A walk with Mark

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Two-thousand-nine was a heartbreaking year for Jackson Mayor Mark Barron.

In July, his son, Wes, died after he fell while rock climbing alone. Six months since the tragedy, Jackson's mayor does all he can do, which is to walk forward. Barron has poured himself into his elected position while letting someone else  worry about running the businesses he has built. He has found a greater sense of purpose in the public service side of his life.

JH Weekly: 2009 was a hard year for you.

Mark Barron: It was a wonderful celebration – watching Josh and [daughter] Mary get married. And then just weeks later, the horror of all horrors, losing our son, Wes. We’ve had a lot of loss in our community this year. It’s unbelievable, actually.
It was really hard. It is really hard. My heart goes out to every family who’s dealing with loss this year. And I can’t tell you how grateful, from my whole family, how grateful we all are for the outpouring of love and support. Wes was a beautiful young guy and we will miss him terribly, forever. It’s tough.

I can see his grave from here [on Snow King mountain]. He grew up on Snow King.
JHW: There was the recent photo of you in the Jackson Hole Daily riding the first chairlift on Snow King’s opening day. You had a huge smile in the photo but it must have been a poignant moment.

MB: It was right after the tears stopped. I had a good cry coming out of Snow King and I was joined by a good friend. I hadn’t been out skiing yet until that day. I don’t know what Bob [McLaurin, also in the photo] said but it must’ve been pretty damn funny.

JHW: A lot of people are really concerned about you.

MB: I appreciate that. I could understand that. I love this place for that. I love my family. We’re working through a terrible loss and we’re surrounded by unbelievable people. They work at High Country Linens and Blue Spruce Cleaners and Hard Drive Cafe and Snake River Roasting. We’re surrounded by really beautiful people. The Town of Jackson never ceases to amaze me. We’re continuing to work on the Wolfensohn Challenge, which is by far the largest thing I’ve worked on since serving as mayor.

I may be in some pain and I think that’s probably normal, and I know I’m not alone. This community has been through a lot this year. But the Town of Jackson’s in good shape.

JHW: Why do you give so much of your time to the Town?

MB: There’s a lot to do. This is a community with a lot of things going on. If you think about it, you’ve got a little town, a little county, the relationships with the state. This is the only town that has a direct relationship with the county. We have our joint information meeting every month. No other county in the state of Wyoming does this. We have relationships with many of the federal agencies here.

It takes time, but it’s because of all of those relationships, and the devotion of each organization, that you get to enjoy this beautiful, majestic place we live in. A lot of stewardship goes into this place – a lot of love and care and passion. So I do the Town service – be the mayor – and it’s like any other human service deal, where people pick up the phone and say “I want to talk to the mayor because I’ve got an idea, and I need 15 minutes.”

JHW: So you’re the mayor because you’re good at it?

MB: No. No, I’m the mayor because the people of Jackson allow it, and I’m passionate about the place I live and I’m passionate about the people who live here and the visitors who come through. I take a lot of pride in the fact that we have world-class ski areas. You have this amazing wildlife refuge, plum full of elk. We’ve watched our wildlife herds grow unbelievably over last 30 years.

JHW: Do you find that it’s good for you to stay busy these days?

MB: I’ve cut way back. I’ve been working on the Town stuff and have fully delegated the business stuff. As I said, the Town staff is just absolutely amazing. Bob McLaurin, the Town manager, has done a phenomenal job developing a service-oriented organization. It was purposeful, it was deliberate, it’s been effective and it was appreciated by the staff. Even though we went through the second half of ‘09 realizing that our budget was not going to come in where we thought, we slashed and slashed and worked $450,000 out of the budget, going into the 2010 budget realizing we had a projected 12-percent less sales tax revenue. That’s $1.3 million less in our budget. Everybody’s had a great spirit of cooperation.

It’s a service organization, that’s what appeals to me. If I look at my own business, it’s a service organization – both of my businesses. If we look at [wife] Ruthie’s coffee shop, it’s about people. That’s what we like. Both Ruth Ann and I are super passionate about people.

JHW: If you meet the Wolfensohn Challenge, will it put Jackson Hole on the global map as a renewable energy leader?

MB:  We’re just getting our toes wet with the Energy Sustainability Plan. The summit that we had [in October] was profound. The fact that we have now a memorandum of understanding and resolution between the Town, the County and our power provider, Lower Valley Energy is historic. Nobody else has done that. All the resolution says is we will support the goals and the efforts of the Energy Sustainability Project. So now we just are in the midst of forming a steering committee made up of personnel from each organization. And the focus is to reduce the energy demand in this community.

From the feedback we get, there are very few places working on this sort of a thing, and I doubt anybody else to the degree that we are. It’s really interesting, because this is a natural extension of the 10-by-10, where, beginning back in the late winter of 07, we had a joint resolution with the County to do a [10 percent energy use reduction by 2010] , and we formed the EEAB – Energy Effeciency Advisory Board – to work with the town and county facilities with updates to reduce our fuels, reduce our electricity, by 10 percent. We’ve gone gung ho on that. We’ve had substantial success, and it’s not an easy thing to do. When we built our new parking garage, it was the only public parking garage in the country lit with 100 percent LED lighting, with 268 tons of fly ash to save 268 tons of carbon emissions. We did a LEED Silver restroom on Deloney Street. We put photovoltaic panels on the garage and on the restroom. We put photovoltaic panels down at the sewer plant, and this is outside of the Wolfensohn Challenge.

[The mayor cited a number of Town projects to save energy, cut here for space. - eds.]

When we talk about energy and we talk about the Wolfensohn Challenge, the cornerstone for the Town is, we’re going to continue to grow our community, marginally, and we’re going to be responsible about the electricity that we’re using and try to reduce electricity at every opportunity, reduce fuels at every opportunity.

JHW: Is it about Jackson becoming a leader? Why is it important?

MB: There’s no place in the world like Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the Snake River, Teton County – there’s no place in the world like this, and we want to be like that with energy. We want to be as responsible for our environment with our energy use, as our forefathers were to settling this community. There’s a reason we only have 20,000 people, maybe, living in Teton County. There’s a reason why less than three percent of the total landmass of Teton County is private. That was on purpose. So I hope we look over our shoulders one day and see other communities having noticed what we’re doing here, following our lead. And it’s not lost on us that you look around the Town of Jackson and you see signs that say this town runs on 100 percent green hydroelectricity. We want people to realize that we’re doing it.

Most of the electricity we get is clean hydroelectricity, which is why our carbon footprint looks so small at five percent. We’re using about 85 megawatts. But as this community is projected to grow over the next generation, it’s projected to require an additional 30 megawatts.

As we grow, we’re going out on the open market and those rates are going to go up exponentially. And those will probably be fossil fuels that we’re bringing in to heat our homes, to make our hot water, to turn on our lights. To the extent that this is the hoping that the Energy Sustainability Project will make a generational commitment to reduce our energy and fossil fuels use, to have mitigated our current energy use so that each home and business will use less and less and we won’t need that 30 megawatts on the open market. If we’re successful, that will save something like $135 million to this community.

JHW: Do you see a growth cap for town?

MB: I couldn’t say. I don’t see it ... Everything I’ve been through this past six months – we’re talking about human beings. It’s not about stats. We’re talking about people. What could be more important than that?

JHW: Are you a spiritual person?

MB: Yeah. I have a hard time defining it, but I definitely believe that God exists. And I definitely believe that we’re not finished when they pat us in the face with a shovel. I have to believe that.

JHW: Are you going to run for reelection?

MB: Yes. I’ve thought a lot about it, especially with recent events. Clarene Law is right when she says that what you give comes back tenfold. My little bit of public service, if the people of Jackson want me to serve again, I’d be grateful to do the best I could. JHW 

Photo by Derek Diluzio
Mayor Mark Barron

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A walk with Mark | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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