The fifteen years
Rules now, town later
Jackson and Teton County adopted a joint Comprehensive Plan in 1994, replaced it in 2012, and updated it in October 2020. Each plan is carried out through Land Development Regulations written in the years after adoption, and the buildings those rules allow are designed, financed, and finished over the decade after that. The first projects under a new plan appear within a few years; the town it produces is visible ten to fifteen years later. Slide the year.
I asked for revision of the Land Development Regulations to be placed on the Council's agenda before my term ended. It was not scheduled.
How long a new plan and code would take, and why residents should care
The timeline under one contract
A Council that decides to rewrite the plan and the regulations together, under one contract with a consultant team, should expect two to three years from the request for proposals to adopted rules. The first twelve to eighteen months go to the plan itself: the team maps what the current rules allow on every parcel in the valley, models two or three alternatives against water use, traffic, housing, and the Town's budget, and brings those results to public workshops before anyone drafts a page. The regulations are written in the second half of the contract, while the plan is fresh and against the same model, which is where the time savings come from. Jackson's own history ran slower. The 2012 plan took about four years to adopt, and the regulations that carry it out arrived over the five years after that. The budget for a joint Town and County scope runs to seven figures and is shared between the two governments.
Not everything has to wait for the full rewrite. A single text amendment to the regulations, such as making lodging a conditional use, capping floor area for each development, or making on-site housing mitigation the default, moves through the Planning Commission and both boards in three to six months. The two tracks can run at once: amend the rules that are producing the wrong buildings this year, and rebuild the whole document behind them.
Why the calendar matters to people who live here
Every approval granted while the rules stay as they are becomes permanent. A hotel or a large second home entitled in 2027 under regulations the community already agrees are wrong will stand for the rest of most residents' lives, and the water it draws, the trips it adds to the roads, and the workers it needs without housing them arrive with it. The fifteen-year clock in the slider above starts at adoption. A rewrite that begins in early 2027 produces rules by 2028 or 2029 and a town shaped by them in the early 2040s; a rewrite that begins in 2031 moves all of that to the late 2040s. Each year the Council waits adds a year of buildings under the old rules and moves the town people say they want a year further away.
The County's part
The Comprehensive Plan belongs to both the Town and Teton County. The joint meetings on the calendar exist because both boards adopt the same plan, and the County's rules for the land around the town govern the same aquifer, the same roads into town, and the same housing market. A Town Council that wants a new plan needs three votes on its own board, three votes on the County Commission, a shared budget, and a shared contract. Getting both boards to the same request for proposals is the work of the first six months, and it is the part most likely to be skipped in favor of another year of small amendments.
The case for a plan and code people can read
The current plan and regulations run to hundreds of pages, with overlays, exceptions, and definitions that point to other definitions, and a resident who wants to know what can be built next door needs a planner or a lawyer to find out. The federal tax code grew the same way, one exception at a time, each one reasonable to the people who asked for it, until the whole became a document only specialists read. A shorter plan is possible. It states the outcomes the community wants in measurable terms, including water use, housing for the people who work here, and total commercial square footage, and it is carried out by a few dozen pages of rules written as standards a resident can check: how big, how tall, how much housing comes with it, and how much water it may draw. Fewer overlays and fewer exceptions mean fewer meetings spent arguing about which rule applies and fewer projects approved through a gap nobody noticed. Keeping the document short takes discipline, and it needs a Council willing to decline the exceptions that will be requested the week after adoption.
The 1994 plan and the 2012 plan, and what changed between them
The goals
The two plans want the same things. The 1994 vision called for a community that supports resident workers, protects scenic vistas and wildlife habitat, keeps the traditions of the Rocky Mountain West, offers housing for the people who work here, and builds an economy that does not depend on population growth. The 2012 plan restated those goals under three named values, ecosystem stewardship, growth management, and quality of life, and its introduction describes itself as validating the 1994 framework. The 1990 workshop list is visible in both documents.
How the 1994 plan worked
The 1994 plan was organized by subject, with nine chapters covering growth, community character, natural and scenic resources, housing, commercial and resort development, facilities, transportation, intergovernmental coordination, and agriculture. Its tools applied across the whole county: a Natural Resources Overlay with setbacks from nests and spawning areas, a Scenic Resources Overlay covering nine view corridors, planned unit and planned residential developments that traded flexibility for clustering and open space, and a housing mitigation requirement with a fee-in-lieu option. The plan governed how development happened wherever it happened and said little about where it should go. By 2009, when the replacement was being written, the zoning in place allowed about 7,800 more homes, roughly 6,200 of them in the County on rural land and about 1,600 in Town, along with about 9.45 million square feet of new commercial floor area.
How the 2012 plan changed the map
The 2012 plan is organized by place. Its Future Land Use Plan divides the valley into character districts, each with its own section, and its central decision was to send growth into Town and a few County nodes. Those areas hold about four percent of the private land in the county and were assigned more than 60 percent of new homes; the rural districts, with 96 percent of the private land, were assigned less than 40 percent. The plan set a buildout range of 5,400 to 9,900 homes, with Town's share rising to between 38 and 51 percent from about 20 percent under the old zoning, and a commercial range of 6.2 to 8.8 million square feet, below what the 1994-era zoning already allowed. It also added an administration chapter with annual indicator reports, and it replaced the pattern of the 2000s, in which pathways, housing, parking, and resort master plans were each studied on their own without a plan to connect them.
The trade
The 2012 plan kept the 1994 goals and changed where the buildings go. It accepted density in Town in exchange for open land in the County and for housing and neighborhood character that the plan promised would come with the density. The Town's regulations written in the years after adoption delivered the density. The housing and the neighborhood character have arrived more slowly, and most of the land use disputes now before the Council turn on that gap, which is the reason my request to the Council concerns the regulations rather than the goals.
Which housing changes need a Comprehensive Plan amendment, per the Town Manager
In November 2021, my first year on the Council, I worked with ShelterJH and the Town Manager on ShelterJH’s list of housing proposals, and the Manager answered in writing, sorting each one by whether it could be done by changing the Land Development Regulations alone or needed an amendment to the joint Comprehensive Plan first. The list is ShelterJH’s, and I do not endorse every item on it; the sorting is what I want readers to see. The sorting matters because a regulation change moves through the Planning Commission and the Council in a few months, and a plan amendment needs both the Town and the County and adds a year or more before the rules can follow. The reply, as he sorted it:
Regulations only, no plan amendment
A penny of sales tax or a Town property tax for housing (the Town is working on a funding strategy). Enforcing short-term rental rules and redefining short-term as fewer than 90 days rather than 30. Requiring public facilities to house at least the workers they generate, which the housing nexus study then underway could address, though the Town may not be able to bind State agencies. Reinstating a 25 percent inclusionary requirement on residential development, and ending the nonprofit and institutional exemptions from commercial mitigation, both of which that study could address. An on-site housing requirement for all commercial development and redevelopment, with public money to buy down affordability on at least half the residential square footage, so a site does not turn into a low-density commercial box. Paid on-street parking with a free pass for residents, winter on-street parking with alternate-side plowing, and no on-site parking requirement for deed-restricted homes.
Comprehensive Plan amendment required
Ending single-family-only zoning and raising density in every Town district for deed-restricted homes. Shrinking the lodging overlay. Reinstating the fourth-story incentive for deed-restricted housing in the appropriate zones (already allowed in the CR-3 zone when criteria are met). Exempting deed-restricted homes from the growth cap and lowering the market-rate cap over time.
What this means five years later
The nexus study named in that reply was completed in 2022 and updated in 2023. The first list was available to the Council in 2021 without touching the plan, and it is available today. I asked for the regulations to be placed on the Council’s agenda before my term ended, and it was never scheduled. The parts of that list I carry are the ones on this site: housing mitigation at the real cost of a home and on site by default, floor area counted per development, an end to the exemptions, and parking rules that let small homes pencil. Light density across the whole town, the change that spreads the burden instead of piling it onto a few blocks, sits in the second list, which is why the fifteen-year clock on this page runs through the Comprehensive Plan and why the County has to come along.
Two cautions shape what I would take from the list. Rules that make building so burdensome that nothing gets built produce no homes, so each change has to be tested against whether a small project still pencils. And Teton County is the only place in Wyoming that charges housing mitigation fees; House Bill 141 would have banned them this year and failed in the Senate 24 to 7, and a town that reaches too far invites the Legislature to take the tool away for good. The changes I favor put housing on site as a land use standard, which a Wyoming town can do on its own authority, rather than stacking new fees the Legislature can strike with one bill.
The 1990 record
In March 1990, 160 residents spent three days at the Successful Communities Workshop writing down what they wanted for Jackson Hole. Their action list included affordable housing, locally owned businesses, control of the amount and location of commercial square footage, better transit and bike lanes, and protection for water and wildlife. Two comprehensive plans later, the list reads as current. The workshop was led by Luther Propst, then field director of the Conservation Foundation’s Successful Communities Program and now a Teton County Commissioner. The booklet below was written by Jonathan Schechter, who also prepared its economic and demographic analysis through Summit Management Consulting, and who now serves on the Town Council.