Pat Stuart

Once, traveling on the South Carolina Outer Banks, we would jounce happily along an unpaved track north from the small village of Duck into the dunes and scrub lands where wild ponies made their homes among strange, stunted piebald deer and a host of birds and other creatures. A friend’s shingle-sided house stood on stilts there, quite alone, facing an ever-rolling surf with an occasional passing ship far out to sea.

Idyllic. But idyllic no more. Now, the ponies and deer are gone. A great berm protects the shoreline, barring the sea from miles and miles of giant 5-10 bedroom houses built shoulder-to-shoulder across the banks, facing the sound on one side and the sea on the other, covering the dunes, looking like a Levittown on steroids.

A forlorn sign along the highway now running the length of the banks attracted my attention on this year’s trip. “Stop Building Mini-Hotels.” 

A vain hope there, but here?

Something like such out-of-control, ugly growth couldn’t happen here. Could it? Places like the Front Range, Boise or Missoula or Bozeman, yes. But here?

The Land Use Plan contractors tell us that the one-acre zoning now allowed in the Cody-Powell corridor could permit almost 500,000 houses. At 2-plus people per house that’s over a million new people in the valley.

We know the process is already underway. Houses are springing up everywhere you look, while the county commissioner’s agenda (see the county website) keeps adding more subdivision approvals. Like, often, three or four per meeting. Here’s a sample from last week:

Park County Planning & Zoning Re: Public Hearing: Gillett North MS-66 Sketch Plan; Re: Diamond View Ranch SUP-240; Re: Merit Energy SUP-242; Re: MW SS-293 Corrected Final Plat.

That’s just one meeting.

Worse, growth projections of .60% per year in the next 20 years are probably horribly underestimated, as they don’t adjust for things like Covid and global warming, economic deprivation, a south-to-north population shift, and all the other developments forcing people out of their homes and sending them looking for a nice, welcoming places to settle.

Let’s face it. We’re a nice, welcoming place ... I don’t have to tell you that!

The planning process now underway, therefore, becomes critical and something that should concern everyone because, even if you don’t care about maintaining our lifestyle or our agricultural lands, you should care about what all those new people will take from your pocket.

Here’s the catch-22. New people seldom provide a net addition to our economy. Instead, their demand for public services costs us. 

How much? Well, right now each work-at-home household adds $23,000 in uncompensated costs for services to Wyoming state and local governments or $2,35 million/year (according to WyoFile) per 100 households while the mineral wealth that has paid the deficit is going away.

How long can we sustain our share of that size of budget drain in Park County?

Which is just for starters. The $23,000 public service cost figure does not include a local add-on: water to rural households. 

Worse, the land use planners just assume that water in the Buffalo Bill Reservoir will never be diverted away from us and that our Shoshone Pipeline and Northwest Rural Water can be built out to service what they’ve identified as suitable land for development (current farmland). 

What will happen, though, if climate change adversely affects the snowpack or—maybe worse—the water-starved giant population centers of the Colorado River Basin manage to tap our reservoir as they have so many others.

And, who’s going to pay for the build out if there is water? Us. The taxpayers, of course.

As for wells and our substrata water, a lot of it will simply go away with our farms and flood irrigation systems. No more irrigation means no more replenishment for what the wells pump into the new rural households.

When completed, the land use plan will be used to rewrite current land use regulations, many of which will restrict our rights as property owners while requiring us to pay for bigger county government to monitor and enforce those regulations.

More taxes. 

Think about it. Unless we are very careful right now, we can look forward to our own version of a rural Levittown, major lifestyle changes, and higher taxes for all.

Can’t happen here?