Snow King’s final master plan was approved in January, even though there was still much left to be desired. And while the community was coming together to handle a public health crisis, Snow King submitted an application for one of the most divisive projects from the proposal – a zip line by Rafferty that would connect to other zip lines on forest land – as well as permits for a new gondola and improvements to the pump house for snowmaking. We called on Town Planning Commission to zip these bad ideas in the bud: to say no to yet another amusement, to say no to a downtown bar experience on our Town Hill, and to question the clean drinking water that would support a 150% expansion in snowmaking. And while the Forest Service hasn’t yet completed the Environmental Impact Statement (which we asked them to redo, because it was so flawed), and we’re learning more about the rare goshawks nesting in what would be the proposed eastern expansion, Town Council is poised to approve all three permits and negotiate leases.
At a high level, decisions about operating hours, zip lines, and water pipes may seem small, but they include key issues that have fallen through the cracks of different jurisdictions. This zip line and gondola are part of a larger picture for our Town Hill, one that includes 25,000 sf summit complexes, top-to-bottom lighting and zip lines, roads crisscrossing the best ski terrain, and bulldozers taking out important habitat of northern goshawks, great gray owls, elk, bear, cougars, lynx, wolves – and local recreationists. These CUP discussions aren’t just about small design adjustments; these discussions are about if these uses should be allowed at all, and if so, under what conditions.
But, Town Council cannot make all the findings required to approve the permits – and our letter (below or here) explains why. Email council@townofjackson.com what you think by July 6 or attend the meeting to provide comment!
July 3, 2020
Jackson Town Council
RE: Snow King zip line, gondola, and pump house Conditional Use Permits
Dear Mayor Muldoon and Councilors,
We want Snow King to succeed as our Town Hill, not an amusement park. We believe the investors’ proposals for late-night operations at the base and summit as well as a web of zip lines all over the Town Hill are much worse than you realized when you approved the Base Area Master Plan. We hope you will deny the harmful aspects of these proposals.
We respectfully disagree with the staff report assessment that you can make all the ‘findings’ to support these projects. In this letter, we explain why.
At a high level, decisions about operating hours, zip lines, and water pipes may seem small, but they include key issues that have fallen through the cracks of different jurisdictions. This zip line and gondola are part of a larger picture for our Town Hill, one that includes 25,000 sf summit complexes, top-to-bottom lighting and zip lines, roads crisscrossing the best ski terrain, and bulldozers taking out important habitat of northern goshawks, great gray owls, elk, bear, cougars, lynx, wolves – and local recreationists. These CUP discussions aren’t just about small design adjustments; these discussions are about if these uses should be allowed at all, and if so, under what conditions.
Gondola CUP: findings
The Forest Service will decide what may be built on Forest lands, but the decisions the Town makes about the gondola will determine the magnitude of many impacts. We believe that the following findings cannot / should not be made:
- Compatibility with desired future character à Common Value 1: Ecosystem Stewardship – does not comply.
- Minimizes adverse environmental impact – does not comply.
Staff notes that “The applicant has submitted relevant excerpts from the Draft EIS report which has thoroughly vetted the environmental impacts of the proposal.” Half of this statement is accurate. The applicant did submit excerpts from the Forest Service (FS) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). However, the FS absolutely did not thoroughly vet the environmental impacts of the proposal. Instead, as we thoroughly documented in our response to the Draft EIS – and as hundreds of locals, approximately 2/3 of commenters, wrote in – the FS utterly failed in their job of analyzing and mitigating environmental impacts. According to an email from the applicant obtained through FOIA, the FS colluded with the applicant to bias the whole EIS process. And the FS ignored crucial winter range for mule deer and elk in Leeks Canyon, northern goshawk territory in the proposed expansion into Cache Creek, and lynx habitat where the applicant wants to put a yurt camp.
The gondola project includes more lighting (even if it is more efficient) and will exponentially increase human activity on the summit late into the night, displacing wildlife that are sensitive to lighting or increased human activity, even with the proposed operating plan. This is clearly not good Ecosystem Stewardship.
We ask town council to protect and preserve the area’s ecosystem. Allowing events and weddings until 1am in a massive 25,000 sf+ complex on the summit ridge overlooking Leeks Canyon is clearly harmful to wildlife and our ecosystem.
- Minimizes adverse impact from nuisances – does not comply
Hours: The gondola, if allowed to function past 10pm, will make all town residents a captive audience of any weddings or events held at the top, not to mention the associated lighting, noise, and traffic. We are shocked that Snow King would even propose a downtown bar experience on top of our Town Hill. Please do not allow the gondola to service special events (weddings? private parties? fundraisers? corporate retreats? exclusive group tours?) until 1am. This proposal is outrageous and should be rejected out of hand.
Please take the time to consider the Parks and Recreation Board input. We were impressed by their thorough discussion and clear decisions, and we hope you will grant them full consideration. We support their recommendation to limit gondola operating hours to 6pm in winter and 9pm in summer (lining up with other activities). Additionally, loud amusements in the base area should have 8pm summer closing times.
Noise has long been an issue for Snow King’s neighbors, and despite town LDRs calling for planned resorts to have a “high degree of self-containment” (4.3.1.A), the resort has not solved the issue. This is our community’s chance to solve this ongoing problem. Snow King is not a self-contained resort, and its operations need to start respecting the neighbors and community nearby. Please remember our clear goal of being a community first, not just a resort. Please deny adding more noise sources to the existing base area impacts, and please require strict 6pm winter / 9pm summer closing times for existing base area amusements. Group events requiring extended hours should be subject to a special event permit since they will require use of the gondola located at Phil Baux Park, and with a low annual limit for all such events (five per year?).
- Impact on public facilities – does not comply
The gondola will create the need for tour bus parking, interrupt the flow and use of Phil Baux Park (as written by the Parks and Recreation Board), and it will provide lift service to bikes that will then flood public trails.
Zipline CUP: findings
Zip lines are among the most controversial of Snow King’s “improvements”; they are high-risk even within the US, as described by Outside; they make our Town Hill worse; and they don’t align with the Comprehensive Plan’s goals of retaining Western character or being a community first, resort second. We believe the following findings cannot / should not be made:
- Visual impacts (minimize) – does not comply.
We respectfully disagree with the staff assessment that because the zip line would be near other amusements, it would not have a visual impact. In fact, a zip line – part of a top-to-bottom network of zip lines – would indeed have an impact on the historic look of our Town Hill. Zip lines will be a noticeable shift away from our vaunted “Last of the Old West” character.
- Minimizes adverse impact from nuisances – does not comply
Noise: The zip line, although located next to other undesirable amusements, will only intensify an existing, and largely unaddressed, problem. A “code of conduct,” oiled cables, and even a stringent operating plan will do little to reduce the number of shrieking riders – and if it is Snow King’s prime revenue source, we expect it will have nonstop use.
Danger: Zip lines are high-risk. As recently described by Outside magazine, as zip lines become more popular, injuries and deaths become more prevalent. There’s no central repository for injury data (or for participation numbers) but we do know that injuries grew from a few hundred in the late 1990s to more than 3,000 in 2012.[i][1] We also know that zip line injuries can be serious, and the sport’s injuries are deemed to be “at least as serious as rock climbing” and more in line with whitewater rafting than riding a rollercoaster. And we know zip lines are not treated like either of those but rather like carnival rides; regulations vary widely from state to state, with oversight limited to simple review of plans on paper.
Locally, a family sued Grand Targhee after a middle school child fell from a zip line during a field trip.[ii] Snow King has also had some very close calls, including failing safety harnesses on the roller coaster,[iii] and opening the mountain on a dangerous day that led to an inbounds slide that endangered 200 children.[iv] Given this questionable safety record, the Town should absolutely forbid any additional unnecessary risky amusement rides.
- Other relevant standards / Town LDRs – does not comply
Town LDRs regarding Planned Resorts state that resorts should “encourage recreational activities that rely on indigenous natural attributes of the area, contribute to the community’s character and economy and have had a long-standing, beneficial role in the community” and should have a “high degree of self-containment” (4.3.1.A). Zip lines fail on all counts (except perhaps economic). Zip lines do not rely on natural attributes: they can operate at Vegas and Disneyland just as well as on mountains. They harm our community’s character and obviously have not had a “long-standing, beneficial role in the community.” In fact, zip lines are viewed negatively by much of our community, and the noise and lighting will clearly spill beyond “self-containment.”
The LDRs for this area also call for you to “Ensure a balance is maintained between tourism and community that promotes social diversity but does not cause undesired shifts away from rural, western community character” (4.3.1.A.8). This proposal marks a clear end to “Jackson Hole, Last of the Old West.” Zip lines and massive event centers on top of Josie’s Ridge are widely undesired and clearly not “rural, western community character.”
Pump house CUP: findings
- Minimizes adverse environmental impact – does not comply.
Both the development and operation of the pump house should be analyzed. The pump house operation (snowmaking) will enable 150% more snow coverage, yet there is no analysis of the environmental impact of the source of the water or the consequences of snowmelt into a drier and southern-facing drainage. We do not agree with the applicant’s logic that because the “town has identified no impending water shortage” that there is no problem with a massive increase in drinkable water use.
According to the letter from Nelson Engineering, most snowmaking occurs at night, when the noise and associated lighting will be most noticeable, to people and wildlife.
- Impact on public facilities – does not comply
What is proposed and conditioned unnecessarily burdens public facilities. The operation of the pump house will require millions of gallons of drinkable water, sourced from our aquifer and pumped through town pipes, perhaps requiring the replacement of town infrastructure. We’d like to see more of the math behind estimated water consumption – our back-of-the-envelope math indicates that a 150% increase in snowmaking coverage would necessitate around 302.5 million gallons, not 161 million gallons. This water is finite, and the energy required to pump it is expensive. Why are we not having an honest conversation about the public and environmental costs of increased drinking water use, especially when some county residents don’t have clean drinking water in their homes?[v] If the resort needs more water for snowmaking, not for a massive summit complex, then the town should negotiate an appropriate cost-share for installing larger conveyance pipes through the pump house CUP.
Leases: Please negotiate fair leases (length and rate) for our public land
Timing: 50 years is way too long to lease town land to anyone. We have no idea what the economy will bring in a month, let alone a year. The applicant claims that the lease length is comparable to other leases the town holds, but the only comparable lease we could find was the lease for the fairgrounds, at 24 years. Leases on forest land range anywhere from 20 to 40 years, with longer terms to balance out capital investments. But Snow King isn’t starting from scratch; it already has local, dedicated users as well as a nearly endless supply of new customers thanks to our tourist economy (and despite fears of COVID-19). Snow King’s town leases should be up for renewal at the same time as the permit for the Forest Service – in 2039 – so that the town can re-negotiate terms as the developers propose other changes in the future.
Amounts: Snow King wants to operate as a for-profit business extracting maximum revenue – charging the Town high rates for using communication towers on the hills and taking away the free access locals had to hike and skin up the hill for over 80 years. Recreation research shows that even small changes in fees can change who uses a site – radically remaking a place Zahan Billimoria described as the most democratic place in Jackson. At the same time, Snow King wants below-market rates. They can’t have it both ways. Snow King’s town land lease rates should be based on a percent of its gross revenue (whole resort, not just gondola tickets) – just like its lease with the Forest Service. These rates should either be market rate (much higher than we’ve ever seen) or come with free access for locals and Town facilities.
Please reject the permits for the zip line, gondola and pump house based on the issues identified above; and please require fair leases for town land.
Overall, we believe that a far better future is possible for Snow King than what the investors are proposing. Zip lines and late-night amusements clearly make Snow King worse, they’re controversial, and Snow King can succeed without them. We want to find a way to help Snow King succeed despite the uncertainty of the coming seasons and years. But let’s not hastily approve bad ideas. If the only way the resort’s current investors can think of to save Snow King is to cover it with zip lines… maybe it’s time for someone else to try. We’ve seen the community’s willingness to consider a public buy-out before, and we saw the community rally around Snow King to fund grooming for uphill exercise even during a public health crisis. Just like with the Café Genevieve block, sometimes we have to say no to a bad idea to create space for a good outcome. Please say no to these bad ideas so that we can all come together in support of better proposals for our Town Hill.
Sincerely,
Brooke Sausser
Community Planning Manager
[1] Borrell, Brendan. (2017, Feb. 28). “Just how dangerous are zip lines?” Outside. https://www.
outsideonline.com/2159481/just-how-dangerous-are-ziplines.
[i] Borrell, Brendan. (2017, Feb. 28). “Just how dangerous are zip lines?” Outside. www.outsideonline.
com/2159481/just-how-dangerous-are-ziplines. See also “Zip line popularity leads to more injuries,” CBS News (2015, Oct. 5). www.cbsnews.com/news/zip-line-popularity-more-injuries/#:~:text=
The%20annual%20injury%20rate%20for,common%20in%20children%20and%20teens.
[ii] Breysse, Emma. (2012, May 4). “Afton family sues Targhee.” Jackson Hole News & Guide. https://www.
jhnewsandguide.com/news/top_stories/afton-family-sues-targhee/article_c96b0dd6-56d5-5a50-8354-282091af2be7.html.
[iii] Cottier, Cody. (2018, Aug. 23). “Seat belt failures close coaster, spark recall.” Jackson Hole Daily. https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/jackson_hole_daily/local/seat-belt-failures-close-coaster-spark-recall/article_58033c12-05b7-5646-b5ec-931ef260561c.html.
[iv] Mieure, Emily. (2017, Feb. 11). “Slide closes Snow King.” Jackson Hole Daily. https://www.
jhnewsandguide.com/jackson_hole_daily/local/article_c2e4babd-8885-5cb5-be42-eea081fe4924.html.
[v] Hallberg, Tom. (2020, June 10). “Hoback water stakeholders recommend forming special district.” Jackson Hole News & Guide. https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/health/hoback-water-stakeholders-recommend-forming-special-district/article_be107eb5-9544-587f-9745-91743314aa73.html.
