Gov. Mark Gordon declared an emergency Saturday, enabling the state to seek Federal Highway Administration funds to repair the highway. The destruction of a segment of the road “endangers the health, safety, economy, and resources of residents of Wyoming” the declaration reads.

A detour around the destroyed section of highway could be fixed in “weeks, not months,” Darin Westby, director of the Wyoming Department of Transportation, told the Teton County Board of County Commissioners over a broadcast link. That will be well into the region’s busy summer tourism season, which has already begun.

Fearful that news of the landslide would crimp the local and state economy, tourism officials and others urged a unified message saying the parks and valley are open and accessible.

Visitors from California, New York and Texas with vacation reservations have asked “will things still be accessible?” said Rick Howe, president and CEO of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce.

Other than the one route, the message to visitors is “we are not closed,” Howe told the county board. Considering that there are four other highways into the valley, visitors have options to get to Jackson Hole, he said, to enjoy the Snake River along with Grand Teton and Yellowstone parks.

“The impact is a lot more on our community,” Howe told the board.
Temporary housing

Loss of the highway means commuters from the Idaho side of the Teton Range, where housing is cheaper than Jackson Hole, will have to drive an extra 62 miles. That adds 1 hour and 6 minutes to what is usually a 24-mile and 32-minute drive. Congestion will increase that time as thousands of commuters re-route their daily travel through Swan Valley, Alpine and the Snake River Canyon.

Fully 20% of the workers at St. John’s Health are affected commuters, hospital spokesperson Karen Connelly told commissioners Monday, and 115 of those “need to be on-site.” Many work 12-hour shifts and have pets, children and homes to worry about.

Adding what could be up to four hours of commuting time to such shifts creates obvious burdens, she said.

“These are long days for people,” she said. “There are needs.”
Additional response

Commissioners will meet Tuesday to take action on a host of recommendations made by emergency and community leaders, including reducing occupancy limits in some housing blocks, giving temporary occupancy permits to others, allowing RV and tent camping, waiving bus fees and other proposals.

“There’s a limit to how many people we’re allowed to put in our units,” said Mary Kate Buckley, president of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. The ski-area company has constructed employee and workforce housing that’s regulated to some degree by development agreements with Teton County.

She asked for a temporary waiver of those occupancy limits and flexibility in other restrictions to accommodate commuters during the emergency. The resort also wants permission to house worker trailers, campers and tents at potential sites at a Teton Village parking lot and the Stilson transit hub a few miles south of the resort and village.

The Jackson Hole Community Foundation has reactivated its emergency fund that was last used during the COVID-19 emergency, said Laurie Andrews, president of the nonprofit hub. The foundation, best known for its annual Old Bill’s Fun Run for Charities that raises millions of dollars each fall for nonprofits, is setting up a network to pair unoccupied guest houses and vacant rooms with commuting workers, she said.

The town and county START public bus service has reworked its Idaho-Jackson schedule to accommodate the longer drive, director Bruce Abel told commissioners. Ridership on the first day of the new schedule was “somewhat disappointing,” he said, but that could change.

Congestion in the Snake River Canyon and Jackson during the emergency could extend the new, longer commute times, he said, because the highway network is “at capacity.”

The Federal Transit Administration, an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, reached out to START to offer aid, he said. START will carefully log expenses with the aim of securing reimbursements during the emergency, he said.

That reimbursement was “top of conversation” with the federal agency, Abel said. The federal outreach came as U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg expressed his agency’s support for Wyoming’s emergency repairs in a post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Rich Ochs, the county’s emergency management coordinator, outlined the difference between emergencies and disasters and told the board that the governor’s emergency declaration was the proper and sufficient reaction. Being a Wyoming highway, the incident is the state’s to manage, he said, and the appropriate venue for aid is through the Federal Highway Administration, another arm of the USDOT.

It’s not appropriate to pursue Federal Emergency Management Agency support, Ochs said. “We have one injury,” he said, a motorcycle rider who was unseated by a slump in the highway some time before it collapsed. “We have no deaths … no direct impact” to town and county finances.

While WYDOT works on a solution — a paved two-lane bypass to the missing highway segment that will require motorists to slow down from normal speeds — Ochs and his eclectic 10-person team of department heads and community organization leaders will continue their efforts.

While costs may accrue to state and federal coffers, “the impacts,” he said, “are our problem.”

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Pothole Boondoggle

RGC Boardmember letter to the editor of the JH News and Guide Jan. 10

On Dec. 6, WYDOT chose to repair potholes on the Highway 22 bridge during daylight hours.

Thank you WYDOT, those repairs were much needed. But I assume we will need pothole repair again in the near future due to heavy winter traffic. What are the better material options and repair processes for longer lasting fills, perhaps so this work is necessary only once a season? Considering the economic opportunity costs for these delays to the entire community, it might be prudent for WYDOT to budget for more appropriate solutions.

I read a notice posted in Buckrail on Dec. 5 advising the repairs would be conducted from noon to 2 p.m. and drivers should expect delays of 10 to 20 minutes.

Accordingly, on Dec. 6 I left Teton Village to return to town, anticipating a delay. OK, great, I have been advised. At Teton Pines, traffic came to a standstill and it took 45 minutes to reach the junction of highways 22 and 390.

As has happened repeatedly since the bridge work started in the spring, poor traffic light timing seems to be a significant contributing factor to this congestion.

Apparently, eastbound traffic coming from Wilson was halted in order to allow westbound traffic to proceed through the one open lane. However, eastbound traffic was backed up bumper to bumper to the west of the intersection, so when the light turned green for the southbound WY 390 traffic, no one could make a left turn onto 22. Hence, the delays were not acceptable. Several drivers reported travel times from Teton Village to Jackson of more than two hours.

Obviously, we have a problem here. How can we solve it?

We recommend that WYDOT not only invest in a coordinated system of smart traffic signaling, but also engage the services of our very competent Wyoming Highway Patrol and Teton County Sheriff for manual traffic management when demands are not able to be met with smart signaling alone. Also, considering the impact that these planned maintenance events have on traffic flow, nighttime operations must be considered and properly budgeted for any Teton County highway project.

There is no such thing as over-communicating when traffic is involved. Talk to the radio stations. Place public service announcements on the road and make sure law enforcement and/or other hired traffic controllers are involved every step of the way.

If WYDOT invests in better materials and coordinates and communicates better with our local officials when it comes to roadwork, then maybe we can get through this construction project without so much angst.

Lance Cygielman

Responsible Growth Coalition