Here are some comments about the latest draft of the Comprehensive Plan update:
Growth: Growth isn’t making Jackson Hole better. The only growth that makes any sense is workforce deed restricted housing in the commercial corridor. Please stick to the 1994 cap numbers for residential development.Climate change provisions: These are unnecessary government intrusions into individual freedom that will have infinitesimally small effect on the problem of climate change while costing enormous amounts of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Conservation as a bi-product of other planning goals (reduced development, preservation of open space, energy use cost savings) is fine. Otherwise, build us a Gen IV nuclear reactor to cost effectively reduce our carbon footprint, or just stop with the virtue signalling about climate change.
Affordable housing: Workforce deed restrictions are the only ones that are fair. Income based dees restrictions provide a perverse incentive for workers and employers. The worse you do the better deal you get on housing. This damages the morale of the middle-class who are trying to benefit from working hard and making good decisions – when people are rewarded for the opposite, why bother? Workforce based deed restricted housing should be available to anyone to buy or rent, but only full-time local workers should be able to live there. Prices should be whatever the market will bear with the deed restriction. In the commercial corridor there should be large bonuses in FAR for 100% workforce deed restricted housing. Housing should not be subsidized by anyone other than employers. Density bonuses in exchange for workforce deed restricted housing are the “free money” that the government can offer to get more housing stock.
“Policy 5.3.b: Preserve existing workforce housing stock” – Should be removed. This provision seems suspiciously leaning towards restricting the sale of homes by retiring workers. These kinds of restrictions along with taxpayer subsidies for affordable housing force parts of the middle class to subsidize other parts of the middle class so that rich people can have less expensive servants. It’s better to let the market set the cost of land and the cost of labor. Government should build housing for its own employees on land that it already owns (Like the project on Snow King). Encourage workforce deed restricted units in the commercial corridor (near Broadway and Cache from Smith’s to Dairy Queen). This is the appropriate place for density. Leave our beloved neighborhoods and open space alone.Don’t try to restrict the price of the homes of local workers who are retiring and ready to sell. Government regulations already prevent these middle-class people from renting short term while wealthy people in the County have free reign. Government regulations seem designed to crush the middle-class while subsidizing everyone else – including the wealthy.
Jobs should pay well enough that people can afford to live here or commute here without government subsidies. We need to stop creating, promoting and subsidizing low paying jobs.
Minimum wage laws are an unwise intrusion into the free market. Wages should be a private agreement between workers and employers.
Government should stay out of the daycare business. Most government interventions into the “needs” of workers pass through as subsidies to employers and promote growth.
Alternative modes of transportation are generally unrealistic, relatively unpopular, and often unpleasant. Residents should have a choice as to their mode of transportation. Automobiles are obviously the most efficient and useful means of transportation for our residents. Working people that need to carry tools have no other choice. We need to limit population growth, and expand and connect our roads so they can function properly for car traffic.
Stop raising taxes. Local government is already too big, too expensive and too intrusive. I don’t appreciate being asked to give more of my money to the government where electeds then use it to pander for votes. Government employees get better pay and better benefits than the private sector workers who support them involuntarily through their taxes. Not good.
Sidewalks are inappropriate in the Town periphery. Street lights are disruptive of dark skies and rural character in the Town Periphery. These Town Periphery neighborhoods are recognized in the Plan as low intensity interfaces with the surrounding wildlands. Stop imposing urbanization on this character district.
3.4: May Park Area – This is the wrong place to add density, because it’s on the edge of town and much of the traffic generated by development in this area has to filter through Town Periphery neighborhoods. Planning 101: don’t put density on the quiet edge of Town.
The Comprehensive Plan has become breathtaking in its scope and invasiveness. While I support protecting neighborhoods and open space the all encompassing control over the freedom of individuals in our town contained in this document is troubling. Elected officials and unelected bureaucrats have entirely too much control over the daily lives of our citizens.
I have over the decades been a big supporter of the Comp Plan – mostly in an effort to keep Jackson Hole from being over developed, and hopped up into small pieces with sprawling suburbs. But now I’m having serious concerns about whether the Comp Plan monster has gotten completely out of hand. Not only has it become a neighborhood destroyer rather than preserver, it has also become a vehicle for controlling huge swaths of our lives, and allows those who wish to rule over us free reign to mold us according to their utopian imagination. Climate change, subsidized housing, tax increases, and whether we can drive our cars are all baked into the behemoth. When push comes to shove I’ll take freedom over conservation, and I think it’s a wise choice. Why are you making me choose?
The middle class is getting crushed between the rich and the subsidized classes. There will soon no longer be a middle class, only the subsidized and the subsidizers. The demoralized middle class is burdened by this plan with higher taxes, suppressed wages and ever more restrictions on what we can do with the assets we have painstakingly accumulated. Restrictions that the rich can weather with relatively little pain, but the middle class finds crushing. Why make good decisions and be prudent with our money when the reward is subsidizing others who weren’t.
Please do some trimming of this overgrown document, before it gets even more out of hand.