Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Two formidable valley entities – one public, one private – charged with seemingly incongruous tasks – one to promote conservation of natural resources, the other to proliferate affordable housing – will host a forum this week on balancing Jackson Hole’s workforce resources while preserving its wild ones. 

From noon to 2 p.m., Friday at St. John’s Episcopal, the Teton County Housing Authority and the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance will host a forum on housing the valley’s workforce and families in a sustainable way. The discussion is meant to encourage community dialogue through the update of Town and County’s joint Comp Plan.

The forum will bring in a panel of speakers with nuanced expertise in the land planning issues that face Jackson Hole. Guest panelists include Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority Executive Director Tom McCabe; Craig Ferguson, a vice president with the prominent land planning firm Clarion Associates, which has consulted Jackson and Teton County through their parallel rewrites; and attorney Mark White with the progressive White and Smith Planning and Law Group.

Topics are to include the impacts of higher mitigation rates for residential and commercial development, targeting the right balance of rental and ownership affordable housing, the long-term impacts of converting rental units to condominiums, and more. The public is encouraged to bring other topics and questions to the table and also to bring a lunch.

The desire to preserve Jackson Hole’s wild character – identified as a top priority in public polling – has, at times, been put at odds with efforts to provide workforce housing, which has been pursued in part with controversial density bonuses that have prompted some developers to present projects considered by some to be too large in the context of the surrounding natural and manmade environments. 

Friday’s forum, which organizers have titled “Protecting Our Community: Housing Working Families,” is the second in the series “Next Steps: Exploring Solutions for Jackson Hole,” and is partly underwritten with funding from the Community Foundation. PJH