Every Monday afternoon for four hours, the Community Health Outreach Workers hosted free drop-in sessions at the Teton County Library helping people navigate the oftentimes convoluted healthcare system, including assisting with medicare applications.
That county program had been funded by pandemic-era federal grants since 2021 and will now end mid-June after cuts to the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
Rachael Wheeler, the county’s interim health director, previously told KHOL that three community outreach workers’ salaries funded by federal grants had been cut.
Those employees expected to have jobs through spring 2026. The federal funding for their jobs ends at the end of April but the county will keep them on until June, Wheeler said. Two other employees who worked in the county’s vaccination programs also lost their jobs ahead of schedule, which had been slated to end June 2025.
Library Executive Director Kip Roberson said the healthcare program was popular.
“I can attest that every week when the CHOW program was operating here in the library, the room that they were using was full. People would be outside waiting to get in,” Roberson said.
Roberson added that the “Creative Aging” program hosted at the library was also caught up in cuts, but the library’s foundation will help fund its own version.
The program, sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council, connected older residents through arts programming across the state. Teton County partners for the most current grant year included Teton Music School and Jackson Hole Writers.
Outside of programming the most visible losses to result from federal cuts will be less money for the statewide interlibrary resource sharing program. Roberson said databases like the WYLDCat catalog, for requesting books at other Wyoming libraries, received more than a third of its funding from the federal government.
The cuts coincide with the federal Institute of Museums and Library Services putting all its staff on “administrative leave” late last month.
Roberson said the library should be able to front the difference with the help of its foundation, though he added that rural counties with less tax revenue in a year of sweeping property tax cuts might find it difficult to cover the cost for the research database and online catalog.
In an average year, Teton County property taxes fund 85% of the library’s budget while the remaining costs are covered by the Teton County Library Foundation and Friends.
This article has been updated to reflect when the CHOW program is ending.
