Targhee approved

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-County Commissioners voted 4-1 Monday to allow Grand Targhee Resort to expand to 450 units, with 150,000 square feet of commercial space. The vote came after nearly three years of negotiations between county and resort officials.
At the final meeting, Grand Targhee frontman Geordie Gillett, whose family owns the resort, offered new mitigation to the tune of 301 acres for future Alta land acquisitions to be set aside for agricultural, habitat, open space or scenic preservations.
Gillett, citing rising land costs in Alta, estimated that offer to be worth somewhere between $3 million and $15 million. The acquisition of those lands will occur in equal parts over four construction phases.

Gillett also increased the resort’s mandate to provide winter transit ridership of day skiers to 30 percent to 25 percent.

Those voluntary mitigations, however, did little to assuage the disappointment of the dozen or so Alta residents who pleaded with county commissioners to vote down or significantly scale down the resort, or hold off on a decision.
Only commissioner Leland Christensen, a Alta resident, voted ‘no’ on the proposal.
“This has been characterized as an Alta issue; while I live there and care what my neighbors have to say, I think it’s a Teton County issue,” he said.
Christensen also predicted a bleak future of development changing the face of both sides of the range.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to spread across the Tetons.”
For his part, board chairman Andy Schwartz offered a different take on the confluence of man and nature here, in one of the world’s great ecosystems, citing Signal Mountain and Jackson Lake lodges.

“We need to create a resort that people can go to and enjoy and at the same time know what it is to be in the wilderness,” he said.
Schwartz said the board used all the tools at its disposal to work with Gillett to shape the best proposal for the resort, surrounded by Caribou–Targhee National Forest.
“I don’t know what more I can do as a county commissioner in order to get a better application,” he said.

Schwartz reminded Alta residents that the march of change is imminent in life.
“I wish it [wasn’t] like that,” he said. “It’s unfortunate.”  
Commissioner Ben Ellis for the first time said he thought the proposal would, in some ways, benefit Alta, an area cut off from the rest of Teton County and Wyoming by the rugged Teton peaks on one side and Teton County, Idaho – a valley undergoing its own rapid transformation – on the other.

With day skier numbers poised only to increase at Targhee alongside growth in Eastern Idaho, the resort’s transportation plan, including privately funded guest shuttles, would eventually engender fewer vehicles on the road.
“From a traffic standpoint, I think this proposal is better than business as usual,” Ellis said. Similarly: “From a resort character standpoint, the proposal is better than business as usual.”

Ellis added that family subdivisions are being platted in and around Alta at a higher rate than elsewhere in the county. “The impacts [to Alta] are a bit overstated as they relate to this proposal,” he said.

Gillett said in a phone interview Tuesday that the first phase of development, which will include the construction of new condominiums, might break ground as early as summer, though could be pushed back a year.
PERMALINK:
Targhee approved | Planet JH News Article: Development

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