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The Teton County Planning Commission has recommended the Gill family’s master site plan for upwards of 600 mostly deed-restricted homes in the latest step toward Teton County’s largest development to date.
In a 3-1 vote Monday evening, planning commissioners sent along plans with recommendations and revisions to the Board of County Commissioners, which is still slated to review the plans this spring. That’s despite not having clear plans for an exit road that wouldn’t bog down traffic onto the highway.
The hot button issues still on the table Monday night included the plan’s vision for parks, wildlife permeability and the widespread desire to build more affordable housing.
Likely the most contentious issue headed to county commissioners is that of an east-west connector road will be built from the Gill’s proposed development to Highway 89.
It seems increasingly unlikely that the most direct option can be built. The road would divert traffic from High School Road, which is already over capacity during school drop off and pickup times.
In a letter sent through Jackson attorney Stefan Fodor, the neighboring Lockhart family said a road through their portion of northern South Park was not a done deal and the plans were “troubling.”
The proposal, Fodor argued, seems to assume that the road will travel through the Lockhart’s land outside of the master site plan.
Unlike the Gills, the Lockharts have no stated plans to develop anytime soon. Even if the Lockharts choose to develop the land later, requiring an easement before that point would be an “overreach for the County,” Fodor said.
The Gills will have to consider other options for getting cars in and out.
Planning commissioners came to a cleaner solution on previously diverging ideas of green space that had delayed an earlier vote. At issue was if narrow parks could provide public amenities and connectivity for wildlife.
“I don’t believe this community needs to be put in this kind of venn diagram of parks versus wildlife versus housing,” Planning Commissioner Bob Weiss said. “We have to find a way to find an intersection of compromise.”
The rift appeared to have bridged enough for the planning commission to approve the proposal, though Steve Foster, interim director of Parks and Recreation, would have liked to see a few more changes.
Since the last meeting, the developers agreed to increase the size of many of the parks, make the shape more regular for a few and eliminate any under one acre.
A few of the parks still qualify as what Foster would call “greenspace” or “open space,” but not a park that, in his mind, should count toward the developer’s required park exactions.
Foster particularly still had concerns about the plans for a few of the parks.
“What they call parks — the greenway corridors — have no public park function,” Foster said.
Without the opportunities to develop the greenspace into future recreational spaces, the land is not entirely what his department had envisioned for the required park exactions.
Many of the narrow areas of green space were intended to serve as a corridor to funnel wildlife to the south. That’s according to Susan Johnson, the Gill’s planner and a former county planner, who said the spaces were planned with Wyoming Game and Fish.
Some planning commissioners, including Alex Muromcew, echoed statements made at previous meetings that getting too far in the nitty gritty, such as with Foster’s specifications for the parks, would get in the way of allowing the developer to build as they see fit.
“It is kind of going above and beyond the powers of the Planning Commission to dictate in such detail how developers develop these lands,” Muromcew said.
“I really prefer to have the various groups who are involved in this fight hash out a solution.”
For that reason, the commissioners did not approve Planning Commissioner Sue Lurie’s motion to widen the wildlife corridor along the eastern and southern boundaries.
Lurie cast the sole nay vote. She critiqued how incomplete the plan was when first received and wanted to see even more efforts to address wildlife permeability.
The Board of County Commissioners will pick up the master site plan in April.
