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Hello, and Happy May!

In an interesting metaphor for life in general, and the importance of optimism in particular, my daffodils are winning their battle with spring’s snows. They’re a little worse for the wear but beautiful nonetheless.

Speaking of spring, mine has been one of polar opposites. My late March and early April were pretty quiet, especially since I spent my spring break in COVID lockdown. I emerged healthy, but somehow doing laps between my bedroom, office, and kitchen didn’t recharge me like a full-blown vacation would have. As a result, I’ve felt rather buffeted by the onslaught of issues that has recently crashed down upon Jackson and its town council.

In no particular order, these issues include:

• Notices informing property owners of a massive increase in the assessed valuation of the county’s property (the average 2021 to 2022 increase was 40%; my house went up 58%).
• Some massive cost overruns on new government buildings (building prices have gone up about 1/3 since these projects were approved three years ago).
• 18 different applications for government and non-profit capital projects seeking taxpayer funding. The collective cost of these projects is $400 million, and they’re looking for $275 million in tax revenues. Around $120 million will be available.
• The town’s new fiscal year starts on July 1, so we are trying to create a budget that, ironically, will be very tight despite record-high revenues and savings (the tightness is a function of how much the local housing and labor markets have been upended by COVID migration and related phenomena).
• A yet-to-be-finished sustainable tourism study which has both tourism’s champions and critics on edge.
• A shifting regulatory regime which is raising questions about whether local government can continue the “parklets” program that has so benefitted local restaurants the past two years.
• A real estate market increasingly disconnected from anything resembling local financial realities.

Oh, and by the way, we’re going into election season, with all its attendant silliness and angst.

Bottom line – life is rich.

I mention all this because, as I see it, it’s vital for elected officials to at least acknowledge how much angst is out there right now. To that end, in this newsletter I’d like to take a closer look at the aforementioned property valuation wallop.

With luck, in this newsletter I can shed a little light on the realities of the situation facing our community, as well as offer a suggestion to which I’d love your reactions.

• A Bit of Background
• Teton County’s Coal
• Building Trends
• Values Go Boom
• A Mill Levy Primer
• Setting Mill Levies
• Property Taxes & Local Government Funding
• Government’s Role
• Lowering Property Taxes
• 21st Century Community With a 20th Century Operating System
• Cutting the Gordian Knot

Even by my standards, this is a long newsletter. Thanks for slogging through it, and I hope you find it of value.

As always, thank you for your interest and support.

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

A Bit of Background

In 2010, Teton County’s Assessor estimated the market value of all property in Teton County – land, buildings, capital equipment, and personal property – to be $12.5 billion. Five years later, it was about the same – due to the recession, the total property value was $13.1 billion, an average annual growth rate of only 1%.

As a point of comparison, during the same 2010-2015 period, Teton County’s total taxable sales grew 7% annually.

Leap ahead five years, and between 2015-2020, the assessor’s estimated market value of all Teton County property grew from $13.1 billion to $21.7 billion, an average annual growth rate of 11% – 11 times greater than during the first half of the decade.

Again as a point of comparison, during that same five year stretch, total taxable sales grew 4% annually, roughly half the 2010-2015 rate.

Then we come to the past two years.

According to the figures released by Teton County’s Assessor a few weeks ago, between 2020-2022 the total market value of all Teton County property grew from $21.7 billion to $34.4 billion, an annual growth rate of 26%. Total taxable sales are growing at essentially the same stratospheric rate, which yields a doubling time of three years.

To state the obvious, no system is well-equipped to deal with such rapid growth. As a result, Jackson Hole is feeling extraordinary strain.

Much of the growth in property values was due to rapidly-escalating real estate sales prices. Another and unknowable portion was due to the fact that, for many years (if not decades), Teton County had been out of compliance with a Wyoming law that requires county assessors to value property within 5% of its market value. Because Teton County’s assessments had generally been way below that target range, it fell to the previous and current Teton County Assessors – Andy Cavallaro and Melissa Shinkle respectively – to bring the estimates of Teton County’s property values to where they needed to be.

Combine this legally-required adjustment with a doubling of real estate prices over the past three years, and you get a community reeling from the recent massive increase in assessed property values.

Teton County’s Coal

For over a decade, residential land – undeveloped lots, developed lots, and the buildings upon them – has accounted for roughly seven-eighths of the total value of all Teton County property.

Residential land is to Jackson Hole what hydrocarbons are to the rest of Wyoming – the foundation of the community’s property values. Unlike hydrocarbons, however, as long as the community doesn’t fundamentally screw itself up, residential land can be “mined” over and over again.

In Wyoming, property taxes are the primary source of school funding. In Teton County, residential property has become so valuable that the local school district is one of only four statewide that take in more property tax revenue than Wyoming’s funding formula says they need (one of the other districts is in natural gas-rich Converse County; the other two are in natural gas-rich Sublette County).

Until around a decade ago, Teton County’s schools cost more to run than the community generated in property taxes. As a result, Teton County was taking in “excess” property tax revenues from Wyoming’s hydrocarbon-rich counties, especially Campbell County, America’s leading coal producer. Today, with “King Coal” on the decline, Campbell County is struggling, and its schools are getting money from Teton County.

Building Trends

In 2010, Teton County’s Assessor identified 11,513 residential lots. 77% were built upon, and 8% had guest houses, Accessory Residential Units, or similar structures.

In 2021, there were 11,644 residential lots, an increase of 131 (1% over the 11 years). 80% were built upon, and 11% had multiple structures.

In short, between 2010-2021 Teton County added 131 new residential lots. Because it built on 448 lots, though, the inventory of empty lots declined by 317 (11%).

Over the past decade, around 30% of the new builds included a second residential structure on the property. As a result, today around 50% more properties have a second residential unit on them than was true in 2010.

The data don’t make clear how – if at all – the additional structures are being used. As a result, some may be vacant guest homes, while others could be rental properties.

Values Go Boom

As noted above, the rise in Teton County’s assessed property values has been due to a combination of rapidly rising sales prices and the assessor bringing the county into compliance with state law.

Because the assessor’s values always trail market conditions, two points are notable.

First, even though the growth in property values was shockingly high, from a percentage perspective it made sense. This is because the big jump in values brought the percentage growth of Teton County’s assessed values into line with the percentage growth of local real estate prices – both have essentially tripled since 2010.

Second, because market prices are continuing to rise, and because market prices are still much higher than assessed values, further assessed valuation increases are likely.

A Mill Levy Primer

Why do we care about assessed valuation? Because it forms the basis of property taxes.

Getting from the former to the latter involves four steps:

1. Determine a property’s market value.
2. Multiply it by the state-mandated 9.5% to determine its assessed value. (E.g., the assessed value of a $1 million property is 9.5% of $1,000,000, or $95,000.)
3. Divide the property’s assessed value by 1,000 to determine how much it will have to pay for each mill of property tax levied (in this case, $95,000/1,000 = $95)
4. Multiply the value of the property’s mill by the number of mills being levied, and the result is the property tax.
   1. For example, in 2021, Teton County’s base mill levy was 56.979 mills. For our $1 million home, that mill levy will result in a property tax bill of $95 x 56.979 = $5,413.

Under Wyoming law, property taxes can fund six types of governmental activities:

1. Public education
2. County government
3. Town government
4. Hospitals
5. Local conservation districts
6. Local weed and pest districts

Also under Wyoming law, all of these save Weed & Pest districts are directly accountable to voters by dint of their boards being publicly elected (Weed & Pest board members are appointed by county commissions).

Of note is how consistent the number of mills levied on Teton County properties has stayed over the past decade-plus. The minimum was 56.479 mills in 2020; the maximum was 58.454 in 2014, 2016, and 2017 – a range of just 1.975 mills, or 4%.

Setting Mill Levies

Regardless of type or location, every Teton County property is charged the same basic mill levy. 2021’s basic levy was 56.979 mills.

On top of this, some properties lie in special districts which can charge additional levies for infrastructure and the like. Examples include the Alta Solid Waste District, the Teton Village Fire, Water and Sewer district, and roughly two dozen other infrastructure and water & sewer districts.

Local government has no control over 43 (75%) of the county’s basic 56.979 mill levy. These 43 mills are mandated by the State of Wyoming, and fund the state’s public education system. Changing these rates would require changing state law or Wyoming’s constitution.

The remaining mill levies are set at rates determined by local government. In 2021, 7.879 of the additional 13.979 mills (14% of the total mill levy) were levied by Teton County to fund its operations (including fire protection, the library, and the county fair), 3 mills (5%) by St. John’s Health, and 1.8 mills (3%) by the combination of Teton County Conservation District and Teton County Weed & Pest.

Beyond the state-mandated 43 mills for education, the Teton County School Board can levy a few additional mills for specific local educational needs. In 2021, they levied 1.3 mills for this purpose, 2% of the entire assessment.

Of particular note is how much property tax goes to fund schools.

Wyoming funds its schools based on a school enrollment-driven formula. In those districts where the 43 mills of mandated property tax generate less money than the formula says they need, the state gives them extra funding. In those districts where the 43 mills generate more, the state “recaptures” the extra funds and distributes them to those districts needing money.

Because Teton County’s property values increased so much between 2021 and 2022, in FY 2023 the state-mandated 43 mills will generate around $46 million more than the state feels Teton County needs to run its schools. As a result, $46 million in Teton County-generated property taxes will fund schools in other parts of Wyoming.

To put that figure in perspective, the $46 million in property tax revenue that will leave Teton County to fund schools elsewhere in Wyoming is about the same as the combined amount of property tax revenue that will be received by all local government entities able to set their own mill levy rates: St. John’s Health, the Teton County Commission, the Teton County Conservation District, the Teton County School Board, and Teton County Weed & Pest (whose rate is set by the county commission).

Property Taxes & Local Government Funding

Because Wyoming doesn’t have a state income tax, funding for state and local governments basically rests on a three-legged stool of property taxes, sales taxes, and taxes on mineral extraction.

Because Jackson Hole has no economically valuable minerals to speak of, most of the funding for Jackson Hole’s local governments comes from a combination of sales and property taxes. More precisely, most of the Town of Jackson’s funding comes from sales taxes, while a goodly chunk of Teton County’s funding comes from property taxes.

Two points are noteworthy here.

First, nearly 80% of Teton County’s property value lies in the unincorporated county. As a result, every mill of property tax the county levies yields roughly 5 times more than every mill levied by the town.

In addition, under Wyoming law counties can levy up to 12 mills, while towns are capped at 8 mills. As a result, if both governments maximized their respective mill levies, Teton County would raise around 7.5 times more property tax revenue than would the Town of Jackson.

In reality, the disparity is much greater. The reason for this is the second noteworthy point.

In the 1970s, the mayor of Jackson was Ralph Gill, one of the county’s largest landowners.Worried about the town’s finances, he struck a deal with town residents: If you vote to raise the sales tax, the town will no longer levy a property tax.

In those days, Jackson was a relatively poor town with a growing tourism economy. Recognizing that, Mayor Gill argued that swapping the town’s property tax for a sales tax made sense for two reasons: because a sales tax would generate a lot more revenue than a property tax, and because a goodly amount of that extra revenue would be paid by tourists (i.e., non-locals).

Agreeing with that logic, the town’s voters approved the sales tax, and for nearly 50 years the Town of Jackson did not levy a property tax. This changed in 2021, when the town council authorized a ½ mill tax on town property. In FY 2022, this will generate around $250,000, all of which will be earmarked for Fire/EMS services. It also puts town property owners on an even footing with county property owners, for due to an anomaly in Wyoming law, county taxpayers had been paying ½ mill more for Fire/EMS than had town taxpayers.

Government’s Role

Of the discretionary mills levied by Teton County’s various taxing authorities, the largest amount is levied by the Teton County Commission. If the commissioners levy the same 7.379 mills in FY 2023 that they did this year, they will raise around $25.7 million.

What does all that money buy? The simplest answer is that it funds the basic services of county government. These Core Services range from plowing roads to running the library; from providing public health services to running elections.

In addition, property tax revenue helps fund affordable housing efforts and local human services non-profits, organizations providing services the community needs but which are beyond the scope of local government.

All of this is good stuff. Yet for completely understandable reasons, at the moment residents are furious with their government.

Why? Well, for starters, having property values jump 40% in one year is nearly inconceivable, especially in a state that prides itself on low taxes. Plus, at the same time this explosion in assessed values hit, the town council and county commission voted to pay for a 50%+ cost overrun on the expansion of the Rec Center, the mind-boggling result of scope creep, bad estimating, and construction inflation.

(Self-serving interjection. I voted against paying for the Rec Center overrun, saying I would oppose it until we were able to do two things:

• conduct a post-mortem on what went wrong; and
• understand the Rec Center cost overrun in the context of both the town’s overall budget and several other current projects also facing cost overruns.

Unfortunately there seems to be a systemic problem with the way the community handles capital projects. This is causing me great concern in general, and tremendous concern given the $290 million of new capital project proposals that just landed on our desks.)

Throw all this into an environment overwhelmed by two years of COVID-driven angst – when so much has seemed so surreal and so many of us are feeling emotionally, physically, and spiritually ground down – and the result is a whole lot of frustration and anger.

Which we electeds are hearing about. It doesn’t matter that government has no control over many of the forces washing over the community. Nor does it matter that, in many cases, there is little we can do about those forces or their consequences.

What does matter is something much more primal and much more important: In times of crisis, people look to their institutions to fix things. In in the minds of at least a very vocal minority, Jackson Hole’s local governments are currently and manifestly not fulfilling that role.

Lowering Property Taxes

So given current circumstances, what should government do?

There are those demanding that property tax rates be lowered. If that happened, who would do it and what would it mean?

Given the fact that 75% of our property tax rate is set by the state, the only entity able to move the needle much on tax rates is the county commission. What if they were to, say, halve their mill levy?

Factually, it would cut the county’s projected FY 2023 revenues by $12.9 million, around one-sixth of their anticipated revenues. If that happened, the commissioners would face some difficult choices regarding which services to cut. Why? Because under Wyoming law, the county is legally required to provide a variety of Core Services. As a result, if major cuts needed to be made, they would likely come at the expense of non-Core expenditures such as support for affordable housing programs and the non-profits providing addressing human services needs. Efforts which, of course, are facing greater-than-ever demand for their services.

That’s one financial reality of a major property tax cut. The more significant one, however, is truly crazy, and rests on two realities.

Reality #1: Wyoming’s Constitution and laws mandate the levying of 43 mills of property tax.

Reality #2: Wyoming’s Constitution and laws mandate that assessed property values have to be within 5% of market value. Hence this year’s 40% increase in assessed values.

Combine the two, and even if every discretionary property tax were eliminated next year – even if the Teton County Commission, the Teton County School Board, St. John’s Health, and the Teton County Conservation District all agreed to levy zero mills of property tax – Teton County’s property taxes would still go up 6%.

Which raises a very interesting public policy question: How is the community best-served? By maximizing individual gain? Or by pursuing the collective good?

For example, let’s say that, in FY 2023, Teton County cuts its property tax levy by 50%. In such a case, the total tax bill facing Teton County’s property owner will fall by only 7%, raising the question: “How is the community best served: by 10,000 property owners each saving 7% on their tax bills, or by using the resulting $12.9 million to provide a variety of services that benefit the larger community, including some of its most vulnerable members?”

21st Century Community With a 20th Century Operating System

To answer questions like this, Jackson Hole needs to ask and answer a question it has never explicitly addressed: In our community, what is the proper role of government?

Historically, the answer has been shaped by Wyoming law, which ties government funding to a combination of property ownership and the very 20th century activities of going to the mercantile and digging stuff out of the ground. This mechanism produces a rather limited amount of revenue, resulting in local government being able to do little more than provide Core Services. Additionally, because of this focus on 20th century economic activities, Teton County’s governments can’t adapt to the more contemporary economic trends driving the community’s growth.

For example, in today’s Jackson Hole, untaxed real estate sales account for about 50% more gross revenue than taxable sales. Throw in the similarly untaxed professional services sector, and the figure goes up to about twice the level of taxable sales.

This disconnect between Wyoming’s 20th century operating system and Jackson Hole’s 21st century economy means there is little money available to address the challenges created by our very contemporary economy. Strikingly, these challenges include not only the obvious ones resulting from things like Teton County’s nation-leading income inequality, but also those facing property owners – Jackson Hole’s 21st century economy is causing property taxes to explode, creating real problems for those whose incomes aren’t growing as fast as property values (i.e., creating real problems for basically all of us).

Yet because Wyoming laws are so rooted in the mid-20th century, they don’t provide Jackson Hole the tools it needs – for example, a real estate transfer tax or the ability to offer property tax breaks for primary residences – to address its 21st century challenges.

Cutting the Gordian Knot

So what might we do?

Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: Rapidly-rising property values have created a dilemma.

On the one hand, rising property values are fueling a concomitant rise in property tax revenues. These revenues are primarily benefiting Wyoming’s schools; to a lesser extent they are benefiting local government, health care, and conservation. Critically, those increased revenues are needed to offset the disruptions being caused by rising property values.

On the other hand, rising property taxes are creating a burden for those who aren’t extraordinarily wealthy. The well-to-do can afford to pay current Jackson Hole real estate prices and the concomitant property taxes. Those less well-off are struggling, particularly those long-time residents whose stewardship has made Jackson Hole such a desirable place to live.

Hence the paradox. How do we simultaneously help two struggling groups with diametrically opposite needs? One group needs greater amounts of tax dollars to address their needs, while the other needs their tax burden lowered. To make the challenge harder still, how do we accommodate both given the constraints of Wyoming’s 20th century operating system?

I can come up with one possible solution – imperfect, but not nothing: Link a reduction in property taxes to an increase in sales tax.

This isn’t an original idea. Instead, it’s just an updated version of what Ralph Gill championed 50 years ago. This time, the bargain would have two linked steps:
• In May 2023, ask voters to increase the local sales tax rate from the current 6% to the state-allowed maximum of 7%.
• If the vote is successful, the county commissioners would then cut in half the mill levy they control.

Doing this would have three positive results and one negative one.

Positive result #1: Local government– both Teton County and the Town of Jackson– would receive more revenue.

Positive result #2: The overall tax burden on Teton County residents wouldn’t change – locals would pay about the same total amount of tax, just with a different split.

Positive result #3: Because tourists account for about 50% of Teton County’s total taxable sales, essentially all of the extra money flowing to local government would come from tourists.

The negative result would be that while property owners would see their property tax burden decline, all residents – whether or not they own property – would pay more in sales taxes.

Under this plan, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average property owner’s tax bill would go down around $1,000/year, and the average resident’s sales taxes would increase around $500/year.

So what will serve our community best? As I see it, there are three basic options.

Option 1 is to stay with the status quo –leave sales taxes and property tax rates where they are.

Under this option, property taxes will go up, and the county commission will have extra revenue for continuing to provide a mix of Core Services and support for things like housing and local social services non-profits.

Option 2 is that the county commission can lower the property tax rate, and in so doing keep property revenues flat or, perhaps more realistically, growing slower than they otherwise would.

With less money to work with and facing higher costs (due to both inflation and skyrocketing housing and labor costs), the county will have to tighten its belt, likely cutting back on things such as its support for housing and human services non-profits.

Option 3 is to swap a sales tax increase for a property tax decrease.

Under this option, local property owners will clearly benefit. But because that group includes both those of great means and those who are barely hanging on, by helping the latter we’ll also be using government policy to help the rich get richer (and they certainly don’t need any additional help…).

Making matters worse, those who don’t own property will find themselves paying more in taxes – and this at a time when inflation is already driving up prices.

Yet besides providing meaningful property tax relief to those who need it, this “sales tax for property tax swap” mechanism will also boost overall local government revenues between 10%-15%, allowing the county and town governments to provide greater services to the entire community, especially those in need of more assistance.

(Note: because of the town collects very little property tax, only option 3 will significantly affect the town’s finances.)

So what’s the right answer? I don’t know. Each option has merits, and I’m acutely aware of the many cross-currents involved in the issue, including the do-nothing option.

What I am certain of, though, is this. Raising the tax swap idea is a way of getting at the larger question of what role government should play in our community. That is a conversation worth having, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Hello, and happy almost-Spring!

Earlier this week, Jackson Hole awoke to its first significant snowfall in what seems like forever. To my eye, the beauty was greatly enhanced by the wait.

In a similar spirit, since it’s been a while since I’ve published a newsletter, I’m hoping the wait will make this edition seem even more interesting…

Today’s focus is on three seemingly disparate items, linked by a temporal quality – what may or may not happen over the next many months:

• To Re-Run or Not to Re-Run
• Wildfire and Homeowner’s Insurance
• Gas Prices, Tourism, and Taxable Sales

Before diving in, one request. If you live in the Tetons region, will you please complete a survey exploring residents’ attitudes toward tourism? The deadline for completing the survey is Tuesday, April 5, 2022:

https://www.visitjacksonhole.com/locals

(Full disclosure: I heavily edited early drafts of the survey, and the final version reflects my contributions.)

As the days get longer, may your days become increasingly rich.

As always, thank you for your interest and support.

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

To Re-Run or Not to Re-Run

Budgets are the clearest indicator of an organization’s priorities. From that perspective, many years ago I found it curious that, despite having a Comp Plan whose Vision Statement so powerfully embraces ecosystem stewardship – “Preserve and protect the area’s ecosystem in order to ensure a healthy environment, community and economy for current and future generations” – neither the Town of Jackson nor Teton County were putting much money into pursuing their vision.

When I took office, this realization morphed into a goal for me to pursue; a polestar of sorts to guide my efforts whenever the job threatened to knock me off course. Happily, in the town’s FY 2022 budget my colleagues and I approved a unique-in-the-nation Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator job, and it will soon be filled.

I mention this because my town council seat is up in November, and I’m in the throes of deciding whether to run for re-election. On the positive side, there are many aspects of the job I really enjoy, and I think I’ve grown to become a pretty good local elected official. On the negative side, to be done properly the job requires far more time than the salary suggests, and its inherently chaotic nature can be exceptionally grinding, especially to a fundamentally introverted person like me.

Given this, at the moment I’m thinking my decision will be guided by answers to two fundamental questions.

First, can I find a new polestar? I lucked into championing the Ecosystem Stewardship position, and pursuing that goal served me very well these past few years. Now that the position exists, though, I need to find something else. Going forward, what might replace it?

Second, given my interests – including my vision for what Jackson Hole can be – how can I best pursue the things I want to do? Is the best use of my time being in elected office, or doing something else?

I mention all this because it in part explains why I’ve not published a newsletter in a couple of months. As part of my effort to answer my fundamental questions, I have been researching and writing a paper in which I try to understand the breadth and depth of the many challenges – and, critically, the many opportunities – facing the greater Jackson Hole region and, by extension, our nation and world.

What I originally envisioned as a modest exercise has now consumed a couple of months, and currently features a far-from-finished 60 page manuscript. Whether the paper ever sees the light of day isn’t clear to me. What is clear, though, is that if I do run again, playing an important role in that decision will have been the process of deeply considering where my community is, how its parts work together, and how we might be able to use our many environmental, social, and economic riches to make a meaningful difference in the world.

What do you think? I welcome any thoughts about whether I should run again (well, maybe not the snarky ones, but…).

Wildfire and Homeowner’s Insurance

At the end of December, a wildfire raced across Boulder County, Colorado. Nearly 1,100 homes were lost, and another 150 or so were partially burned. Total damages were estimated at over $500 million, an average of roughly $500,000 per home.

Making a bad situation even worse, many who lost their homes discovered their insurance wouldn’t cover the entire cost to rebuild. In many cases, their insurance didn’t even come close to making them whole.

That got me thinking – not just about my own personal situation, but about my community. Given the drought conditions throughout the west, and given that February marked a near-record low in local snowfall, my concern was that if a wildfire sweeps through Jackson Hole, many of my friends, neighbors, and constituents could find themselves in the same, awful boat as the folks in Boulder County; i.e., not only having lost their home, but finding out they were under-insured.

When I checked, I found out that I could have been one of those unlucky souls. In particular, my insurance company told me that under my policy, I would receive $225/square foot if I needed to rebuild my house. That struck me as low, but they assured me that this is what their computer model said were the costs for my area.

Curious, I talked to friends in the building trades. They said that, given supply shortages and Jackson Hole’s current building frenzy, the current actual cost of building a home like mine is more like $600/square foot.

Eventually I got things straightened out with my insurance company, but not before I found out that:

• they were using one construction cost figure for all of Wyoming; and
• their “one figure fits all” was based on building costs in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where the median home price is roughly one-tenth of that in Jackson Hole.

What about others in my community? Concerned, I wrote Wyoming’s Insurance Commissioner Jeff Rude, asking what steps his office could take to ensure that homeowners across the state knew whether they were adequately insured. I then followed up by meeting directly with Commissioner Rude and his team.

The upshot is that Wyoming’s Department of Insurance is looking into what it can do, both legally and in terms of getting information out to the state’s residents. Locally, I’ve shared the letter with the local media, in hopes they’ll find the story sufficiently interesting to write a story or two about the situation.

Finally, I’m using this newsletter to urge you to check your insurance. Please see whether you have the insurance level you want in case the type of nightmare that befell Boulder County should strike your neighborhood. Sadly, as our climate warms and the west becomes drier, that possibility becomes increasingly likely.

Gas Prices, Tourism, and Taxable Sales

All of Wyoming’s governmental agencies operate on a July 1 fiscal year. As a result, both the Town of Jackson and Teton County are in the early stages of crafting their respective budgets for Fiscal Year 2023.

Key to this effort is estimating how much revenue each body can expect to generate. And key to that is estimating the coming year’s taxable sales, because both the town and county are exceptionally dependent on sales taxes for their revenues.

In Jackson Hole, the county government’s annual general revenues are twice those of the town’s. But because sales taxes account for over half the bodies’ combined general revenue funding, local government’s financial well-being is closely linked to how much taxable stuff residents and tourists buy.

Over the past century, Jackson Hole’s economy has evolved from one emphasizing ranching to one emphasizing tourism to, today, one in which residents’ incomes increasingly come from location-neutral sources such as investments and professional services salaries.

Unfortunately, under Wyoming law these location-neutral economic activities generate no revenue for local government, and what’s not evolving is how local government is funded – as has been the case for over half a century, tourists still provide a significant chunk of those critical sales tax dollars.

But not as big a chunk. Since 2013, sales taxes generated by businesses associated with Teton County’s tourism-related industries have grown more slowly than those associated with industries not directly associated with tourism. In particular, the three taxable sales categories with the highest growth rates – on-line shopping, car sales, and the building and equipping of homes – are, at best, tangentially related to the region’s tourism economy.

For reasons ranging from individual livelihoods to community character, though, tourism remains vital to Jackson Hole. This raises the question of how the recent spike in gas prices might affect the critical summer tourism season (for all of Jackson Hole’s fame as a ski area, ~50% of each year’s taxable sales occur in the four summer months of June-September).

To explore this question, I looked at four data sets:

• Annual average US gasoline price/gallon
• Annual recreational visits to Grand Teton National Park
• Annual recreational visits to Yellowstone National Park
• Annual taxable sales for Teton County, Wyoming

For the first three, data were available from 1993-2021; for sales taxes, they were available starting in 1998.

The first graph below compares gas prices to national park visitation; the second compares gas prices to taxable sales.Whether you just look at the graphs or conduct a statistical analysis, the conclusion is the same: there is no statistically significant correlation between gas prices and local national park visitation or taxable sales.

(For data wonks, the R-squared value for gas prices and Grand Teton visitation is 0.05; for gas prices and Yellowstone visitation it’s 0.27; and for gas prices and taxable sales it’s 0.35. For non-data folks, R-squared is a measure of how closely two data sets are correlated. Values range from 0 to 1, and 0 means there’s no correlation at all, while 1 means there’s perfect correlation. As a point of reference, the closely-linked Yellowstone and Grand Teton visitation figures have an R-squared value of 0.86.)

A much stronger correlation exists between national park visitation and taxable sales. Stronger, but not perfect: the R-squared value between Yellowstone visits and Teton County taxable sales is 0.76; for Grand Teton it’s 0.79. This suggests that summer tourism is a decent, but far-from-perfect, indicator of what will happen with the community’s taxable sales. Gasoline prices are not.

Notably, as Jackson Hole’s economy has become increasingly driven by location-neutral income sources, the connection between national park visits and taxable sales has grown weaker.

What to make of all this? Two things catch my eye.

First, if you want to predict how many people will be visiting Jackson Hole this summer, ignore gas prices. However much intuitive sense the connection makes, there’s no factual evidence that gas prices affect local summer tourism – whether visitation numbers or taxable sales.

Second, despite the community’s ski culture, historically the four generally-overlooked shoulder months of April, May, October, and November generate nearly as much taxable sales as do the four heavily-hyped winter months of December-March. Here, too, it makes no intuitive sense, but 20+ years of data make a pretty compelling argument.

Hello, and the happiest of holidays to you!

This newsletter celebrates the unique, focusing on two items that are truly one of a kind.

Item one is that the Town of Jackson has finally posted the job description for its there-is-no-other-job-like-it Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator position.

Item two is that the IRS has put out data showing that, in 2019, Teton County, Wyoming’s mean per-return Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) was $312,442. This not only led the nation, but marked the first time in US history that a county’s mean per-return AGI exceeded $300,000.

To put Teton County’s figure in perspective, in 2019 New York County, New York (aka the island of Manhattan) had the nation’s second-highest mean per-return income. It was $212,534, a full $100,000 lower per return than Teton County’s.

Perhaps more striking still, 75% of Teton County’s income comes from investments and other, non-wage income (the US average is 31%). In 2019, Teton County’s mean per-return non-wage income alone was $235,186, 11% higher than New York’s total income figure.

These are insane numbers. Yet what’s really nuts is that these figures are from 2019; i.e., the year before COVID-19 migrants started flocking to Jackson Hole. As a result, 2020’s numbers should be much higher, and 2021’s numbers nuttier still.

Bottom line: If it feels like things are not just crazy, but spinning-out-of-control crazy, there’s a good reason for it.

Table of Contents

• Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator
• 2019 IRS Data
• Basic data for Teton County, Wyoming
• Teton County v. the rest of America
• People moving out; people moving in
• Charitable giving: actual and potential
• America’s greatest income inequality
• Observations

Not-at-all-crazy are two deeply-held feelings of mine.

First, I hope 2022 proves to be a year of great happiness and deep contentment for you and all those you love.

Second, thank you so very much for your interest in, and support of, my efforts. Words cannot capture how much that means to me.

The happiest of holidays, and here’s to a wonderful 2022.

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator

The Town of Jackson has finally posted the job description for our new Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator position. Applications are due on Friday, January 24, 2022, at 12 noon.

Here are links to the general job posting, as well as the complete job description.

To my eye, the most important sentence in the general job posting is this: “Any combination of education and experience providing the required skill and knowledge is qualifying.”

The significance of this sentence stems from the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no other local government in America has a position like Jackson’s Ecosystem Stewardship Administrator. This is because no other community in America has a Comp Plan whose vision is anything like ours: “Preserve and protect the area’s ecosystem in order to ensure a healthy environment, community, and economy for current and future generations”

Because of this dual uniqueness, there is no mold or archetype for this hire. As a result, the richer and more diverse our applicant pool, the greater the chances of the Town of Jackson finding just the right person to create and make a success of this entirely new position.

Please feel free to share this information as widely as possible — not just with folks who might be interested in the position, but with anyone who might know people who might be interested.

2019 IRS Data

Each year, the IRS presents an astonishing amount of data about each county’s tax returns. For example, did you know that, between 2010-2019, the number of Teton County households whose income tax returns were classified as “Farm Returns” rose from 143 to170 (1.0% and 1.1% respectively)? Or that, in 2019, Teton County residents’ total tax liability was nearly $1 billion – $969 million, over twice 2010’s figure of $440 million? Neither did I.

The IRS provides so much data that I can focus on only a fraction of it:

1. Basic data for Teton County, Wyoming
2. Teton County v. the rest of America
3. People moving out; people moving in
4. Charitable giving: actual and potential
5. America’s greatest income inequality

Basic data for Teton County, Wyoming

In the 30 years between 1989 and 2019, the number of income tax returns filed by Teton County residents more-than-doubled, from 6,875 to 14,870. During that same time, residents’ mean per-return AGI grew over eight-fold, from $38,339 to $312,442. (Graph 1)

As noted above, the 2019 mean per-return income figure was a record high not only for Teton County, but for any county in any year in the nation’s history.

The 30 year average annual growth rates were:

• Tax returns filed: 2.6%
• Mean total AGI: 7.2%
• Mean wage income: 4.8%
• Mean non-wage income: 8.6%

As a point of comparison, over this same 30 year period the average annual growth rate for the S&P 500 was 7.8%; for inflation, it was 2.4%. (Graph 2)

Teton County v. the rest of America

Comparing Teton County to the rest of America, two 2019 figures are especially striking.

First, between 2018 and 2019, Teton County’s mean per-return AGI rose by $50,942 (19.5%). During that same time, America’s mean per-return AGI fell from $75,695 to $75,694, a drop of $1 (0.0%)

As a point of comparison, in 2019 40% of all US counties – a total of 1,263 – had a mean per-return income of under $50,942; i.e., their mean per-return income was smaller than Teton County’s 2018-2019 increase alone.

Second, in 2019, Teton County’s mean per-return income figure of $312,442 was over four times greater than the national average of $75,694. To put that figure in perspective, let’s quickly return to the aforementioned gap between nation-leading Jackson Hole and second-place New York City.

in 2019, Jackson Hole’s mean per-return AGI was essentially $100,000 greater than New York City’s; to be precise, $99,908. In contrast, a nearly-identical $99,732 gap separated second-place New York City and 63rd place Delaware County, Ohio, a wealthy suburban area bordering Columbus OH.

Same dollar difference. One place between us and New York. Sixty two places between New York and Delaware County.

Historically, the only county that has come even close to matching Teton County’s income has been New York, NY. New York led Teton County until 1994. Since then, Teton County’s per-return income has exceeded New York’s every year save two: 2009 and 2011. (Graph 3)

People moving out; people moving in

One of the many sources of angst washing over Jackson Hole is a sense that the community is being decimated by turnover, with new arrivals pricing out long-time residents. While IRS migration data shed some light on this, please note that we won’t know the extent of COVID-related migration until 2020’s data are released a year from now.

In its reporting, the IRS lumps all taxpayers into three migration-related categories:

• Non-migrants; i.e., people who live in the same county two years in a row.
• In-migrants; e.g., those who lived outside of Teton County in 2018, and in Teton County in 2019.
• Out-migrants; e.g., those who lived in Teton County in 2018, and outside Teton County in 2019.

Migration data go back to 1990-1991, with income data provided from 1993 on. Broadly speaking, during those 28 years Teton County has experienced three migration phases, roughly coinciding with the past three decades.

Phase I was the 1990s. Call this the “population growth” phase. Each year, hundreds more households moved to Teton County than left, and the newcomers made about as much money as those already living here. Which was about twice as much as those leaving Teton County.

Phase II was the 2000s. Call this the “stasis” phase. Far fewer people moved here, and all three income figures – non-migrant, in-migrant, and out-migrant – were about the same at the end of the decade as they were at the beginning.

Phase III was the 2010s. Call this the “income growth” phase. This past decade was hallmarked by two qualities: volatility in migration patterns, and a huge explosion in income growth. It was also the first decade in which, for every year, the income earned by in-migrants was at least twice that of out-migrants.

In 2019, the mean per-return income for Teton County’s non-migrants was $169,719. For in-migrants, it was $265,413; for out-migrants it was $115,134. To put that latter figure in context, in 2019 only 49 US counties – 1.6% – had mean per-return incomes higher than that of the households leaving Teton County.

Combined, the migration-related data seem to support our migration-related angst, not to mention the quip about billionaires crowding out millionaires. (Graph 4)

Charitable giving: actual and potential

The IRS has made charitable contribution data available since 2010. Each year, Teton County has recorded the nation’s highest per-return charitable contribution figure. 2019’s $33,710 was the highest per-return contribution figure ever recorded, a full 72% higher than Teton County’s 2015 figure of $19,646 (the previous high).

Overall, in 2019 Teton County residents claimed 10.8% of their total AGI as charitable contribution. This, too, led the nation, the first time we’d done so. (Graph 5)

This extraordinary generosity raises two obvious questions.

First, how much of residents’ giving goes to local nonprofits?

Unfortunately, there is no direct way of answering that question. We can surmise, however, that because Teton County residents claimed a total of $501 million in charitable donations in 2019, most of residents’ giving is targeted at nonprofits outside the community (as total charitable contributions to local nonprofits are too small for a figure as large as $501 million to make sense).

Second, do residents have additional giving capacity?

At one level, it doesn’t seem possible, for as noted above, in 2019 Teton County led the nation in both mean donation amount and donations as a percentage of AGI.

That noted, it’s also true that between 2018 and 2019, residents more-than-doubled their total charitable giving. They also donated a much bigger percentage of their AGI than before.

Equally intriguing, until 2019 Teton County residents donated a smaller percentage of their AGI than did residents of some other counties.

More striking still, Teton County has never led the nation in percentage of non-wage income donated to charities, and has never come even close. In 2019, we were 9th in the nation in charitable donations as a percentage of non-wage income; before then, we barely averaged being in the top 1,000 of all counties.

Graph 6 compares Teton County residents’ charitable donation levels as a percentage of non-wage income to two benchmarks:

• each year’s leading county; and
• the state of Utah (which annually leads all states in its percentage of non-wage income donated to charity).

Bottom line? If Teton County’s already-generous charitable givers donated their investment income at the same levels as residents of the nation’s leading county and/or state, they’d have donated several hundred million more dollars annually than they actually did.

Combine this with the big leap in residents’ donations between 2018 and 2019, it seems likely that Teton County’s residents have greater charitable giving capacity than is currently being realized.

America’s greatest income inequality

As I first reported many years ago, historically Teton County has had the nation’s greatest income inequality. In 2019, this streak continued.

Since 2010, the IRS has broken every county’s tax returns into income brackets, with the highest bracket recording returns with AGIs of $200,000 or more.

In Teton County in 2019, 2,630 returns – 18% – had AGIs of $200,000 or more. These returns had a mean per-return income of $1,5 million, and accounted for 85% of the community’s collective income. The 82% of returns with AGIs of under $200,000 had a mean per-return income of $56,909, 1/26 that of those earning $200,000 and more. (Graph 7)

And again, these figures end in 2019; i.e., before Jackson Hole’s influx of COVID-19 migrants. As a result, these inequality figures have almost certainly grown in the past two years.

Observations

Sustainability involves three types of capital: environmental, economic, and social. As 2021 flows into 2022, Jackson Hole is unique in two of them: we sit at the center of the largest generally-intact ecosystem in the lower 48, and we have the highest mean per-return income of any county in American history.

Moving beyond 2022, however, it’s not clear whether we will retain both of these unique qualities.

Economically, there’s no doubt about Jackson Hole’s future. Given COVID-related migration, the worldwide explosion of remote working, and Wyoming’s tax-friendly legal structure, Teton County will clearly continue to enjoy record-setting wealth.

Much less certain, however, is whether we can maintain our environmental health.

We face what I’ve come to think of as the “Eco/Eco Dilemma.” The first “Eco” is Economic Development; the second is Ecosystem Health. The dilemma lies in the sad fact that, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, every place on Earth that has developed a successful industrial or post-industrial economy has, in the process, compromised the health of its ecosystem.

The one exception? Contemporary Jackson Hole and, more broadly, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

So what might happen?

On the one hand, Jackson Hole sits at the heart of the largest generally-intact ecosystem in the lower 48. Further, ecosystem stewardship is the foundation of our Comp Plan. Better still, we’re acting on that commitment – most recently through the creation of the town’s Ecosystem Stewardship position. This is truly great stuff.

On the other hand, there’s the Eco/Eco Dilemma.

In particular, recent growth patterns strongly suggest that the Tetons region – especially the counties absorbing Jackson Hole’s growth-related pressures – will succumb to the same pressures that have compromised ecosystems across the planet for the last 250 years. Indeed, despite Jackson Hole’s location at the headwaters of the Snake and Columbia river basins, two local streams are currently classified as “impaired” by Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality – not a good omen.

Making matters more complicated still, because no place on Earth has ever figured out how to solve the Eco/Eco Dilemma – i.e., ever figured out how to simultaneously develop a successful contemporary economy and maintain a healthy ecosystem – there is no blueprint for Jackson Hole to follow in its quest to “preserve and protect the area’s ecosystem.”

Without a blueprint, what will it take for us to solve the problem on our own? Two things:

• A shared sense we’re in this together; and
• A shared sense of the opportunity at hand.

We’re in this together

Throughout much of its history, living in Jackson Hole required making sacrifices. For some residents, this meant forsaking income and career opportunities. For others, it was being away from family and friends; for still others, not having access to cultural and consumer opportunities. Something about the place, however, made those sacrifices worth it, and that sense of shared sacrifice knit the community together.

Over the past 30 years or so, though, changes in technology, the economy, transportation, and mores have steadily eroded the need to make sacrifices. As a result, today it’s possible to live in Jackson Hole and truly “have it all” – an extraordinary lifestyle in an extraordinary setting without making any meaningful sacrifices.

Well, at least some of us can have it all. But when 18% of households are making 85% of the community’s income, not everyone is having it all. Far from it.

So if a sense of shared sacrifice can no longer knit us together, what can? In my view, our best opportunity is to collectively commit ourselves to solving the Eco/Eco Dilemma; to collectively commit ourselves to figuring out how we can continue to have both a thriving economy and a thriving ecosystem. For unless we can do that, we put at grave risk all that makes this region and community exceptional.

The opportunity at hand

Solving the Eco/Eco Dilemma may be an audacious goal, but our region’s history is replete with examples of people and organizations not just pursuing audacious goals, but achieving them. More striking still, these efforts have occurred in 50 year cycles, and we’re coming to the end of the most recent one.

In particular:

• March 1, 2022 will mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. In the 1870s, creating a national park was an audacious idea, if not a truly radical one. Yet today we see it as one of history’s great no-brainers.
• In the 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. began the process of buying 35,000 acres in the Jackson Hole valley, which eventually became part of Grand Teton National Park. Again, a truly radical idea. Again, an idea appropriate to the times. Again, an idea which has more-than-stood the test of time.
• In the 1970s, the first conservation easements were placed on Jackson Hole properties. Viewed as radical at the time, the concept has become so broadly accepted that today more than 30,000 acres of land is protected in Teton County, Wyoming, and another 67,000 acres in the counties surrounding Teton County.

Our current decade marks 50 years after the last big initiative was launched, presenting today’s generation of Tetons residents with our opportunity to leave a meaningful legacy.

To leave a meaningful legacy will require us to be bold, but the same was true for our forbears 50, 100, and 150 years ago. As we proceed, though, our boldness needs to be tempered with humility, in particular a recognition that everyone who has chosen to live in the Tetons region has, whether consciously or not, also chosen to be a steward of this extraordinary place; a place which, as the National Park Service Organic Act puts it, is worthy of being conserved and left “…unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Can we successfully address the Eco/Eco Dilemma? As was true for previous “50 year challenge” folks, the answer isn’t clear. Unfortunately, 250 years of precedent suggest the answer will be “no,” because after 250 years the Eco/Eco Dilemma remains unsolved. Making things more challenging still is the fact that seemingly every economic incentive is pushing us towards ecosystem-harming types of development; in particular towards providing increasingly expensive homes, services, and other products to the folks who can afford them.

Arguing for success, though, is Jackson Hole’s history of innovative conservation, and our deeply embedded passion for conservation.

This is an incredibly strong foundation upon which to build. Add in our extraordinary wealth and extraordinary philanthropy, as well as our potential for donating even more, and our generation has the raw materials in place for making a truly meaningful contribution to the region’s historic 50 year pattern.

To be clear-eyed about our opportunity, we won’t be able to figure out how to thrive economically and ecologically unless we consciously set out to do it. And even if we do, there’s no guarantee of success. But similar challenges were faced by those who founded Yellowstone, expanded Grand Teton, and set out to conserve Jackson Hole’s private lands. How incredibly great would it be for this generation to take its place among that pantheon?

As we move into 2022, here’s hoping we rise to the occasion.

Hello, and happy September!

Wyoming’s governor was recently in town. After his speech, an acquaintance greeted me by saying: “What are YOU doing about hotels? What are YOU doing about traffic?”

I thought: “Why hello! So nice to see you too!”

The encounter stuck with me because, while at one level the comments were about Jackson Hole’s growth-related problems, they also reflected two additional qualities shared by so many people: a deep passion for our community; and the deep-seated angst hallmarking our times.

Regardless of where I go or with whom I speak, people are anxious about both our world and the seemingly intractable nature of the issues we face. Whether local or global, whether dog parks or COVID or climate change, we live in an era chockablock with great passion and great fears.

Reflecting on this, I began to wonder about the root causes of our manifold concerns. One hypothesis I thought worth exploring was how quickly Jackson Hole is changing, and whether that might be contributing to locals’ angst.

In particular, my focus was on how our community’s economy is evolving from location-dependent – i.e., dominated by tourism and informed by its values – to location-neutral; i.e., an economy hallmarked by income derived from investments, finance, and professional services. The result is the essay below.

Teaser

To lure you in, here’s the most interesting fact I uncovered in my research.

Out of America’s 3,143 counties, in 2019 Teton County ranked 4th in per capita jobs in the Finance & Insurance sector (the two are lumped together by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, and 2019 is the most recent year for which data are available).

In first place was New York County, New York; i.e., the island of Manhattan. In 2019, the world’s financial capital had 0.28 Finance & Insurance jobs per resident, most of them in finance.

In second and third places were two midwest counties housing major insurance companies. Their 0.17 and 0.14 per capita Finance & Insurance jobs were mostly in insurance.

And then was Jackson Hole, with 0.13. What’s crazy about this is that there’s no obvious explanation for our extreme concentration of finance jobs. Yes we have a handful of insurance brokers. And yes we have several commercial banks and trust companies. But so, too, do hundreds of other places.

Yet somehow, per capita, we had more Finance & Insurance jobs than 3,139 other counties, including major financial centers such as Boston, Charlotte, San Francisco, and Minneapolis (5th, 12th, 13th, and 14th respectively).

And as an added bonus, between 2001-2019 Teton County ranked 13th nationally in our growth in Finance & Insurance jobs.

Why do we rank so high? My theory is that Teton County’s extraordinary wealth has become both a magnet and incubator for jobs in finance. And as finance grows in importance, that industry’s location-neutral ethos is increasingly clashing with our community’s historic location-centric character. Hence one major contributor to local angst.

One Final Note

At 5:00 pm MDT this Friday, September 17, the donation period closes for this year’s Old Bill’s Fun Run. Rather than send out a generic appeal, my hope is that this newsletter will convey the message “If you appreciate this kind of analysis, please donate to my Charture Institute through Old Bill’s.” PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

The beauty of Old Bill’s is that donations are matched, historically at a rate of around 50%.

Remember, the deadline for donating match-eligible funds is Friday, September 17 at 5:00 pm MDT. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE

As always, thank you for your interest and support.

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

Elephants: In the Room and In the Grass

Let’s talk about elephants. The metaphorical ones. Not the pink ones associated with the DTs, but the ones that occupy living rooms. The ones which, according to the Swahili proverb, trample the grass around them when they fight.

Before we do, though, consider some background data.

Among America’s 3,143 counties, Teton County has the highest per capita income. It’s not even close: in 2019, our per capita income was $229,825, or 16% higher than second-place New York, NY’s. It was also over four times greater than America’s overall per capita income of $56,490. (Graph 1)

Graph 1

Teton County ranked first because we also led the nation in per capita investment income: $161,411 in 2019. In fact, our per capita investment income figure was so big that it alone would have ranked us second in the nation in per capita total income. (Graph 2)

Graph 2

Teton County has led the nation in per capita investment income every year since 1998. We have also led the nation in per capita total income every year since 2004, when a huge jump in the community’s investment income overcame New York City’s big advantage in wage income. (Graph 3)

Graph 3

Inevitably, all this investment income attracted finance-related businesses. As a result, between 2001 and 2019 Teton County’s fastest-growing employment sector was Finance. (Finance-specific employment data were not available until 2001 – Graph 4)

Graph 4

As a further result, in Teton County today more people are employed in Finance than in Construction, Government, Retail, Professional Services, and all other sectors except Real Estate and Lodging & Dining. (Graph 5)

Graph 5

Graph 6 helps explain why.

The math is stark: In Teton County in 2019, the average Finance job paid more than four average tourism-related jobs combined. It also paid more than 2.5 average construction jobs.

And while location-neutral Professional Services jobs don’t pay as well as those in Finance, they still pay gobs more than those in the “traditional” Jackson Hole job categories of Tourism, Construction, and Government.

Put another way, Jackson Hole’s location-neutral sources of income – investments, and jobs in Finance and Professional Services – are far, far, far more lucrative than our traditional location-dependent jobs in Tourism, Construction, and Government.

Also worth noting is that these data are from 2019, so don’t capture COVID’s effects. When the data for 2020 and beyond come out, they will show that COVID accelerated these trends, greatly increasing the disparity between Jackson Hole’s location-neutral economy and its traditional, location-dependent economy.

Graph 6

Two Critical Implications

From this perspective, consider two critical implications of the rise of Jackson Hole’s location-neutral economy.

Constraints

First, changes in the economy and advances in technology and transportation have made Jackson Hole’s geographic isolation less forbidding. This has led to increasing numbers of people moving to the region. As they have, Jackson Hole’s physical, political, and land ownership-related constraints have loomed ever-larger – simply put, there is increasingly less space in which to put everyone and everything that wants to be here.

In a constrained world, those with more resources tend to win. And in the constrained world that is Jackson Hole, the location-neutral economy has all sorts of resource advantages over the location-dependent one.

Why? The most important reason is that location-dependent and location-neutral industries have wildly different business models. As traditionally practiced, tourism – that supremely location-dependent industry – needs to employ a ton of people at low wages. Who, in turn, require abundant cheap housing. But when it takes four Tourism jobs to equal the pay of one Finance job, Tourism employees simply can’t compete. Nor can they compete with those making lots and lots of investment income.

The result? The kind of help wanted problems we’ve been experiencing. In turn, these are occurring because people with location-dependent jobs are being displaced by those with location-neutral incomes, who are buying up record amounts of housing at record high prices.

Billionaire gentrification

Second, like attracts like. Over time, more and more well-to-do people have been attracted to Jackson Hole because the well-to-do people who originally moved here started a process of what we might call “billionaire gentrification” – a few people of means coming here made it safer for the next wave, who in turn made it safer for the next wave, and so on.

The gentrifiers’ wealth inevitably attracted people working in finance, leading to Teton County’s aforementioned #13 ranking in Finance & Insurance job growth. (Our 5.7% annual growth rate in Finance & Insurance jobs was over six times faster than that of 1,412th-place New York’s rate.)

We also saw significant growth in Professional Services jobs, further accelerating the shift away from our traditional location-dependent economy toward our new, increasingly location-neutral one.

COVID Hasn’t Helped

COVID has only accelerated Jackson Hole’s billionaire gentrification process, which in turn has put additional strains on our tourism businesses – be it in finding employees, housing employees, or maintaining their financial growth targets.

To address these challenges, many of our location-dependent businesses and industries – including the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, St. John’s Health, restaurant groups, hotel groups, and construction firms – are vertically integrating or otherwise consolidating. Another tactic COVID has forced upon many businesses is to see just how lean their operations can become.

Such strategies can only be pushed so far, though. As a result, local location-dependent businesses are going to increasingly struggle as their traditional approaches to growth and profitability face myriad challenges and constraints, including:

• competition with location-neutral businesses (hello Chase and First Republic banks);
• competition with growth-oriented national chains (hello Black Diamond, REI, Target, and Whole Foods);;
• community backlash against more visitors (especially as our location-neutral economy grows, and residents become less dependent on tourism for their livelihoods); and
• the viability of the ecosystem on whose health tourism depends.

Back to the Elephants

Which brings us back to elephants.

In this metaphor, there are two elephants in the room: Jackson Hole’s location-dependent economy and its location-neutral economy. We know they’re there, and of course tourism gets a lot of attention. Receiving less attention, however, is our location-neutral economy; receiving even less is how the two are increasingly competing for the same limited resources of people, housing, and land.

Which, in turn, leads to the Swahili proverb: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

While businesses in both the location-dependent and location-neutral economies share a focus on profitably and Return on Investment (ROI), their very different business models are increasingly incompatible. This is especially true when it comes to how Jackson Hole uses its land, whether for housing, bricks-and-mortar businesses, or hosting visitors. As a rule of thumb, location-dependent businesses need to have more employees on site, and more people coming here as customers. In contrast, location-neutral businesses’ employees and customers can be anywhere. Throw in much greater profit margins for location-neutral businesses, and you have the recipe for a resource-driven clash which increasingly favors location-neutral industries.

As that battle escalates, things will become increasingly difficult for our location-dependent industries, which in turn will make it harder for all of us – particularly those who came to Jackson Hole for reasons other than maximizing ROI – to maintain a shared sense of community and comity.

Put another way, by definition location-neutral industries are agnostic towards their communities, while the fate of location-dependent industries is deeply entwined with that of their locales. As these differences play out, one result can be trampled grass.

Extending the metaphor, in our local version of two elephants fighting, the grass is both the region’s ecosystem and its residents of modest means.

Regarding the former, how will our already-under-pressure ecosystem respond to our rapid growth in visitation? This summer, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and the Jackson Hole Airport all set new activity records, and the trend shows no signs of abating. Why? Among other reasons, shrinking revenues from other sources is driving airlines, tour operators, and state and local governments to ramp up their marketing of our region, leaving it up to us to figure out how to deal with the growing number of visitors. This may help the tourism industry, but at what cost to the community at large?

Regarding the latter, right now it seems that the only folks who can afford to buy in Jackson Hole – and increasingly in our region – are people with location-neutral incomes. If this continues, things do not bode well – not just for our location-dependent industries, but for those people who don’t make a ton of money yet form the warp and woof our community and its character.

These clashes between location-neutral and location-dependent industries are already occurring, and will only get worse as the two elephants compete for the region’s increasingly constrained resources. And not just locally. Nationally and globally, this same location-dependent v. location-neutral clash is occurring, producing similar dynamics and similar stresses for both the elephants and the “grass people” affected by the battles.

Looking to the future, are we “grass people” and our “grass communities” destined to be little more than collateral damage, the victims of a titanic struggle for economic dominance? Possibly. But because we can see it coming, we can also try to set up guardrails to protect the things we value from forces that can too often be indifferent to the locations in which they operate.

That is our challenge. It’s also our opportunity. Game on.

Thank You for Your Support

Please support CoThrive, 22 in 21, and Charture’s many other efforts by making a donation through Old Bill’s Fun Run?

Click here to go to the Charture-specific donation page.

Hello, and happy August!

In many ways, Jackson Hole is special but not unique.

This reality was driven home to me anew recently, as I compressed two years of untaken vacation into about eight weeks. My trips took me as far south as Flagstaff, Arizona, and as far north as Denali National Park.

Whether as big as San Francisco or as small as Talkeetna, Alaska, every place I visited was experiencing labor shortages, resulting in stores and restaurants shortening their hours and/or closing some days.

Most places I visited were also experiencing record levels of visitation. Certainly this is Jackson Hole’s reality, and the resulting pressures are the focus of the essay below.

• PS: I Need Your Help, Please
• Who is Benefiting from Our Current Boom?
• What’s Good For GM…
• Thank You for Your Support

Two other thoughts frame this newsletter.

First, what’s going on in Jackson Hole (and Moab and Flagstaff and Lake Tahoe and Idaho’s panhandle and…) isn’t new, but instead an acceleration of phenomena occurring before COVID-19 struck.

Rather than fundamentally change things, COVID instead illuminated a number of previously overlooked problems, challenges, and trends now engulfing – if not overwhelming – every desirable place to live. And as is true for all these other places, Jackson Hole doesn’t have the first clue what to do about it.

Second, like all the places I visited, Jackson Hole not only has far fewer workers than jobs, it doesn’t have enough housing for those workers. For example, between March 1 and July 31, the Jackson Hole News&Guide ran a total of 20,581 column inches of Help Wanted ads versus 163 column inches of Rental Housing ads, a ratio of 126:1. Given that there are 112 column inches per page, this means that, over the past five months, the average paper has had one-and-one-eighth pages of Help Wanted ads for every one inch of Rental Housing ads.

All of which raises three questions for me.

First, is Jackson Hole’s problem one of scarcity or abundance?

By this I mean: Do we have too few workers and too little housing, or too many jobs and too much economic activity? Conventional wisdom suggests the former, but arguably the “we’re too busy” explanation is just the other side of the same coin.

Second, is tourism’s business model still workable?

As an industry, tourism’s basic model is to hire a ton of people at relatively low wages. That this model is struggling – not just in Jackson Hole but in literally every other place I visited in the last eight weeks – suggests a systemic problem, one being exposed by this summer’s travel-related pressures.

Thinking bigger still, is there perhaps a fundamental problem with our larger economic system? The large-and-growing issues surrounding America’s large-and-growing income and wealth inequality suggest there might be.

Finally, in Jackson Hole, is the tail of commerce wagging the dog of community?

As the essay below suggests, Jackson Hole is experiencing record-setting everything: visitation, taxable sales, traffic, and so much more. Yet save for tourists, few people seem happy. Not employees. Not business owners. Not seasonal residents nor locals.

Which begs the question: We may be booming, but to what end? Are we a better, happier place because we’re raking in money? And not just from tourists, but from our exploding investment, real estate, and remote-working economies?

When even business owners tell me we’re too busy, one has to wonder.

This newsletter is not the tool for answering these questions. But at a minimum, if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by this summer – heck, by the last couple of years – perhaps you can find some solace in knowing you aren’t alone in feeling that way.

As always, thanks for reading, thanks for your on-going support, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

PS: I Need Your Help, Please

In all the work I do, my goal is to offer new insights into important issues, and do so in an easy-to-understand fashion.

With luck, I succeed more often than not. But what never fails to surprise me is how much time and effort it takes to do the work. For example, it took me a week to produce this newsletter – to find the data, make sense of them, create the graphics, figure out what in the world I wanted to say, and then say it in what I hope is a coherent and accessible fashion.

The same is true for the other work I take on. To offer another example, the half-day 22 in 21: Tourism conference I staged in May took several weeks to pull together, and that was after several months of preliminary work.

I anticipate far more of the same during the upcoming months, when I plan to stage two or three more 22 in 21 conferences, as well as return to a regular newsletter schedule (I suspended them during my summer travels).

I mention all this because this work takes time, time is money, and I simply cannot do the work without financial support.

As is the case for so many Jackson Hole non-profits, my Charture Institute relies on donations given through Old Bill’s Fun Run, for the matching funds Old Bill’s provides are extraordinarily valuable to small organizations like Charture.

Will you please support CoThrive, 22 in 21, and Charture’s many other efforts by making a donation through Old Bill’s Fun Run? Click here to go to the Charture-specific donation page.

Thank you so very much.

Who is Benefiting from Our Current Boom?

Stars live for millions of years, but even they are not infinitely sustainable.

Most stars are fueled by hydrogen, which nuclear fusion converts to helium. Eventually, as their hydrogen supply diminishes, stars start burning that helium, which in turn triggers a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon: the star’s interior begins to contract into its core while, simultaneously, its exterior grows larger and shines brighter.

This marks the “red giant” phase of a star’s life, one which eventually comes to a quick and spectacular end when the star collapses in on itself after burning through the hydrogen, helium, and other resources sustaining its existence.

I mention this because red giants came to mind when I received Teton County’s most recent economic indicators. Specifically, in June 2021:

• Teton County’s merchants sold an all-time record amount of taxable goods;
• Teton County’s roads carried an all-time record number of vehicles for June (June 2021’s record traffic counts were quickly eclipsed by July 2021’s);
• Both Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks set June visitation records (July 2021’s figures will almost certainly be higher); and
• The Jackson Hole Airport set June records for both commercial airline passengers and private plane activity (ditto).

Graphs 1a and 1b shows just how crazy June 2021 was – not only was every previous June record smashed, but most of June’s numbers set or came close to setting all-time highs, regardless of month. Yet July and August are supposed to be our busy months…

At least this year, June became the new July, leaving July to explore uncharted seas.

Graph 1a

Graph 1b

June’s sales tax numbers are worthy of a little extra attention because, as Graph 2 shows, June 2021’s taxable sales were 6.8% higher than those in September, 2019, the previous record-holding month. And as Graph 3 shows, June’s sales were so strong that they powered our economy well beyond where we were when COVID hit.

Graph 2

Graph 3

While our sales tax boom was clearly correlated with our recent tourism boom (Graph 4), if we want to understand Jackson Hole’s taxable economy it’s actually more instructive to look at what happened during the COVID downturn.

Graph 4

Using the classifications provided by the state, Teton County’s taxable sales can be broken down into seven basic categories. In descending dollar order, these are:

• Core Retail (i.e., storefront retail)
• Lodging
• All Other
• Restaurants
• Construction
• Car Sales
• On-line Shopping. (Graph 5)

Graph 5

What’s notable about this graph is that the top four categories – Core Retail, Lodging, All Other, and Restaurants – were all clearly affected by COVID. And to state the obvious, Core Retail, Lodging, and Restaurants form the foundation of our tourism economy.

Yet the remaining three categories didn’t decline during COVID. This suggests that to fully understand what and who are driving our taxable economy, we need to look at the data through another lens. Graph 6 tries to do this.

Graph 6

As Graph 6 suggests, while tourism is driving the recent jump in sales, the thing that really mattered during COVID (and even before) were the purchases made by locals, specifically on-line purchases and those made by folks building, remodeling, and/or furnishing homes in Jackson Hole. And when combined with Graph 7, it becomes pretty clear that while COVID affected the most visible part of our taxable economy – Tourism – the other half of our economy weathered COVID just fine, thank you.

Graph 7

Then consider two other points.

First, taxable sales account for only about one-sixth of Jackson Hole’s economy: investment income is a much bigger slice of our economic pie than taxable sales; real estate sales are about equal to taxable sales; and we have a large and growing “Zoom” economy.

Second, this other five-sixths of our economy exploded last year.

Add it all together, and it becomes easier to see why, for all its awfulness, COVID left the local economy relatively unscathed.

What’s Good For GM…

To return to the red giant metaphor, not only has the local economy recovered from its COVID-induced coma, but by all appearences is now growing at an explosive rate. The question is, at what cost?

In 1953, Charles Wilson, the then-president of General Motors, famously (although apocryphally) told Congress that “What’s good for GM is good for the country.”

By equating economic health with overall national health, Mr. Wilson encapsulated capitalism’s philosophical ideal of a successful society: Society thrives when every individual and organization maximizes their own economic self-interest.

Throughout its history, Jackson Hole has been home to folks who embrace this view. However, it’s also been home to many people who don’t, feeling instead the community should focus on the collective good, both human and environmental.

Tension has always existed between the two camps, but to date our geographic isolation and the relatively low demands on our natural and human resources have allowed for an uneasy truce. As money and people continue to pour into the region, though, that balance is failing. As a result, I think the next several years will be ones defined by increasingly pitched battles between economic self-maximizers and those who feel otherwise.

In fact, this battle is already heating up, as evidenced by the depth and breadth of concerns dominating locals’ conversations. Traffic. Housing. Real estate. Construction. Income inequality. Tourism. Crowds. Not only does the list goes on, but considering each item independently misses the unfortunate synergy between them.

A synergy so extreme that, as I noted earlier, even business owners are telling me that Jackson Hole is too busy this summer.

Which in turn raises the meta-question: Our economy may be booming, but who is benefiting from that boom? Surely some folks, but I’m not sure whom.

What I am sure of, though, is that our community is home to a large and growing contingent of anxious and worried and burned-out folks. Workers and shopkeepers and residents who share not just a passion for this place, but a sense that there is more to life – especially life in the Tetons – than simply working or, more broadly, catering to economic exigencies.

Something has to give, and I’m not sure what it will be. I fear, though, that the process will not be pretty.

Closing where I began, the great concern for us as a community is whether in its quest to grow – an effort abetted by entities ranging from international airlines and tourism companies to local websites and lifestyle magazines – Jackson Hole’s tourism economy has become like a red giant, an entity shining brightly because it is in the process of using up the community’s essential resources in a gloriously unsustainable fashion.

Our environment. Our people. Our sense of community. All of these essential resources and more are threatened by the seemingly insatiable needs of not just our tourism economy, but the related “Zoom town” economy which, in a bitterly ironic way, is sucking up many of the resources tourism needs to succeed.

A question I’ve heard repeatedly this summer is “Have we passed the point of no return?” Another is a variation on that theme: “Are we a community or just an economy? More than just an economy? Different than just an economy? Better than just an economy?”

Put more simply, are we as special as we think we are? Or are we notable only because tourists flock here, and because Wyoming’s tax laws have allowed us to become the richest county in the richest country in the history of the world?

By myself, I can’t answer these questions, nor address the issues they raise. I firmly believe, however, that collectively we can. As we consider our future, I know of no more important task.

Thank You for Your Support

Please support CoThrive, 22 in 21, and Charture’s many other efforts by making a donation through Old Bill’s Fun Run? Click here to go to the Charture-specific donation page.

Hello, and happy May!

Isn’t spring grand!

Over the last several weeks, the natural world has been blooming in front of my eyes. For example, two mornings ago I awoke to be greeted by the leaf in the picture below – it hadn’t been there when the sun went down the night before.

Spring is also bringing a bumper crop of issues into my life. Some are town council-related; others are simply the warp and woof of my professional and personal life.

Add it all together and you get this newsletter, a mash-up of some new ideas, some new data, and some fresh takes on subjects I’ve written about in past newsletters.

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As I noted in my most recent newsletter, this coming Wednesday, May 12, from 8:00 am to noon, I am hosting the latest in my on-going series of “22 in 21” conferences. The focus of the event will be tourism, with the theme: “Undertourism. Overtourism. Ideal Tourism. What Is It, and How Do We Know?”

There is no charge, but donations are encouraged.

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Three items:

• Reflections On a Cup of Coffee;
• The Coming Employment Shortage; and
• What Hath the Pandemic Wrought?

As always, thank you for your interest, feedback, and support.

Stay healthy, and all the best!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

(Relatively) Quick Hits

Reflections On a Cup of Coffee

A few days ago, I was interviewed by the US correspondent for Verdens Gang, Norway’s biggest newspaper. He was in town researching a story about America’s wealthiest county, and asked me to explain Jackson Hole’s dynamics.

We met at a coffee shop, and at one point he asked what local government was doing to help address the fact that, along with having America’s highest per-capita income, Teton County also has America’s greatest income inequality. I explained that our options were rather limited on that score, because while Jackson Hole’s economy is firmly planted in the 21st century, Wyoming’s mechanisms for funding state and local government haven’t changed much since they were developed in the late 1960s.

For example, of the $3.80 billion Teton County residents reported in Adjusted Gross Income in 2018 (the most recent year available), exactly none of it was taxed. To put that $3.8 billion in perspective, sales taxes are the biggest single source of income for local government, and in 2018 Teton County’s merchants sold a total of $1.54 billion in taxable goods – just 40% of residents’ combined incomes.

The more powerful example was this.

I asked the reporter how much he paid for his cup of coffee. He replied: “$2.00.” In response, I observed that the 12 cents in sales tax he paid for that coffee put infinitely more into local government coffers than the $0.00 in taxes paid on Teton County’s $1.8 billion in 2020 real estate sales.

He had a hard time fathoming that. I do too.

I also have a hard time fathoming how any local real estate agent can claim, with anything approaching a straight face, that implementing a real estate transfer tax might slow down or otherwise harm the local real estate market.

The current market is hallmarked by offers – sometimes higher than the asking price – being made on homes the potential buyer has never seen. When money is being splashed around in that fashion, it’s simply not credible to claim that the extra cost of a real estate transfer tax will make any difference to anyone.

Put another way, those arguing against a real estate transfer tax are making an ideological argument, not one based on economics or an actual understanding of Jackson Hole’s real estate market.

The Coming Employment Shortage

Each page in the Jackson Hole News&Guide is 16 inches high. In the classified ads section, there are 7 columns of ads. Multiply those 7″ by 16″ of height, and each full page has 112 column inches of ads.

As I write this, the most recent edition of the News&Guide was its May 5, 2021. Going back to 2018, the table below shows the column inches of Help Wanted and Rental Housing ads in each year’s first issue of May, as well as the cumulative column inches for the 52 weeks ending with that issue.

The thing to note, of course, is how little Rental Housing is being advertised. The May 5, 2021 issue had 72% fewer inches of Rental Housing ads than its counterpart the year before. Looking at the longer-term trend, the most recent 52 week running total is 61% down.

As Graph 1 shows, Rental Housing ads started to decline in July, 2020, about the time that Jackson Hole’s real estate market kicked into overdrive last year (in the first half of 2020, local real estate sales totaled around $600 million; during the second half, the figure was twice that: $1.2 billion).

While it’s not proof-positive, the timing of the decline lends weight to the argument that the surge in real estate sales is displacing a growing number of folks from their long-time rentals.

Graph 1

What’s also striking is that the ads suggest employers are getting increasingly anxious about their summer 2021 staffing situations.

Seasonal employment – particularly in summer – is the foundation of Jackson Hole’s tourism economy. (Looking to the future, it’s not clear to me whether local employers will be able to continue relying on seasonal employees. That, however, is an issue to explore in a future newsletter.) As Graph 2 suggests, this year more employers have started advertising earlier in the season, with every newspaper since mid-February having more Help Wanted ads than its counterpart in 2019.

Even more striking is this. Over the most recent 13 weeks, the total column inches of Help Wanted ads is 26% higher than the same period in 2019. Not the pandemic-influenced 2020, but the strong-economy 2019. Also comparing 2021 to 2019, the total column inches of Rental Housing ads is down 79%.

While there are no definitive estimates of how many people might visit Jackson Hole this summer, the few extant data suggest we will not only see more people, but that they will start arriving sooner in the spring and staying longer into the fall. If that’s the case, our systems will be taxed – perhaps at record levels – in at least three different ways:

• Our roads, hotel capacity, and other components of physical infrastructure will likely be pushed to their limits;
• Our businesses and, by extension, community at large will be pushed to their limits by too-few employees being available to handle likely-record numbers of tourists; and, of course,
• As was the case in the summer of 2020, our ecosystem will be stressed by large numbers of people looking to recreate, camp (short- and long-term), and otherwise escape a year’s worth of COVID-related confinement.

How we will deal with these challenges is not at all clear.

Graph 2

What Hath the Pandemic Wrought?

As I see it, the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t fundamentally alter anything happening in Jackson Hole. What it did do, though was pour gasoline on already-burning fires of growth and change. Today, those growth-and-change fires are major conflagrations, ones threatening to fundamentally change not just Jackson Hole’s economy and character, but those of the entire Tetons region.

The aforementioned real estate sales are one obvious indicator. What’s interesting to me, though, is that when real estate agencies report on the market, they focus only on the revenue side of the transactions, not the costs.

By this I mean that local real estate newsletters clearly reflect the agents’ glee over record numbers of sales for record-high prices. What they don’t discuss, however, is how those sales seem to be reducing the number of long-term, lower-cost long-term rentals, and what the implications of those changes might be for the local economy and our community character.

The real estate newsletters also avoid discussing how Jackson Hole’s boom is affecting the surrounding region.

In particular, the huge run-up in Jackson Hole’s real estate prices is spilling over into Wyoming’s Star Valley and Idaho’s Teton Valley. Both have been in the process of evolving from bedroom communities for Jackson Hole to places with their own free-standing economies, and here too the pandemic has hastened that process.

This subject is worthy of a much longer essay. For now, however, I’ll offer two other indicators of the changes sweeping over Jackson Hole.

Private planes

The Jackson Hole Airport is the only commercial airport in a national park, and one thing that has clearly changed with the pandemic is the mix of planes using the airport.

As it happens, I live about 10 miles south of the airport, right under the flight path of the most common approach for arriving planes. As a result, my gut sense has been that plane traffic has sharply increased in the past year or so.

A feeling which, it turns out, the data confirm. Daily plane traffic counts are available for the past few years, and as Graph 3 shows, between April 2018 and April 2020, the average number of flights per day increased about 13% (private plane traffic by about 5%, and commercial around 25%).

In the past year, however, while the 365 day rolling average number of commercial flights fell about 8%, the number of private jets and propeller flights has increased by nearly 1/3 (jets comprise the vast majority of these flights). Figuring the airport is open 15 hours/day, this means that, in the past year, on the typical day a private plane was flying into the Jackson Hole Airport every 15 minutes. At its peak the frequency was over twice that.

Looking ahead, there’s no reason to think the trend in private planes will change – it may flatten out; it more likely will grow. What will change, however, is the amount of commercial air traffic.

Until the more profitable business travel market rebounds, airlines are focusing on vacation-oriented destinations, and this summer Jackson Hole will be served by seven airlines, an all-time record. Similarly, there will be direct flights from 18 different cities, with at least 21 flights/day (peaking at 31 on Saturdays). All that, too, will be all-time records.

Providing yet another test of the community’s systems for handling crowds.

Graph 3

Taxable Sales

In the March edition of CoThrive, I suggested the pandemic’s effects on the local economy may be behind us. At least as far as our taxable sales economy, the most recent sales tax data confirm this.

For Jackson Hole, the pandemic formally struck on March 15, 2020, when COVID-19 caused the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort to shut down three weeks early. As a result, what had been on track to be a strong sales month ended up 23% below March 2019’s figure. As a further result, the March 2020 baseline was so low that the just-released March 2021 sales tax figures were a staggering 60% higher than the March 2020 figure.

Which, in turn, pulled the 12 month running total of taxable sales back up to essentially where it was before the pandemic hit.

How did this happen? Again, not because of a fundamental change in the local economy, but because the pandemic accelerated trends that were already occurring.

While Tourism-related sales are at early 2018 levels, over the past year people building, remodeling, and equipping new homes have spent so much money that the Build & Equip category of sales is more-than-offsetting the declines in Tourism-related sales. Throw in the prodigious amount of commercial construction occurring throughout the county, and Build & Equip is now the driver of Teton County’s taxable sales economy. (Graph 4)

Graph 4

As it actually has been for a while. As Graph 5 suggests, the Build & Equip economy has been growing faster than Tourism for several years. COVID-19 accelerated that difference, both because of a sharp increase in Build & Equip sales and a sharp decline in Tourism sales.

Graph 5

Concluding Thoughts

People who spend a collective $1.8 billion on local real estate are likely to want to spend even more to build on the lot they purchased, or remodel the older home they acquired, or at a minimum make purchases that will turn their new home into something that reflects their personality and interests. Combine that with rising prices for building materials and anecdotal evidence that everyone in the local building trades is super-busy for the foreseeable future, and it seems certain that the Build & Equip sector of the local economy will remain strong.

Then there’s tourism. If reality turns out to be anything close to the speculation about the coming tourism tsunami, this summer will also see a huge spike in Tourism-related taxable sales.

This line of thought raises so many interesting questions that no single newsletter could do them justice. That noted, I’ll offer one.

Assuming we set all sorts of records for sales tax revenues, what will be the cost? To the people doing the work? To the human and physical infrastructure? To ecosystem health?

Because we measure real estate sales, that industry can giddily report record sales figures. Similarly, because we measure taxable sales, we have a good sense of those figures, which in turn gives us a good sense of local government revenues.

But to state the obvious, there are costs associated with those revenues. And the simple reality is that we have no good tools – heck, we don’t even have any bad tools – for assessing the costs to the community of our taxable sales successes.

That’s not an issue we can address at the moment, but with luck events like my 22 in 21: Tourism will allow us to start contemplating these questions. Which, as I see it, is vital, for if we can’t successfully ask and answer such questions, the future of the community will be shaped by economic forces alone. And to understate the case, the future those forces will produce may not be the future desired by the community as a whole.

Overview

In Growth Begets Growth: Jackson Hole’s Evolving Taxable Economy in the Era of COVID, I draw four basic conclusions and identify two major challenges facing the community.

The four basic conclusions are:

• Economically, the pandemic is no longer a significant issue for Jackson Hole.
• Tourism is no longer driving Jackson Hole’s economic growth. Instead, growth itself is driving growth – not just in Jackson Hole, but across the greater Tetons region.
• Economics is dividing Jackson Hole into three increasingly incompatible tribes.
• Summer 2021 and beyond will place extraordinary growth-related stresses on not just Jackson Hole’s economy, but the community as a whole.

The two major challenges are:

• Maintaining the community’s character in the face of a rapidly-evolving economy.
• Preserving and protecting the area’s ecosystem

Each is explored below.

Four Conclusions

Conclusion #1: Economically, the pandemic is behind us

To be clear about what’s truly important, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a horrible toll on individuals, families, the nation, and the world. It’s wreaked havoc on not just the economy, but our communities, our physical and mental health, and pretty much every aspect of life. Very little of this has been good, or even neutral.

We must also recognize the pandemic is still raging. While the rapid growth in vaccinations is providing hope, COVID-19 is still sickening and killing people, still disrupting lives, and still threatening to come roaring back should we prematurely let down our guard.

All of this noted and honored, Jackson Hole’s overall economy hit its pandemic-driven nadir in mid-summer 2020, and by October was exceeding its 2019 pre-pandemic levels. Most notably, since bottoming out in September, taxable sales have regained 60% of their losses. At current growth rates, total taxable sales could be back at their pre-pandemic peak by mid-summer.

Graph 1

And it’s not just taxable sales. Graph 2 combines a variety of economic and tourism metrics, showing monthly changes in each between 2019 and 2020. By June every metric was improving; in each of 2020’s three final months, essentially every metric save commercial airline enplanements was ahead of its 2019 level.

Critically, while Jackson Hole’s collective economy is well on the way to recovery, many businesses and individuals are still struggling. At a minimum, they need our sympathy and concern; ideally they need our support.

Graph 2

Conclusion #2: Growth is driving our growth

While tourism remains the most important piece of Jackson Hole’s taxable economy, its relative importance has been waning for several years. In its place, economic growth is being driven by Build & Equip-related sales (i.e., residential development and its attendant purchases).

This is why, during 2002’s nine months of “pure pandemic” (i.e., April-December), Teton County’s taxable sales fell only 7%. Break the data into Tourism-related purchases versus Build & Equip-related purchases, and during those same nine months Tourism-related purchases fell 23%, while Build & Equip-related purchases rose 20%.

Graph 3

Taking a longer-term look, during the six years from 2013-2019 – i.e., before the pandemic – Tourism-related sales grew at a compounded annual rate of 8.8%, while Build & Equip sales grew at 12.0% per year. Expand the time frame to include the pandemic – i.e. from 2013-2020 – and the seven year compounded annual growth rate for Tourism falls to 4.0%, while the Build & Equip rate grows to 13.1%.

Graph 4

The fact that $1.8 billion worth of property was sold in Jackson Hole in 2020 suggests the growth in Build & Equip will not abate, but instead almost surely accelerate – the COVID migrants buying vacant lots will want to build on them, and the folks spending millions on new homes will want to furnish, refurbish or remodel them. And since money won’t be an object for many of these folks, all the pieces seem to be there for a continuing Build & Equip boom.

Two other factors will also likely to contribute to Build & Equip becoming increasingly important to the local economy. One is that like attracts like – the more COVID migrants and other well-to-do folks who move to Jackson Hole, the more attractive it will become to like-minded people.

The other factor is that most new Jackson Hole residents have no direct economic connection to Jackson Hole’s economy. As a result, they will be less likely to support tourism, especially at the ballot box (e.g., support will likely wane for the Lodging Tax and pro-tourism candidates). As that happens, it will become increasingly difficult for the Tourism industry to continue to grow at the rates it has become accustomed to and, in many cases, needs to meet its financial targets.

Conclusion #3: We’re dividing into three tribes

Among the other trends the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated is the division of Jackson Hole and the surrounding region into three economic tribes.

The first tribe is those involved in tourism, a group anxious to make up for the big losses they suffered during the pandemic. Happily for them, their prospects seem good – by all indications Americans are eager to travel, disinclined to go overseas, and especially interested in national parks.

The second tribe is those working in Build & Equip industries. Coming out of their best year in at least a decade, the Build & Equippers are eager to keep the good times going.

Finally, there’s Everyone Else. While those not involved in Tourism surely appreciate the amenities tourism makes possible, they also seem to be increasingly impatient with increasing crowds, worsening traffic, and the other consequences of a growing tourism industry.

All this lays bare an issue that has always been there for Jackson Hole, but has never reached critical mass – the lack of direct economic alignment between the three tribes.

For generations, the community’s consensus view was that the region’s economic health depended on a strong tourism base. This view was bolstered by the facts that: a) many residents had at least an indirect financial stake in tourism’s success, and b) all other economic activities were essentially ancillary to tourism.

As technology has rendered Jackson Hole’s geographic isolation less constricting, though, this consensus view has been eroding. With increasing velocity, Tourism’s importance to the community’s economy is diminishing, while other economic drivers are gaining ground (particularly investments and location-neutral jobs, which have no direct connection to either tourism or, more broadly, the community as a whole). As this shift continues, the community will need to develop a new consensus about both tourism and how we develop our remaining private lands.

Conclusion #4: We face extraordinary growth-related stresses

Several qualities will hallmark the remainder of 2021:

• Record numbers of tourists.
• Record amounts of construction.
• Record demand for employees.
• Record shortage of rental housing for workers.
• Record effective population (due to a combination of a record number of tourists, a record demand for local employees, increasing numbers of location-neutral workers, and a record number of seasonal and permanent residents lured here by COVID-related concerns).

If, in turn, much or all of this comes to pass, several outcomes are likely:

• An epically-overworked and under-housed tourism workforce. Coming on top of a year of pandemic-related stresses, this will likely lead to a decline in service quality, increased burn-out, and the like.
• Record amounts of traffic
• Exceptional pressure on the region’s public lands, especially the national forests (as the national parks have greater resources and greater ability to control crowds).

If, in turn, much or all of this comes to pass, it will likely exacerbate the fracturing of the community into tribes, with Tourism competing with Build & Equip for workers and workforce housing, and Everyone Else railing at both Tourism and Build & Equip for compromising their quality of life.

Longer-term, the key issue will be addressing the issues created by the increasing strength of Jackson Hole’s location-neutral economy versus the increasing diminution of its tourism economy. Two specific threats loom large:
Maintaining a sense of community as location-neutral income increasingly overwhelms locally-derived income (e.g., when renting or buying a home, those earning location-neutral income can easily out-compete those earning locally-derived income); and
Figuring out how to adequately fund local government when it receives essentially nothing from location-neutral economic activity.

Two Challenges

Challenge #1: Maintaining the community’s character

“Location-neutrals” are people earning their living from remote-work jobs and location-neutral investment income. As Jackson Hole’s population of location-neutrals grows, it’s becoming increasingly unclear how these folks will connect with the community.

Certainly not economically – someone earning their living by working remotely will care far more about national or global occurrences than local hotel occupancy rates or Grand Teton visitor days.

But absent that – absent a culture informed by many people working in tourism and most everyone else removed from the industry by only a degree or two of separation – what will bind us together? What will dampen the centrifugal forces pushing us apart from one another? What will sustain a culture where, as legend has it, you don’t know whether the person next to you is a liftie or a millionaire?

That is the fundamental threat facing Jackson Hole’s character. How do we maintain the “we’re all in this together” quality when, increasingly, we’re not all in it together? At least not economically.

For generations, people have moved to Jackson Hole for a variety of reasons, but stayed for a common one: they fell in love with the community. They stayed because it was home to a group of people willing to accept a harsh climate, geographic isolation, and other privations in exchange for the privilege of living in a place of beauty and wonder; a group of people who shared the ineffable sense that, rather than your job or your bank account, what mattered in life was the world around you.

Over the past several decades, this has slowly changed. As a result, Jackson Hole is increasingly feeling like every other haunt of the well-to-do.

In some ways, this homogenization is the inevitable outcome of America’s economic and social system, one which incentivizes turning something unique into a commodity. But because most American communities are organized around economic self-interest, there is no road map for Jackson Hole to follow should tourism cease to bind us together.

All this creates an extraordinary challenge for not just Jackson Hole, but the entire Tetons region and beyond.

The challenge is this: In the face of rapid technological change and extraordinary economic pressure, can the greater Tetons community find a way to hold onto the qualities that make it a community? Or will it succumb to the forces of homogenization, and in so doing undermine the bonds that form its distinctive character? The answer is far from clear, especially because there are really two questions here:

• Can Jackson Hole can chart a different course?
• Does Jackson Hole even want to chart a different course?

There is no clear answer to either question.

Challenge #2: Preserving and protecting the area’s ecosystem

Historically, two factors have molded Jackson Hole’s character: the region’s ecosystem, and the sacrifices born of its geographic isolation.

Today, thanks to changes in technology, the economy, and transportation, living in Jackson Hole requires increasingly fewer sacrifices. What remains intact is the ecosystem – it’s the one thing that binds together the community’s three tribes of Tourism, Build & Equip, and Everyone Else.

Unfortunately, though, the ecosystem faces two threats.

One is from the region’s influx of built amenities, the golf courses and spas and trappings of commerce that make every high-end community in the world increasingly look and feel and behave like every other high-end community in the world. These amenities are wonderful, but they are also commodities. More importantly, they also distract residents and visitors from fully appreciating just how extraordinary the region’s natural qualities are.

The other threat is the pressures on the region’s ecosystem. Some of these threats – most notably climate change – are basically beyond local control. Others, though, can be addressed locally.

Groundwater pollution. Habitat fragmentation. Road expansion. All these and more are things we can control, because all are the result of us taking our ecosystem’s health for granted.

But we can’t take it for granted. Want proof? 97% of Teton County’s land is publicly owned – the second-highest percentage of any county in the nation. Yet despite this extraordinary level of ecosystem protection. many of our streams are rated as “polluted.” A surprising amount of our groundwater is fouled. And a growing amount of our large mammal habitat is becoming fragmented.

All this and more is exactly what’s occurred in every other once-pristine place on the planet. As a result, we’re in the process of learning what these other places have already learned: Pursuing economic growth while ignoring environmental consequences doesn’t work out well for ecosystems.

Sadly, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this approach isn’t working out well for Jackson Hole, either – we may be special, but in this regard we’re not unique.

Where Jackson Hole is unique, though, is in how dependent we are on the health of our ecosystem. Why? Because it’s the foundation of not only our region’s economy, but also its character.

Combined, our ecosystem and our character are driving our economy’s boom, attracting free-spending tourists and Build & Equippers even in the face of the worst public health crisis in a century. Yet because of that boom, we risk compromising both the health of our ecosystem and the distinctiveness of our character. And should we do that, we’ll render ourselves just another community with high-end amenities located in a beautiful setting.

There are lots of beautiful places with high-end amenities, but lots of places aren’t Jackson Hole. Our community’s history suggests we are capable of not only envisioning a different, better, and forward-looking way of doing things, but turning that vision into reality. Indeed, doing so is at the core of the community’s character.

The question now is whether that character can survive the extraordinary technological and economic pressures buffeting Teton County. If it can, it will be because the community has recognized that, while economic health is necessary, it is not sufficient. Indeed, prioritizing economic health over all other considerations is antithetical to what Jackson Hole has been for its entire history. It will also be fatal to keeping it Jackson Hole the special – if not unique – place so many, many people want it to continue to be.

Bonus Analyses

Bonus Analysis #1 – How we’re coping

Graph 5 shows the monthly sales of local liquor stores.

The magenta-colored bars show sales from April 2020 – January 2021; i.e., the 10 full pandemic months for which data are available. The light purple bars are the same 10 months the year before.

During the 10 pandemic months, local liquor store sales were up 17.5% over the same 10 months the year before.

As the pandemic wore on, liquor store sales grew even faster. During the most recent seven months of July 2020 – January 2021, liquor store sales were up 22.1%. Some of this may have been due to the growth in tourism during the second half of 2020. It’s also fair to assume, though, that some of it was due to locals increasingly finding solace in a bottle from the slow-but-relentless grind that has hallmarked the pandemic.

Graph 5

Bonus Analysis #2 – How we’re equipping

When it registers with the state, every business selling taxable goods in Wyoming is assigned the four digit North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code appropriate for its industry.

The first two digits of the NAICS code represent a broad industrial category. For example, “44” and “45” are both Retail. The third and fourth digits indicate a more specific sub-category; e.g., 4421 is “Furniture Stores,” 4422 is “Home Furnishings Stores,” and 4431 is “Electronics and Appliance Stores.”

For me, perhaps the weirdest single sales tax-related figure coming out of the entire pandemic was one showing that, in January 2021, an out-of-state business classified as an “Other Miscellaneous Store Retailers” reported selling $24.6 million in taxable goods to people living in Teton County.

This figure was epically huge, exceeding the category’s sales for the previous 5.5 years combined. As a result, I called Wyoming’s Department of Revenue to see if it was a typo. They did some research, and confirmed it represented the December 2020 sale(s) made to Teton County residents by just one business in Washington, DC.

Additional research showed that the “Other Miscellaneous Store Retailers” category is comprised of five sub-categories:

• 453910 – Pet and Pet Supply Stores
• 453920 – Art Dealers
• 453930 – Manufactured (Mobile) Home Dealers
• 453991 – Tobacco Stores
• 453998 – All Other Miscellaneous Store Retailers

Piecing it together, in December 2020, someone living in Teton County purchased from a Washington DC vendor:

• $25 million in pets and/or pet food; and/or
• $25 million worth of double-wide trailers; and/or
• $25 million in fine Cuban cigars and other tobacco products; and/or
• $25 million worth of art.

In this game of Clue, my bet is on a well-to-do resident purchasing $25 million in art for their Jackson Hole home. Yet more proof of the growing importance of Build & Equip-related expenditures to Teton County’s economy.

And at that one household, it must have been a very merry Christmas indeed.

Graph 6

Bonus Analysis #3 – The coming train wreck

Since the beginning of 2005, I have measured the column inches of Help Wanted and Rental Housing ads in each week’s Jackson Hole News&Guide. Although a variety of internet-based classified ad forums have popped up in recent years, by all indications the News&Guide’s classified ads remain the region’s foremost medium for Help Wanted and Rental Housing advertising.

Graph 7 shows what’s occurred with Help Wanted ads over the last 16-plus years. The solid blue line is the 52 week running totals; the blue bars are each week’s column inches.

The graph’s big takeaway is that Help Wanted ads quickly respond to downturns in the local economy – they nose-dived following the onset of the Great Recession, and did so again once the pandemic hit. Over the last few months, though, they’ve begun to climb again.

Graph 7

Graph 8 is structured like Graph 7, but looks instead at Rental Housing ads. The two trends basically move in opposite directions: When there’s a big demand for workers, housing supply goes down; and vice-versa.

The striking thing about Graph 8 is what’s happened over the last several months. After remaining fairly steady through the end of last summer, over the past seven months the News&Guide’s 52 week running total of Rental Housing ads has been in free-fall. It hit its all-time low in the first week of December 2020, and has set a new low every week since.

Graph 8

For every week’s paper since the beginning of 2018, Graph 9 shows ratio of Help Wanted ads to Rental Housing ads. In the most recent edition of the News&Guide, for every one column inch of Rental Housing ads there were eight full columns of Help Wanted ads – an entire page plus one additional column.

Driving this dynamic has been the ever-shrinking amount of Rental Housing listings. How bad is it? In the 16 years of newspapers ending with the 2020 Thanksgiving edition, only 16 editions – 0.8% – had 10 inches or fewer of Rental Housing ads. In the 17 papers since Thanksgiving 2020, every single one has had 10 inches or fewer. And only two of them had as many as 10 inches.

Graph 9

As Graph 10 indicates, employers sense there’s a problem looming.

In particular, looking at the six weeks between early February and mid-March – i.e., the six weeks before the pandemic struck in 2020 – 2021’s Help Wanted ads ran 22% ahead of 2019’s count, and 26% ahead of 2020’s.

Most striking of all, though, is that the News&Guide’s March 24, 2021 issue had a level of Help Wanted ads not normally seen until late May.

Combine this level of Help Wanted anxiety with the record-setting shortage of rental housing, and it seems likely that summer 2021 will be highlighted by a record demand for labor and a record shortage of housing. Then throw in anticipated record tourism levels plus a year of accumulated pandemic-related stress, and it seems likely the coming months will be a pressure cooker for all those living and working in Jackson Hole.

Knowing this, it will serve us well if we can reach even deeper into our reserves of patience, understanding, and empathy for all those working to keep the community going.

Graph 10

To download pdf version of the three papers examining different facets of Jackson Hole’s economy, please follow these links:

Jackson Hole’s pandemic-era economy
Jackson Hole’s pandemic-era real estate market
Jackson Hole’s government funding

Hello,

I’m finalizing this newsletter on Election Day.

Like many Americans, I’m obsessed, anxious, on edge; a number of feelings I’d rather not experience, thank you. Yet there they are.

I’m also experiencing two related qualities: listlessness and vulnerability. The listlessness makes it hard to focus, to get anything done. The vulnerability makes me feel even worse for my lack of production – I sense that I’m somehow weak for not being able to overcome the listlessness underlying my lack of production, not to mention my sensitivity to every little thing.

Why mention this? Because I’m a perfectionist. Damn it. In each of these newsletters, I strive for not just perfection (no typos, no grammatical errors, every sentence a polished gem) but profundity. If I’m asking someone to take time to read what I write, I’d better make it extraordinarily worth their while.

My belief-cum-fear is that today’s installment falls short of profundity. Instead, it’s just basic gruel. Not thin, but not rich and meaty either. For which I offer my sincerest apologies.

Instead, what you’ll find below is mostly just a report on what I found in the community surveys I conducted in June, September, and October. Information with a little bit of commentary, but nothing I’d categorize as earth-shattering.

Is it interesting? I think so, but you might not. Will it rock your world? Doubtful. And that reality leaves me feeling flat. If I don’t get the information out in a timely fashion, though, it won’t be relevant. Hence this newsletter – one written before I can make it something I consider profound.

What many readers might find interesting are the comments, ones I’ve chosen and copied verbatim as representative of the 371 comments September’s 207 respondents offered. Hence I’ve structured the Table of Contents so you can jump straight to them if you’d like.

Table of Contents

October 2020 “State of Our Community” Survey: Summary and Methodology
Summary
Findings
Comments
COVID-19 and Well-Being/Outlook
Questions
Comments: Personal Future
Comments: Jackson Hole’s Future
Comments: Region’s Future
Comments: America’s Future
“Returning to Normal” and How the Economy Will Fare
Questions
Comments
Who Are You Voting For? Who Will Win? – Federal
Comments
Who Are You Voting For? Who Will Win? – Local
Comments
General Comments

A thought

I will make one observation, though.

I’m currently listening to Nixonland, the second of of four books by historian Rick Pearlstein on the rise of the contemporary Republican Party. Just yesterday, I came across this passage:
“Part of Richard Nixon dreamed of world peace. Part of him gave the public something it wanted as much, or more: an outlet for their hatreds…”

I share this because, like so much of the book, it seems tremendously applicable to this moment. The late 1960s/early 1970s era chronicled in Nixonland were a time of extraordinary upheaval in our country, a period of tremendous polarization, domestic violence, and profound uncertainty about not just what was going on, but what the future might hold. For all of his dreams and all the good he did, Mr. Nixon also fanned the flames of that polarization, leading to consequences that not only brought him down but reverberated through subsequent decades. Indeed, through today’s election and beyond.

Why mention this? Because what reverberates through the surveys evaluated in this newsletter – captured especially poignantly in the comments – is how much people love this place, this community, this country. And, regardless of political persuasion, how very concerned they are about the future. In my obsessing I may be crazy, but I’m not alone. And neither are you. What comes through to me from the surveys is respondents’ love and fear and passion for something better in our world.

What might that be?

This is where I take off my analyst’s beanie and put on my community leader ballcap. Once we get past today’s election (or whenever the results are finalized), I think it will be extraordinarily important for those in leadership – at all levels – to articulate not just a shared and optimistic vision for our future, but a plan for how all of us can start moving toward that vision.

I’ve got a dim sense of what that future might look like for Jackson Hole and the surrounding region, one I’ll be exploring in future newsletters. But man, it’s a really dim vision. To bring it into focus will require your help, feedback, and thoughts about how we get from where we are to where we want to be. Which, in my view, is a community as extraordinary as the setting in which we live. In other words, a community, region, and world that CoThrive.

As always, thanks so much and stay healthy!

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

October 2020 “State of Our Community” Survey: Summary and Methodology

Summary

Since COVID-19 struck, I’ve taken several surveys to assess respondents’ feelings about how the pandemic is affecting them, and how it might affect our community’s economy.

The original idea was to see if, collectively, respondents could accurately guess where our economy might be headed. To put it mildly, that didn’t work out so well, for the economy fared much better than the collective guess (more on that in a future newsletter).

As a result, I’ve focused the three most recent surveys – mid-June, mid-September, and late October – on how people are faring during the pandemic. The results suggest four big conclusions.

First, as a rule of thumb, people have fared better economically than they originally feared would be the case. Perhaps as a result, they are also less pessimistic about the community’s economic situation.

Second, this does not mean people are optimistic, whether about themselves or the community. Instead, respondents seem to be both weary and wary – weary from COVID fatigue and, arguably, the political chaos that has rocked our nation and community; wary because there is still so much uncertainty on the pandemic, economic, and political fronts.

Third, I have no idea how representative my newsletter subscribers or the survey respondents are of Jackson Hole or the greater Tetons region. What I do know is that around 90% of people responding to the most recent survey are voting not just for Joe Biden, but for other Democrats running for federal office in Wyoming.

As a result, to the extent subscribers – or at least the subset who responded to the survey – are representative of the community, come 24 hours from this writing, the community is going to be either manically euphoric or in a slough of the deepest despond.

Fourth, what makes this particularly clear to me is that, during the middle of my September surveying period, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Those who responded before her death were noticeably more optimistic than those who responded after her death. Similarly, the October responses were more optimistic than the September responses, which I suspect is due to how much more likely it became during that time that Joe Biden would win (when the September survey closed, FiveThirtyEight.com gave Biden a 77% chance of winning; on October’s closing date it was 89%)

I offer these politically-based observations because a theme cutting through all of the surveys I’ve taken – captured most acutely in the comments – is that the Jackson Hole community is as polarized as the rest of the nation. We may have a disproportionate number of Trump haters, but in the depth of their feelings, our Trump lovers and Trump haters are as as impassioned as folks anywhere.

At least as significant is our saving grace, though. The thing that ties all of us together – Trump lovers and Trump haters and those at a remove – is their passion for Jackson Hole. Their love for the place and their desire to keep it extraordinary. That, too, shines through the surveys.

Whatever happens in the elections, that will be the foundation upon which we can begin to build the next four years and beyond.

One final note. As you’ll see in the comments, some survey respondents criticized me for asking about how they were voting. I did so not to influence or pry, but because I am very curious about how representative my readers and respondents are of the community overall. Voting patterns seemed the clearest way to measure that, and I’ll soon have a sense of how well the two match up.

Methodology

The October 2020 survey was conducted between October 26 – 29, a four day window versus the week-long window of previous surveys.

207 people responded to this survey, down from the 388 of September’s and the 270 of June’s. Whether this was due to a shorter window, survey fatigue among the e-mail list, and/or something else isn’t clear.

Despite a significantly different number of responses, the demographic makeup of the survey respondents was very much alike

• ~80% Teton County WY residents
• Lived in the region an average of around 23 years
• ~20% retired

A number of questions asked respondents to give a score of -5 to 5, where -5 was absolutely bad and 5 was absolutely good.

COVID-19 and Personal Finances

Findings

• Respondents’ mean income is ~$180,000, with around 40% of respondents earning <=$100,000, 25% earning $100,000-$150,000, and 33% earning more than $150,000
• ~14% of respondents considered themselves living paycheck-to-paycheck, including some people earning $100,000 or more.
• In September, the figure was 18%; in June it was 17%. I don’t think October’s decline is statistically significant
• Question: “How much has COVID-19 affected you financially?”
  • Summary: Not much
    • Perhaps a slight improvement since June
  • October responses: Mean = -0.1; Median = 0; Mode = 0
    • September: Mean = -0.2; Median = 0; Mode = 0
    • June: Mean = -0.6; Median = 0; Mode = 0
• Question: “Since COVID-19 struck, how has your income changed?”
  • Summary: A slight decline from previous years
    • Given how the mean figures have changed, perhaps COVID-19 has harmed local incomes a little less than originally feared
  • October responses: Mean = -5%; Mode = 0%
    • September: Mean = -6%; Mode = 0%
    • June: Mean = -8%; Mode = 0%
• Question: “Since COVID-19 struck, how have your expenditures changed?”
  • Summary: For those whose incomes were affected by COVID, there’s been a clear decline from previous years. For everyone else, little change.
    • October’s mean figure was lower than September’s but higher than June’s, suggesting people remain worried about their incomes being harmed.
  • October responses: Mean = -10%; Mode = 0%
    • September: Mean = -9%; Mode = 0%
    • June: Mean = -11%; Mode = 0%

Comments

• CARES Act $ is saving our household
• I feel like I have aged 5 years in one
• I miss the loss of touch: hugging my family and friends; standing close; seeing facial expressions. But, never have I watch birds at the feeder so intently; leaves unfolding and dropping; clouds. A new learning to see.
• over population & heavy tourist numbers have degraded the environment & quality of life
• physical doing fine…mental…getting tired of being “quarantined”…need to be able to be with friends and family and to travel
• Physical health has remained as good as before, but mental health issues (stress levels, anxiety, depression) have definitely been more pronounced
• This answer has changed: -5 when family had covid. Better now. But Trump/elections = more stressful.
• This community and there level of fear based controlling people has affected everything I do here now. I was born and raised here and I don’t event recognize this place anymore. It is heartbreaking.

COVID-19 and Well-Being/Outlook

The responses in this section are summarized in Graph 1 (below).

Questions

• Question: “To what degree has COVID-19 affected your life personally?”
  • Summary: COVID-19 seems to be slowly wearing down respondents
    • Things seem to be slightly improved from September, and similar to June.
  • October responses: Mean = -1.5; Median = -1; Mode = -1
    • September: Mean = -1.6; Median = -2; Mode = -2
    • June: Mean = -1.2; Median = -1; Mode = -1
• Question: “How optimistic are you about your personal future?”
  • Summary: Respondents seem tentatively optimistic about their personal futures
    • Since June, there has been a sense of stasis regarding personal optimism – a whiff more than in September, but basically unchanged over the past several months.
  • October responses: Mean = 0.6; Median = 1; Mode = 1
    • September: Mean = 0.6; Median = 0; Mode = 0
    • June: Mean = 0.9; Median = 0; Mode = 0
• Question: “How optimistic are you about Jackson Hole’s future?”
  • Summary: Respondents seem to be warily pessimistic about Jackson Hole’s future
    • Respondents were notably more optimistic about Jackson Hole’s future in June than they are today
  • October responses: Mean = -0.6; Median = -1; Mode = -1
    • September: Mean = -0.7; Median = -1; Mode = -2
    • June: Mean = 0.4; Median = 0; Mode = 2
• Question: “How optimistic are you about the Tetons region’s future?”
  • Summary: Respondents are slightly pessimistic about the region’s future, but less so than they are about Jackson Hole’s. A notable contingent of respondents is clearly optimistic about the region’s future.
    • Respondents’ slight pessimism didn’t change much between September and October, save for more expressing a notable optimism.
  • October responses: Mean = -0.3; Median = 0; Mode = 2
    • September: Mean = -0.4; Median = 0; Mode = 0
    • June: Not asked
• Question: “How optimistic are you about America’s future?”
  • Summary: Respondents are similarly pessimistic about the nation’s future as they are about Jackson Hole’s
  • October responses: Mean = -0.8; Median = -1; Mode = 0
    • September: Mean = -1.7; Median = -2; Mode = -3
    • June: Mean = -0.8; Median = -1; Mode = -2

Graph 1

Graph 2

Comments: Personal Future

• A great deal rides on the election.
• Sorry to say, there are a number of indicators that appear to be headed the wrong direction
• Worry about leadership of this country and distressed over the divisiveness,worried about the people I help and lack of health care,disruption of education,degradation of community and environment, global warming and the seemingly obvious signs that are not being addressed.

Comments: Jackson Hole’s Future

• Concerned about the numbers of people visiting and moving here – quality of life and environment.
• Definite concern over the future of Jackson…housing issues for working folks, sense of community, ongoing influx of extreme wealth
• I no longer consider Jackson Hole a desirable place to live. I am exploring other places to move to.
• I see the economy of Teton County booming as people continue to flock to the region for recreation and to escape densely populated areas, but I see difficult times ahead for our working class families as housing becomes even more scarce and expensive.
• I’m worried about the impact a large group of wealthy people will have on our community.
• It’s heartbreaking that all of these nonprofits exist to help people, but I essentially keep being told that I don’t qualify for one reason or another. I have BEGGED for help, and people essentially throw their hands up. I have work in non-profits for 13 of the 15 years that I have lived here and feel that I gave significantly to me community, but now that I’m in need people are shutting the door in my face.
• No affordable housing, rising income inequality, declining water quality, too much traffic on 22 possibly leading to 4 lanes and attendant construction problems especially during the construction period, declining availability of service workers, too many people unwilling to wear masks to address COVID
• The influx of new residents has dramatically changed the vibe and disparity of many things including traffic, (aggressiveness on the roads), shopping for food and a much changed attitude in the former “local” community, with a level of general anger I’ve not seen before. In short, many of the new residents seem little interested in adopting a more laid back lifestyle and seem to hole-up in their enclaves, 3 Creek Ranch, Shooting Star…
• Too many people coming who don’t care about the community and environment. Commercial growth and people who aren’t part of the community wanting to invest in housing here has put so much pressure on housing. We will never build our way out of it, but we will destroy ourselves trying.
• too much emphasis on bring/growing tourist economy…. we’re saturated and won’t be able to catch up with infrastructure
• Wyoming, Teton County and JH have many challenges. COVID is accentuating them. The income gap is a curse and blessing. Hospitality and Tourism based economies have too many externalities. Locals get whipsawed.

Comments: Region’s Future

• Again, as much as I feel like I have given this community, it continues to push people like me out. I work for the school district and have a decent job, but have to live in government subsidized housing and have to go to the food bank to eat. I am heartbroken and exhausted, but have no where else to go.
• flood of new arrivals will bring negative pressure on our environment, our quality of life, as well as, ultimately, our politics
• I still see negative forces at work in the greater Tetons, but they are not as strong as in Jackson Hole.
• I think these communities will continue to grow and thrive by gaining young, working class people who are interested in being positively involved in their community
• The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem saw much of the same increase in traffic and tremendous (negative) impacts to our public lands and resources that we saw here in Jackson Hole this summer. This type of visitation and use is not sustainable.
• Unless we protect our wildlife and ecosystem, we will lose what makes this place so special

Comments: America’s Future

• A negative 5 if Trump is re-elected, a positive 1 if Biden is elected
• Biden is about to usher in socialism and high taxes. Jobs will implode
• Congress doesn’t address America’s many problems, society/government increasingly polarized, decline in civility, foreign policy failures and former allies distrustful of US, potential funding issues at federal level due to $27 trillion debt and possible rise in interest rates which would squeeze social programs/education funding
• Depends entirely on the presidential election. Currently, we seem to only focus on the stock market as our gauge of how the economy is doing. The pandemic response has been pathetic and frightening, and I’m disappointed by the attitude of so many Americans. I also am alarmed about how little priority we place on our natural resources and protection for individuals (water quality, air quality, food regulations, etc.)
• Long after we are all dead and gone, they will continue to clean up the damage caused by the first 4 years of the Trump administration. Should there be another 4 years or more, all is lost.
• Wow. Our Republicans leadership has abandoned the rule of law, the courts, the environment and the poor and middle classes. It’s going to take a lifetime to rebuild, if it’s even possible in this time of waning civic responsibility.

“Returning to Normal” and How the Economy Will Fare

Questions

• Question: “When will Jackson Hole no longer have to worry about COVID-19?”
  • Summary: Respondents seem to be warily pessimistic about Jackson Hole’s future
    • Respondents were notably more optimistic about Jackson Hole’s future in June than they are today
  • October responses: Most frequent was Autumn 2021 (17% of responses)
    • Other high responses: Autumn 2021 (16%), Summer 2022 (12%), and Never (12%)
  • September responses: Most frequent were Autumn 2021 and Never (both 17% of responses)
    • Other high responses: Spring 2022 (14%), and Summer 2021 (11%)
  • June responses: Most frequent was Spring 2021 or later (49% of responses)
    • Other high response: Never (21%)
• Question: “How will Autumn 2020 end up comparing to Autumn 2019?”
  • Summary: Respondents were notably more optimistic about Jackson Hole’s future in June than they are today
  • Responses (Mean scores, by survey month):
    • Change in overall tourist visits
      • October: 13%
      • September: 9%
      • June: -27%
    • Change in driving-based tourist visits
      • October: 19%
      • September: 17%
      • June: -17%
    • Change in flying-based tourists visits
      • October: -5%
      • September: -11%
      • June: -38%
    • Change in total taxable sales
      • October: 3%
      • September: 0%
      • June: -29%
• Question: “How will Ski Season 2020/21 compare to Ski Season 2019/20?”
  • Summary: Respondents were notably more optimistic about Jackson Hole’s future in June than they are today
  • Responses (Mean scores, by survey month):
    • Change in overall tourist visits
      • October: -7%
      • September: -5%
      • June: -25%
    • Change in driving-based tourist visits
      • October: 2%
      • September: -3%
      • June: -18%
    • Change in flying-based tourists visits
      • October: -10%
      • September: -11%
      • June: -33%
    • Change in total taxable sales
      • October: -7%
      • September: -6%
      • June: -27%

Comments

• I think that the people that come to visit Jackson are truly oblivious to the problems here, because that is the persona that Jackson fights to maintain. That we’re carefree, that we are actually able to enjoy the outdoors, that we love our lives; while in reality we’re stressed, we can’t go to the parks or on hikes or find a moment of solidarity due to the overcrowding that tourists create, we can only enjoy the reasons that we live here in September (and that’s obviously fleeting), and we’re stressed and depressed because we have to work so hard to live here and still live paycheck to paycheck. People always say “It’s so nice that you live in Jackson”, but it’s not that. I work my ass off to live in Jackson for a community that isn’t thankful and is only supportive when they need to hype up what they do to receive Old Bill’s donations.
• I’m hoping the mountain resort restricting ticket sales will decrease the crazy influx of tourists, but I think we will still have a lot of tourists like we did this summer
• Much will depend on how much the government gets involved. That may over rule personal decisions to travel.

Who Are You Voting For? Who Will Win? – Federal

• President
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Joe Biden (D) – 88% (Barbershop Poll result – 58%)
    • Donald Trump (R) – 13% (42%)
  • Who will win?
    • Joe Biden (D) – 80%
    • Donald Trump (R) – 20%
• US Senate
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Merav Ben-David (D) – 80% (47%)
    • Cynthia Lummis (R) – 20% (53%)
  • Who will win?
    • Merav Ben-David (D) – 6%
    • Cynthia Lummis (R) – 94%
• US House of Representatives
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Lynette Grey Bull (D) – 79% (46%)
    • Liz Cheney (R) – 21% (54%)
  • Who will win?
    • Lynette Grey Bull (D) – 2%
    • Liz Cheney (R) – 98%

Graph 3

Comments

• It infuriates me that my vote doesn’t count on a national level.
• These feel like extremely inappropriate questions that don’t have to do with the rest of your survey, coming from a sitting elected.

Who Are You Voting For? Who Will Win? – Local

• Teton County Commission
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Christian Beckwith (R) – 19% (Barbershop poll result – 13%)
    • Greg Epstein (D) – 19% (20%)
    • Wes Gardner (I) – 18% (22%)
    • Peter Long (R) – 11% (25%)
    • Natalia Macker (D) – 33% (20%)
  • Who will win?
    • Christian Beckwith (R) – 12%
    • Greg Epstein (D) – 27%
    • Wes Gardner (I) – 15%
    • Peter Long (R) – 21%
    • Natalia Macker (D) – 33%
• Town of Jackson Mayor (non-partisan)
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Michael Kudar – 27% (51%)
    • Hailey Morton Levinson – 73% (49%)
  • Who will win?
    • Michael Kudar – 35%
    • Hailey Morton Levinson – 65%
• Town Council (non-partisan)
  • Who are you voting for?
    • Jessica Sell Chambers – 17% (20%)
    • Pete Muldoon – 22% (12%)
    • Jim Rooks – 36% (36%)
  • Devon Viehman – 25% (32%)
  • Who will win?
    • Jessica Sell Chambers – 9%
    • Pete Muldoon – 12%
    • Jim Rooks – 40%
    • Devon Viehman – 38%
• 1% increase in sales tax
  • How are you voting?
    • Yes – 71% (42%)
    • No – 29% (58%)
  • Which will win?
    • Yes – 55%
    • No – 45%

Graph 4

Graph 5

Graph 6

Comments

• Had to tighten my belt. Ditch the raise and clean up the budget
• I belive we truly need the extra money, however people think it will not be used wisely.
• I think it’s time to explore other tax structures. While “tourists pay it,” so do locals, and the working poor in Jackson will pay a higher percentage of their income on purchases; the shopkeepers will also have people wanting to shop elsewhere where the sales taxes are lower. Isn’t Idaho Falls at 6%?
• what is wrong with the people who are voting against it? sales tax is regressive but we need it. Start the income tax in Wyoming and get on with paying our bills. We also need to tax property transfers.

General Comments

• I am so-o-o disappointed by the politicals allowing expansion of Snow King to continue the deterioration of our valley and expect the Forest Service to allow Targhee to expand unnecessarily. We’ve forgotten about the environment, the wildlife, and the values that used to make Jackson Hole a unique place. Now it’s just another Disneyland!
• i do not understand why we continue to build hotels and otherwise increase tourism when we cannot handle the traffic issues that we already have and have had for years.
• I doubt this will be a very good reflection of this community. Low income community members, and service industry workers are not likely to participate due to poor outreach.
• I hope we avoid bloodshed in the wake of this election. tRump has dog whistled (at a minimum) every armed nutcase in the country to be at the ready if things don’t go his way. If they attacked the pizza parlor to free Democrat sex slaves, I fear that they’ll be out in droves for this event! Hope not…
• I work in workforce services and I am very concerned about the worker shortage in Teton County. I am worried that people will conveniently stay on unemployment …if another CARES (or similar) package rolls out. We are having a difficult time filling job orders for employers b/c claimants don’t want to return to work if they have UI benefits.
• I would just love to see more support in this community that is honestly, not just aimed at Hispanics. There are a lot of Caucasian, middle aged, working class people who NEED assistance, but are running into walls because they do not “qualify”. I think that the support for Hispanics is incredible, but PLEASE do not make that, whether overtly or not, a defining factor in who receives help.
• I’m feeling depressed and angry about our town’s progressive leaning being under attack by the right wingers who have state and national help. I don’t trust the right wing candidates and believe that trey are mostly lying to get into office. It’s as if we al went to sleep just like when Obama got elected and didn’t see the right wing backslash coming at us.
• Like a lot of people, I’m just disappointed in the lack of civility and honesty in American politics right now. I don’t see how this is going to be corrected. Also disappointed in Wyoming which, although always a Republican dominated state, was also generally a reasonable political atmosphere that put a priority on care of Wyoming children and families. I fear that has changed dramatically.
• Our federal lands can’t carry the burden of this level of visitation. Why should the Bridger-Teton NF have to pay for more employees, volunteers, port-a-potties, etc. and be the primary charge dealing with all the dispersed camping we saw this summer? Where is the Chamber? Lodging Tax? Teton County? The Chamber’s efforts at outreach to the visiting public was disappointing. The national parks, refuges, forests, BLM, etc. can’t take on this tremendous burden of additional trail use, rescues, trash, etc. There needs to be more funded partner employees, ambassadors, etc. As far as traffic, I don’t have a solution other than to be honest in outreach and let people know they can expect frustrating traffic congestion during much of the spring, summer, and fall.
• So many national surveys that are gauging people’s mental state right now are blaming it on Covid. I think the divisive politics are much more to blame than the pandemic for my mental state.
• There are too many folks with “good ideas” trying to influence/control what others think and do.
• There needs to be ethical non-partisan behavior from the Jackson Town Council and County Commissioners.
• This community really needs to figure out a sustainable balance between the booming real estate market/sales, new development and building of new hotels and how to build and make available enough affordable housing to sustain the workforce that supports all businesses and development in this community. This pandemic has really escalated this issue and we are approaching an uneven balance where there will soon be a huge shortage of available employees in this valley.
• This is a tough time to be a Teton County and Town of Jackson resident. The assholes are winning and outspending everyone else. We can screw this place up in only 4-5 years – as Trump has demonstrated in DC – and we’re now on the map for big money and influence buying. It scares the hell out of me.

Hello,

We’re eight days out out from Election Day, a reality which forms the somewhat-loose focus of this newsletter.

It has two basic parts.

October Survey

Please take my October survey. It will close at 11:59 pm this Thursday, October 29, and the typical response time is only about 7 minutes.

This month’s survey asks essentially the same questions as last month’s, with the goal of seeing how the community is feeling. It also has a few questions about next week’s elections, for I’m curious to see how politically-representative of the community survey respondents are.

I’ll conduct a similar, post-election survey in November, giving me – and you – a sense of how the results have affected our views of the world.

Changes, and Not Just the Seasons

I’ve written an essay around the general theme of change, weaving together thoughts about national and local political races, local tourism dynamics, and how we might move beyond the weariness so many of us are feeling.

Thanks so much, stay healthy, and be sure to vote!

Cheers!

Jonathan Schechter
Executive Director

PS – Please be sure to take the survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VPRTCZL Please feel free to forward this link and/or this newsletter to others, and ask them to take the survey as well. And again, it closes at 11:59 MDT this Thursday, October 29 – don’t delay!

PPS – If you’re wondering: “What about the results of September’s survey?”, the answer is that, due to data glitches, I couldn’t get the results processed in a timely fashion. I’ll include that analysis with the results of the October survey.

Chaos and Constancy

Since COVID-19 hit, I’ve never had such a powerful sense of living through history.

In a related vein, since Donald Trump became president, my dream investment has been in a product that replenishes the human adrenal gland. The chaos that seems to be Mr. Trump’s stock-in-trade leaves me depleted, and I suspect I’m not alone in that.

COVID-19 has, of course, made matters worse. As I’ve noted before, COVID is like a vise, with its slowly-increasing pressure exposing our fault lines and creating new fissures. Add Mr. Trump and COVID together, and I’m guessing a whole lot of folks are feeling a whole lot of drained.

My fervent desire to move beyond this wretched state has led me to obsess on the presidential race. As I noted in my most recent e-newsletter, one way I’ve channeled that obsession is creating a spreadsheet tracking FiveThirtyEight.com’s daily forecast of the presidential race. And because I’m anal like that, I track not only the overall race, but FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for each state.

Why mention this? Because looking at the data between August 31 and October 25, what hit me was not chaos and upheaval, but instead a rather boring consistency.

Put simply, for the past eight weeks, the race has been marked by only two dynamics: Mr. Biden’s chances of winning have either stayed flat, or they’ve slowly grown.

In particular, as Graph 1 below shows, the last eight weeks of FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts can be divided into four phases:

Phase I

• Mr. Biden’s chances on August 31 were 68%. 11 days later, they were 75%, a daily growth rate of 0.9%

Phase II

• Mr. Biden’s chances on September 11 were 75%. 17 days later, they were 77%, a daily growth rate of 0.2%

Phase III

• Mr. Biden’s chances on September 28 were 77%. 15 days later, they were 87%, a daily growth rate of 0.9%, the same as during Phase I

Phase IV

• Mr. Biden’s chances on October 13 were 87%. 13 days later, they remain at 87%, a daily growth rate of 0.0%

Graph 1

What’s really striking, though, is that the same pattern has occurred not just nationally, but in key swing states.

For example, two clusters of states are currently front-of-mind for those obsessing about the presidential race. The “Blue Wall” states are the three industrial states that traditionally vote for the Democrat, but which Mr. Trump narrowly won in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The ones I refer to as “Sunbelt States” are also ones Mr. Trump won in 2016, but are now considered in play: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. Here’s what’s happened to each of them during the four phases.

Phase I

• National: Mr. Biden’s lead grew at a daily rate of 0.9%
• Blue Wall: Mr. Biden’s lead grew at a daily rate of 1.0%
• Sunbelt: Mr. Biden’s lead grew at a daily rate of 1.2%

Phase II

• National: 0.2%
• Blue Wall: 0.1%
• Sunbelt: -0.2%

Phase III

• National: 0.8%
• Blue Wall: 0.5%
• Sunbelt: 1.5%

Phase IV

• National: 0.0%
• Blue Wall: 0.0%
• Sunbelt: -0.4%

Add all this together, and my big takeaway is that things have been remarkably stable. And unless Mr. Trump, that consummate shaker-upper, can shake things up so powerfully in the last week of the campaign that he can win all six of these states and several more, then the calm, methodical tortoise that is Mr. Biden’s campaign will end up prevailing over the chaotic hare that is Mr. Trump’s.

Which leads into local politics.

The Nationalization of Local Politics?

The Jackson Town Council is comprised of a mayor and four councilmembers. The mayor’s spot and two of the four council seats are up this year (my term expires in two years). As won’t surprise you, I’m watching both races closely.

Which is why, the other day, I was surprised to see ads for local candidates on the website Politico. Specifically, I saw a series of rotating ads for one of the two mayoral candidates (Michael Kudar) and two of the four town council candidates (Jim Rooks and Devon Viehman). All three ads were well done and shared a similar look and feel, and obviously I was seeing them because of some algorithm targeting my location and demographic.

My first reaction was how much things had changed in just the past two years. When I ran in 2018, I put ads on Facebook and Instagram at the suggestion of some millennial friends. But I never conceived of placing ads on a national news platform like Politico, much less other news websites. Yet in the past 48 hours, I’ve seen this same cluster of town council candidate ads on the sites of the middle-of-the-road Newsweek, the ultra-liberal San Francisco Chronicle, and the ultra-conservative Manchester (NH) Union Leader.

What really knocked my socks off, though, was that the ads were not paid for by the candidates. Instead, in itty-bitty letters, each ad featured the disclaimer that the ad was paid for by Turning Point Action, a non-profit political advocacy group affiliated with the deeply conservative Turning Point America. The disclaimer also noted “(this ad) is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”

Extremely curious, I reached out to all three candidates, each of whom told me they didn’t know the ads were running.

I also reached out to Jackson Hole resident Foster Friess, who provided seed funding for Turning Point America and is on both its Honorary Board and its Advisory Council. I did so because I wanted to know how a council race in a town of 10,000 could attract the attention of a national political advocacy group. Foster, too, said he didn’t know.

Absent any other information, I assume Turning Point Action’s involvement in our local race is an extension of its involvement in robocalls and other mass outreach this summer when rumors were flying about the town council defunding Jackson’s police. Then, too, I tried to figure out how Turning Point Action became involved in the affairs of a small Wyoming town; then, too, I hit only dead ends.

Why mention this? Because my sense-cum-dread is that Turning Point Action’s efforts will, in hindsight, be looked upon as a watershed moment in Jackson Hole’s political history, the time when local campaigns pivoted from being homey, retail affairs to ones increasingly nationalized in both money and message. Should this occur, it will be a real tragedy, for reasons ranging from increased divisiveness to the likelihood it will further discourage people from running. I so hope I’m wrong; I so fear I’m right.

Farewell Fall Off-Season?

Speaking of watersheds, this may be the year when we look back and say “2020 was when we lost the autumnal off-season.”

Here’s what I mean.

For August 1 – October 11, Graph 2 shows the 7 day average of traffic entering Yellowstone National Park from the park’s South Gate; i.e. from Jackson Hole. The lighter red line shows the 2019 counts, the darker red line shows the 2020 counts, and the pink bars show each day’s growth between 2019 and 2020.

Two things jump out.

First, between September 2019 and September 2020, the South Gate’s seven day average daily traffic count increased 38%. It increased literaly every day – by a minimum of 24%, and on one day by a whopping 72%. As a result, even though historically August is Yellowstone’s second-busiest month, in September 2020 28 percent more vehicles entered Yellowstone from Jackson Hole than entered in August 2019.

Building on this theme, in August 2019, the busiest daily traffic count was 1,726. In comparison, every day in September 2020 exceeded the August 2019 count. Further, October 2020’s first 11 days were 119% ahead of October 2019’s first 11 days.

The rest of Yellowstone also saw increased traffic this fall, but nothing like the numbers seen at the South Gate.

Graph 2

And it’s not just cars. As Graph 3 shows, the Jackson Hole Airport’s private jet flight count hit 50 on just one day in September 2019 . In September 2020, there were at least 57 private jet flights every day, and eight consecutive days had between 71-75 flights.

Further, during the first 11 days of October, October 11 was the only day with fewer than 50 private jet flights from the Jackson Hole Airport – on that day the number dipped to 49.

Graph 3

Conclusions

Tying all this together, here’s what I’ve concluded.

My point of departure is that I’m weary. Most folks I know are weary too. Sadly, because of the realities of calendar, weather, and viral transmission, it’s likely that one of the root causes of our collective weariness – COVID-19 – will be with us for a while.

I take solace in a couple of thoughts, though.

First, I find it easier to deal with a problem if I can understand it. Collectively, for four years we’ve been dealing with a national political environment disproportionately shaped by someone who cultivates chaos. For the most recent eight months, that upheaval has been amplified by COVID-19, which has completely disrupted every facet of our lives, individually and collectively.

Locally, all this has been compounded by crazy increases in tourism, which the community and region have had to handle with fewer resources than normal. And it can’t be helping things that, as evidenced by huge spikes in both private jet traffic and high-end real estate prices, there seems to be a tidal wave of money pouring into Jackson Hole. This only amplifies the pressure felt by the bulk of the region’s residents who aren’t wealthy.

To add the final soupçon of craziness, all this stress seems to be spilling over into our local political races, which are proving to be as fraught and frayed as our times.

Second, I also find it easier to deal with a problem if I know there’s an end in sight. In this case things are tricky, for COVID-19 and its attendant baggage are likely to be with us for a while.

But with the onset of winter weather, it seems likely that the valley’s tourism crush will soon let up, giving us all a bit of respite. And even if the results aren’t known until a day or three after November 3, the additional pressure created by the election will, one way or another, soon be behind us.

Finally, barring something extraordinarily weird occurring – which, granted, we should probably expect – if the FiveThirtyEight numbers are reliable, the epicenter of national chaos will soon be gone.

Which leads into my final point.

I love my community, my country, my planet. Yet for far too often during the past four years, America has seemed like an exceptionally alien place to me. We Americans have not just thought and spoken and behaved in ways that strike me as un-American, but we’ve seemed to embrace those who’ve taken that approach.

Given this, my hope is that, once the election is behind us, our collective fever will break, and we’ll start to recover from the crazed delirium that’s ravaged and depleted and contorted us the past four years. We won’t recover at once, of course – it takes time to get over being really sick. But my further hope is that as we do improve, we’ll look back on this past stretch and ask ourselves: “What just happened? We had to be very ill indeed, because that’s not who we are – as individuals or society.”

Will this happen? I don’t know. But where are we without our dreams?

Please take my October survey.
It will close at 11:59 pm this Thursday, October 29
The typical response time is only about 7 minutes.
CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY

As I wrote about earlier this month, in late June Jackson Hole’s summer of 2020 turned from calm to chaotic.

As measured by traffic through Yellowstone’s South Gate (at Jackson Hole’s north end), tourism to the Tetons was sporadic through June 25– some days were busier than in 2019; others slower.

Since June 26, though, daily traffic through Yellowstone’s South Gate topped 2019’s numbers essentially every day. The pattern still holds.

Graph 1 shows the running totals for number of vehicles passing through Yellowstone’s South Gate between July 15 and September 16. During those two months, traffic going into Yellowstone from Jackson Hole was up an astonishing 41 percent.

Graph 1

(Note: I used the July 15 – September 16 dates because they match up with the best reliable data I have from the Jackson Hole Airport.)

In contrast, the combined traffic counts at Yellowstone’s four other gates – from West Yellowstone MT, Gardiner MT, Cooke City MT, and Cody WY – were up just 13 percent (Graph 2).

Graph 2

My big, self-obvious conclusion: if it felt frantic this summer, it’s because it was frantic.

Things were very different at the airport. At least at first blush.

I serve as the liaison between the Jackson Town Council and the two local air travel-related boards: the Jackson Hole Airport board and Jackson Hole Air Improvement Resources, which runs our local airline subsidy efforts. One thing I’ve learned in that role is that, like other US airports, the Jackson Hole Airport has no ability to regulate who flies into or out of the airport – locally, we can control only what occurs on the ground.

Another thing I’ve learned is how profoundly disruptive COVID-19 has been for America’s airlines. As a result, their schedule this past summer was constantly changing in response to the demand for flights, or lack thereof.

Locally, that meant the Jackson Hole Airport had 22 percent fewer commercial flights over the past couple of months than during the same period in 2019 (Graph 3)

Graph 3

(Note: To make the sometimes-scattered airport activity data easier to understand, Graphs 3-6 use 7 day averages; e.g., the figure for July 15 is the average number of flights each day between July 9 and July 15.)

But that’s just the commercial flights. As Graph 4 shows, since mid-July, private jet traffic into the Jackson Hole Airport was up by one-third over 2019’s level. In fact, for each of the 64 days between July 15 – September 16, the 7 day average number of flights was higher in 2020 than in 2019.

And of course the private jet traffic during that 64 day stretch in 2019 was busier than in 2018. Which was busier than in 2017. Which was busier than in 2016…

Graph 4

Why focus on air traffic? For a few reasons.

One is that air traffic is a good indicator of how busy Jackson Hole is. Not the best indicator, perhaps, but not a bad one either.

Another reason is that private jet traffic is arguably a very good indicator of how attractive Jackson Hole is becoming to those wealthy enough to afford private jet travel. (If you have a spare 1 minute and 20 seconds here’s a great satiric take on this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmrUZCih-aQ)

The third and most important reason, though, is the noise of it all.

My understanding of Jackson Hole has been greatly enriched by getting to know Bernie Krauss, a bio-acoustician who has been seminal in developing the concept of soundscape ecology; i.e., “the study of the acoustic relationships between living organisms, human and other, and their environment.”

What Bernie helped me understand is how significantly sound can affect how we experience the world. (Follow this link to learn more about Bernie’s work: http://www.wildsanctuary.com/index.html)

In this auditory context, two realities shape the relationship between Jackson Hole and its airport.

One is that the Jackson Hole Airport is the only commercial airport in a national park.

The other is that the shape of the Jackson Hole valley dictates flight patterns. In particular, there are only two directions air traffic can go: over the park, or over the Town of Jackson. As a result, increased air traffic means increased numbers of planes coming in at low altitude – noisy altitude – over the town or park.

Which, to understate the case, is annoying for anyone under a flight path. Especially this year, when COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on everyone’s peace of mind.

But are this year’s airplane-related noise concerns actually grounded in fact? Or are they just a symptom of our COVID-stressed times? To find out, I did a bit of simple math.

Step 1 was to assume the airport was active 14 hours/day, from 7 am to 9 pm. Step 2 was to divide the resulting 840 minutes by the number of flights per day to see how frequently planes were using the Jackson Hole Airport.

Graph 5 divides the 840 minutes by the total number of planes using the airport each day: commercial and private, jets and propeller-driven. Last year, between July 15 and September 16 there were an average of 115 such flights/day, meaning a plane was using the Jackson Hole Airport every 7.3 minutes. This year, the numbers were 122 flights/day and 6.9 minutes – a slight increase in frequency, but not a major one.

Most striking was that far more planes used the Jackson Hole Airport during August 2020 than in 2019. As a result, for essentially every day in August 2020, planes came into and out of the airport much more frequently than they did in the typical day in 2019. Chalk one up for busy-ness.

Graph 5

But that weren’t nothin’ compared to 2020’s private jet traffic.

As Graph 6 shows, using the 7 day averages, between July 15 and September 16 2020 there was a private jet over Jackson Hole every 12 minutes: 5 times per hour, 14 hours per day. This was 26 percent more frequent than in 2019.

Speaking more directly to the annoyance factor, on nearly three-quarters of the days in 2020, there were more private jets using the Jackson Hole Airport than on the busiest day in 2019.

Graph 6

Switching gears slightly, this past Monday my Jackson Town Council colleagues and I granted the Snow King ski area a new long-term lease to use town-owned land in Phil Baux Park. This will allow Snow King to build a new gondola from town property at the base of the mountain to its summit.

I supported the measure, but before I voted I offered the following remarks:

“For many years, now, Jackson Hole has increasingly attracted those who seem eager to exploit the community, taking from it far more than they give back. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this process, attracting people eager to take advantage of all our region has to offer without any sense of how to give back, or even that they should give back.”

Whether or not it’s fair, there is no more visible indicator of the wealth pouring into Jackson Hole than private jets. The airport numbers confirm that which any sentient observer has sensed, namely that private jet activity was way up this summer.

In future newsletters, I’ll explore the implications of all this new wealth. For now, the hatch of private jets over the Tetons is a many-times-per-hour reminder that Jackson Hole is in a state of rapid growth, change, and gentrification.