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Encouraging transportation solutions consistent with safety, environmental, and wildlife core values.

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Tribal Trail: bad timing for a big price tag

The Tribal Trail Connector – a half-mile segment connecting the existing Tribal Trail Road to Highway 22 in northern South Park – has been steadily working its way through the county’s approval process. As the date for the Board of County Commissioners to decide whether to advance the road process nears (on June 2), so do budget decisions in a fiscal crisis. So far, the projected cost to the county ranges from $2-3M, with a total project cost ranging from $8-17M. Given the controversial process thus far, and the commissioner’s own time, bandwidth, and funding constraints, we asked commissioners to put Tribal Trail on the back burner and not to fund it this year. Not to mention that the future of Tribal Trail is also closely tied to future development plans for northern South Park, which (if now is the time to consider its development) needs full funding for holistic planning.

May 20, 2020

Teton County Board of County Commissioners

RE: Please put the Tribal Trail project on hold

Dear Madam Chair Macker and Commissioners,

Thank you for the extensive time and detailed considerations each of you has made into determining next year’s budget given the COVID-19 funding crisis. We last wrote to you expressing our support for fully funding a neighborhood plan for northern South Park, if you believe now is the time to consider development there. In contrast, please put the Tribal Trail road on the back burner and do not fund it now.

Road building is a costly process, whether in staff time, consultant services, stakeholder facilitation, or construction. The cost to the county alone was last budgeted at $2.4-$3.2 million, and the entire project could reach $8-17M. Of course, you have not yet made a decision on whether or not to build the Tribal Trail road, let alone decided on the design that would determine final costs – so these numbers are rough guesses.

This discussion has long been controversial. We find it extremely significant that most of the stakeholder group asked that the process be halted – and that their request was not honored. A controversial proposal like this places a real burden on our community members to engage meaningfully during an ongoing public health crisis. And it adds a cost to your own decision-making bandwidth when you clearly have higher priorities.

Right now, and in the coming year, our community and our elected leaders should be most focused on core government services that provide for human health – whether that’s public health, human services, water quality planning and management, responsible planning, or conservation. These last few months have repeatedly demonstrated the fundamental value of these services for our mental and physical health. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves, where can this money, whether several thousand for facilitation or many million for a road, be put to better use?

Please focus your limited budget and limited time on more-important, less-controversial projects, and put the unnecessary Tribal Trail project on hold for at least a year or indefinitely.

Sincerely,

Signature Brooke Sausser community planner

Brooke Sausser

Community Planning Manager

Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance

This letter appeared in the JH News and Guide and was reposted on the JH Conservation Alliance website

This letter to the Teton County Commissioners can be download it here.

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No Need for Connector Road

By Geoff Gottlieb

Incredibly, the proposed Tribal Trail Connector (TTC) capital project is still alive, even though for the past four years virtually all the facts and data-based arguments made in relation to the TTC have come from parties who are concerned about its costs versus benefits to the community. 

Those in favor of the TTC have been unwilling or, more likely, unable, to make any such argument, resorting to outdated and unsubstantiated assertions, such as “we need it for safety,” “it will alleviate traffic at the Y”, “we need it to protect our children,“ “we need it in the event of an emergency evacuation,” etc, etc.

County Staff, which is biased in favor of the TTC, even though it relies on the work of no less than three independent consulting firms at a cost to the county of approximately $730,000 this fiscal year alone, has failed to make up for this shortcoming, probably because there are no compelling benefits from the TTC to justify its financial and environmental costs. On this basis alone, the TTC project should be cancelled when the Commissioners meet on June 2 to vote on whether or not to proceed to the next planning phase. 

If the Commissioners vote to proceed, then they should at least address some, if not all, of the reasonable arguments made to date by the parties concerned about the TTC’s impact on our community.

If that is too big an ask, they should at least have the decency to recognize that allocating another $1,000,000 to TTC planning is inappropriate on so many levels. The TTC has been reclassified as “non-essential”, and the expected loss of revenue due to the pandemic has required significant operating and capital budget cuts (which may mean the money is not there). Yet the Commissioners see fit to make this allocation while cutting essential services such as fire/ems. It is ironic that one of the key arguments made in favor of the TTC is safety, specifically redundancy for fire/ems. In addition, the County has yet to fill the open position of regional transportation director, which one would assume is important for the continued implementation of the recently updated ITP.

As published in the Jackson Hole News and Guide on March 20, 2020

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Tribal connector ruse

Letter to the Editor, Jackson Hole News & Guide, April 4, 2018

In an absurd case of putting the cart a (half) mile ahead of the horse, and in conflict with the comprehensive plan’s goal of “preserving and protecting the valley’s ecosystem,” Teton County commissioners have wasted their time and our tax dollars developing an memorandum of understanding with the Wyoming Department of Transportation to design and construct a Tribal Trails connector road. This half-mile, two-lane stretch of road connecting 2244 South Park Loop to Highway 22 would cost just over $6.8 million.

We at the Responsible Growth Coalition remain mystified by the commissioners’ continued breach of their fiduciary obligations to the county’s tax-paying residents.

The memorandum implies a high likelihood that the proposed connector will be approved. It ignores the commissioners’ prior promise to first complete the Cambridge Systematics traffic study, share its results with the public and proceed with Tribal Trails if — and only if — those results demonstrate compelling traffic benefits, particularly at the “Y,” and no viable alternatives to building the new road are available.

WYDOT’s recent upgrade of the “Y” has virtually eliminated its congestion. Induced demand generated by Tribal Trails’ added capacity would quickly offset its immediate benefit and restore the current equilibrium level of traffic, defeating the objective of “alleviating congestion.” In fact, there would be a permanent increase in car volume on our roads, whose contribution to air and noise pollution will come at great cost to the comprehensive plan’s mission.

It is also apparent that the project, were it justified, should not be single-sourced to WYDOT, but rather subject to a competitive bidding process, to obtain valuable information on road construction costs and identify more qualified contractors. Indeed, according to County Engineer Sean O’Malley, a single-source arrangement is unprecedented. More concerning is that WYDOT, by its own admission, has no experience building local county roads. This is demonstrated in its price quote, which is almost double what it was last year when Tribal Trails was proposed as a specific purpose excise tax initiative and over four times the cost cited in public sources. Here is a link to such a source: TinyURL.com/timsylvester.

The issues raised above justify voting against the approval of the memorandum on April 10. The traffic study must be completed first, and if its results justify building the connector, then a competitive request-for-proposals process should be undertaken, soliciting no less than three qualified road contractors (in addition to WYDOT).

Otherwise, the only plausible explanation for insisting on this memorandum (and Tribal Trails in general) now is certain commissioners’ pro-growth agenda and their desire for a development corridor in South Park.

Geoff Gottlieb
Jackson

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Tribal Trails connector off SPET Ballot

The County Commissioners and Town Council members fully removed the design and the construction of a proposed Tribal Trails connector and East-West connector (named “South Park Road Network)” from the proposed May SPET ballot.

On January 23, they removed the construction portion and on January 30, at another public meeting, they removed the design portion. As promised, the valley-wide traffic study will be conducted and WYDOT will begin improvements to the Y intersection in August 2017.

Clearly, there is still resolve among certain elected officials to build these new roads in South Park. Several officials have indicated they plan to use other County funds to do what is needed to tee this up eventually as a new road project. Together, we will need to closely follow their efforts as this continues to unfold.

Many thanks to all who spoke at the meeting or sent in public comment. The comments were overwhelmingly against asking for funding of these new roads at this time.

More info:
SPET written Public Comments.
Today’s JH News & Guide article.
RGC’s Followup Letter.