2026 County Commission Candidate Questionnaires
To enhance readability, we have added the bold font to responses below to emphasize notable aspects of their views.
Do you plan to vote yes or no on the property tax ballot measure this fall?
Jessica Sell Chambers: No
Gabe Koerber: Yes
Jonathan Schechter: No
Alyson Spery: No
What roles should market-rate housing, public-private partnerships, and public housing each play in addressing Teton County’s housing shortage?
Jessica Sell Chambers: Market-rate housing: the rules decide what gets built. Today a 10,000-square-foot lot pencils best as one 5,800-square-foot house with an accessory unit that sits empty. The same lot could hold three 1,700-square-foot homes. Light density across the whole town, with a floor area cap that rewards splitting the building, gives us homes priced without a subsidy. And every project should house the workers it brings, on site, at what a home costs here. Public-private partnerships: a developer is the other side of a negotiation until the agreement is signed. 90 Virginian Lane ran three years under the word partner, they were not, with one-on-one briefings, no minutes, and nothing signed. I raised the structure of that deal while it was unfolding, and it ended in July on the terms I had raised: the land, the money, and the decisions were headed into private hands. I want homes built at 90 Virginian Lane, and I want the land and the decisions to stay public. Negotiations work when the public sets the terms: competitive bids with published scoring, no private contact with bidders while a bid is live, an owner’s representative and financial counsel who answer to the elected body, and every record posted as it is created. On those terms, private capital is welcome. My liaison work with the Housing Supply Board and Housing Trust is in Resolution 25-02, at jessicaforjackson.com. Public housing: land the public owns stays public, under long-term ground leases, so the subsidy is paid once and stays here. A deed restriction is a conservation easement for people. It holds a place in town for the nurse, the teacher, and the plow driver the way an easement holds open land. The public owns the land, sets and enforces the restriction, and lets whoever can build at the lowest verified cost build the homes.
Gabe Koerber: The only thing market rate housing has that benefits us at this time is the mitigation fee that’s associated with larger developments, which I still go back and forth on if its a good idea or not to have. Other than that, nothing coming from market rate is actually benefitting workers of Jackson, it exacerbates the issue. Public-Private Partnerships need to be seriously reconsidered. RFP’s need to be held to their proposal, not as a general starting point. The ever moving goalpost that was seen in the attempt to build 90 Virginian Lane was like watching a train wreck, watching the development become less ideal for community members, more costly for tax payers, and slowly getting to the point where the only one who came out ahead would have been the developer. Based on current track records, the town should attempt to increase its collaboration with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, and others with good track records Public housing is a necessity at this point, but I’d like to see more homes, not “labor housing” as I see some proposed developments.
Jonathan Schechter: Seven basic facts inform any discussion of affordable housing: 1. Teton County’s current affordable housing efforts began in 1993, an approach I call Affordable Housing 1.0 (AH1.0). 2. Under AH1.0, success has essentially been based on quantity and speed; i.e., the more affordable units we build and the faster we build them, the more successful we are. 3. A 2007 study found Jackson Hole had ~800 affordable housing units and needed ~500 more. Today, we have ~1,850 units and need ~2,000 more. Thus, despite building over 1,000 units in the past 20 years, our problem is much worse than it was. 4. Our goal is to house 65% of our workers. Unfortunately, this goal is driven by something we don’t control: job growth. Worse, Teton County’s job growth ranks in the top 5% of all counties, meaning our housing needs are growing faster than our ability to build any housing – affordable or free market. 5. Under current zoning, Teton County will build a total of perhaps 8,000 more homes, and probably fewer. Of those, no more than 2,000 will be affordable; more likely ~1,500. 6. Today, each affordable housing unit requires a subsidy of ~$300,000-$700,000. This means we need ~$1 billion to build our future affordable homes, far more than local government can currently raise. 7. Worldwide, every desirable place to live has an affordable housing shortage. None knows how to address it. Combined, these facts argue we need a new approach to affordable housing – call it Affordable Housing 2.0. AH2.0’s foundation would be the answers to 3 basic questions: 1. Who do we want living in Jackson Hole 50-100 years from now? What combination of workers, dirtbags, professionals, artists, and everyone else who makes a community vital? 2. What kind of housing do they need? 3. Where should we build it? Once we answer these questions, we can figure out who is best suited to build it: the market, public sector, or partnerships. In other words, let our goals determine who builds our housing, not vice-versa.
Alyson Spery: Market housing will continue to play a role in housing our workforce, as the majority of our workforce currently lives in market housing. These homes are critical, and we should craft policies that will help preserve these homes and keep our local workers in them. There are many reasons we’ve used public/private partnerships to develop housing, and those partnerships have been successful. We should continue to look at other ways to increase our housing stock, but given the scale of the challenge, we aren’t going to solve it alone. All deed restricted housing should be considered public housing – whether built directly by the public, through a public private partnership, or by private developers without public involvement. The deed restriction itself is what the public has an interest in, as that is the mechanism that controls who lives in it and how much they will have to pay. Every one of these units that is built and occupied is by definition a success, and they are our main tool for ensuring housing for our workforce.
If you could snap your fingers and make three specific policy or regulatory changes to address Teton County’s housing shortage, what would you do?
Jessica Sell Chambers: 1. Make the small home the easy one to build. Rewrite the Land Development Regulations so floor area is capped per development, not per building, with a cap that steps down as a building grows. Three 1,700-square-foot homes should be worth more to build than one 5,800-square-foot house. Count an accessory unit as housing only when someone lives in it. 2. Make every project house the workers it brings. Mitigation at the real cost of a home here, built on site by default, with a fee in lieu only when the Council makes a finding. Count underground connections and total floor area so a hotel cannot split itself to shrink its obligation. Make lodging a conditional use downtown and on the highway corridor. 3. Make housing money produce housing. Competitive bids with published scoring, no private contact between officials and bidders while a bid is live, minutes for every briefing, and a public repository. Adopt those rules before the next 90 Virginian Lane solicitation goes out, not after.
Gabe Koerber: Snap 1: Remove the 2 for 1 bonus for developers. The housing that comes with this allowance for monstrosities of developments in this town is not worth the cost on infrastructure, congestion, density, and job growth associated with it. It’s like cutting off your leg so you can say you lost weight. We are worse off with it than without. Snap 2: Consider a required ratio for purchasing already existing housing to convert to affordable housing against developing and construction of new affordable housing. Utilizing already built housing gets people into units faster than going through the mountains of red tape, money, and time involved in new developments. Snap 3: Create a heavier penalty for tearing down habitable, non condemned houses that get scrapped by developers to build luxury houses, many of which sit empty, that don’t serve our town’s character and culture. How about $50,000 per residential lot? $100,000? Let’s talk about options.
Jonathan Schechter: Our most important challenge is funding. As noted above, to meet our affordable housing needs will cost ~$1 billion, far more than local government can currently raise. To address this problem, two tools suggest themselves. First, we need to convert the 7th penny of sales tax from SPET to general operating revenue. This would raise ~$25 million/year for local government, some of which could fund affordable housing. (Note: the SPET 7th cent will likely expire in mid-2028, meaning the 7th cent of general revenues would first be available in late 2028 or early 2029.) Second, we need to get Wyoming’s legislature to authorize a real estate transfer tax. If enacted, it could raise tens of millions for local government, much of which I would like to see used for affordable housing. Getting the legislature to enact this tax would take an active, community-wide effort, and likely take several years. Happily, we have a precedent for such an effort: the lodging tax. In the late 1980s Teton County led a statewide effort that resulted in a lodging tax being enacted. The initial law was carefully crafted to apply only to Teton County. Today, every Wyoming county and many municipalities levy the tax. Given that many other parts of Wyoming are facing affordable housing challenges, there’s a good chance we could find statewide support for a carefully crafted tax. The third change I would make is to develop the Affordable Housing 2.0 effort I discuss above. Once in place, AH2.0 would provide the entire community with a clear understanding of our affordable housing goals, which in turn would make it easier to generate the types of political and financial support critical to developing meaningful amounts of affordable housing. Without such clarity, the task will be much harder. Combined, these steps will address three root causes of our affordable housing challenges. To me, this would be a far more important, meaningful, and effective approach than even sweeping regulatory changes.
Alyson Spery: There are no silver bullets, unfortunately. The politically easy things have been done. As an elected official, I get lots of feedback from people who insist that there’s this one solution that can solve all our problems. But there isn’t one solution, much less three. It takes hard work on the part of staff, and it takes public awareness and commensurate support from community members to ensure that elected officials have the public support they need to see projects through to completion over multiple election cycles.
If the Wyoming Legislature were to prohibit housing mitigation fees, what would you recommend to replace that lost revenue? How would you build support for your idea(s)?
Jessica Sell Chambers: House Bill 141 would have banned the fees this year. It died in the Senate 24 to 7, and it will be back, because Teton County is the only place in Wyoming that uses them and the rest of the state pays nothing to take them away. What replaces them, within a Wyoming town’s powers: Homes instead of fees. A rule that a development houses a set share of the workers it creates is a zoning standard under W.S. 15-1-601, and it holds up when the share is tied to a jobs-to-housing study. Housing in exchange for height. Extra height or floor area granted only when the value comes back as deed-restricted homes on site. The applicant chooses, and no fee authority is needed. SPET for land, with the parcel list published before the vote. Public land under ground lease, so each dollar is spent once. Building support: bring the lodging, construction, and health care employers in first. Their workforce is the reason the fees exist, and their names on the standard carry weight in Cheyenne. Take a SPET request to voters only with a parcel list, a cost per home, and a compliance plan attached. Show the Legislature the homes built on site and the study behind them, so the next bill has less to point at.
Gabe Koerber: I would look at redirection of our lodging tax dollars. We charge a 5% lodging tax in this town, 3% goes to Wyoming, and 2% goes to Teton County. 60% of that 2% goes to the JHTTB for marketing and promotion. I think if you asked most people here, we don’t need to be spending money promoting our overrun town. Collaboration between Teton County and the state to be able to shift a portion of this 60% of 2% can greatly offset the loss of housing mitigation fees. I would also consider a steeper lodging tax on short term rentals. Hotels haven’t historically housed locals, but many STR’s were once your seasonal or year round housing for those who worked and lived in town.
Jonathan Schechter: As discussed above, funding is a critical – perhaps the critical – challenge facing Jackson Hole’s affordable housing efforts. If the legislature prohibits or further reduces mitigation fees, it will not make our efforts impossible, but it will make them harder. To replace and/or supplement mitigation revenues, I feel we should turn to the two ideas mentioned above:
• Convert the 7th cent of sales tax from SPET to general operating revenue for local government.
• Pursue a real estate transfer tax. Either of these measures would produce far more money for local government – and, by extension, affordable housing – than mitigation fees.
Combined, they would give local government much more freedom in our affordable housing efforts. Two other thoughts. First, ideally the incoming legislature and administration would be open to the idea of raising mitigation rates, allowing communities to more fully capture the actual costs of development. Second, another way of raising funds is to increase property taxes. I oppose this idea, and have for years. The reason I oppose a town-only property tax increase is because it would mean town property owners would be taxed at a higher rate than county-based property owners (because town property owners would be paying a tax to both the county and town). Additionally, because properties in the Town of Jackson account for only ~20% of Teton County’s overall property values, a town-only tax would be very inefficient. If taxes ever did have to be raised, far better to raise them across the county, where each additional mill levied would produce nearly five times more revenue than a town-only mill.
Alyson Spery: There aren’t many options for housing revenue besides increasing sales tax and increasing property taxes. If we lose our mitigation fees, we’ll have to have a public discussion about which (if either) of those two options the public is willing to support. It’s the role of elected officials to use their judgment of the people’s interest to respond to what the community wants. Making those decisions and understanding what the general public wants is a full-time job. It’s not the job an elected official to garner support for policies; that’s the role of politically engaged people in the community, often working through organizations like Shelter JH.
What is your assessment of the Jackson/Teton County Affordable Housing Department’s performance? Are our public compliance systems sufficient?
Jessica Sell Chambers: The department manages about 1,000 deed-restricted homes, reports 241 created in the past decade, and built a compliance division from nothing. That work matters and the staff who do it work hard. Development is a different story. 90 Virginian Lane was the department’s largest project ever: a $28 million land purchase in 2023, up to $250,000 in shared predevelopment costs (maybe more), a respondent protest after the RFP deadline about the process, one-on-one briefings of elected officials with no minutes, off-line private conversations between mayor and developer, outsourcing public procurement duties to the vendor, no development agreement in three years, and now a Wyoming Department of Audit inquiry. See 90virginian.netlify.app for more details on all of that. The Mayor said in a public meeting that housing projects have been done this way for ten years. I asked about those practices during my term, before the records existed to answer me, and I asked again afterward with the records attached. A land deal this size cannot be undone after closing, and a town gets a few shots at a project this big in a generation. Raising the terms before the papers are signed is the job, and I did it. The director has announced she will leave at the end of the year. Her successor’s job description should include procurement, and rules addressing the missteps above should be adopted before the next solicitation, not after. Compliance: a restriction is only as good as its enforcement. Publish an annual report with units monitored, how they were checked, violations found, and how long each took to resolve. Give every complaint a case number the neighbor can follow. Fund enforcement from the program it protects, and post the results without a records request.
Gabe Koerber: As someone fortunate enough to live in affordable housing, I’m grateful for the diligence they put into compliance for those living in these units to make sure it really is those who contribute to our wonderful town. I’m also a fan of transparency and always welcome any opportunity to make sure all aspects of publicly spent dollars are being vetted carefully and openly, along with all involved. I have concerns about some aspects of workforce housing, but much of it follows the law, I guess I’m more peeved at the idea of potential loopholes that house people who don’t necessarily need it at the cost of others.
Jonathan Schechter: Between the collapse of the proposed Virginian housing project and the resignation of Housing Department Director April Norton, the elected officials and community as a whole have a remarkable opportunity to examine what our housing goals are, how well our efforts are working, and other key aspects of our approach to affordable housing. In fact, the only way the Virginian project will be a failure is if we don’t make an active effort to learn from it. In that context, to evaluate the Housing Department, first we need to understand its role. The Housing Department has two fundamental jobs: oversee the existing units under its control, and pursue opportunities to build new ones. In my view, the department has done a good job in both areas. No system is perfect of course, and like all government departments the Housing Department has room to improve. But the work they’ve done under April’s guidance (she will be missed!) has been professional, compassionate, and effective. Better still, the department has shown it has learned from its past mistakes and embraced new and better ways to pursue its mission. While some may argue for tighter compliance, as with everything related to affordable housing, tighter compliance is subject to given local government’s funding constraints. Given this, regardless of how much we fund the department, there is only so much it can do to ensure that qualified people are living in our affordable units, and that those people are treating the units well. More could be done of course, but the value of that would have to be weighed against additional costs. If reelected I will push for the town and county to take a hard look at all facets of our affordable housing efforts, including what we want from the Housing Department and what it needs to do its job well. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
Alyson Spery: The Housing Department is tasked with a very difficult job under challenging conditions, and ~241 homes built in 10 years means it has done an incredible job. Thousands of people have found housing in this community due to the efforts of the Housing Department. I have nothing but praise for the work they have done. I especially want to commend retiring Housing Director April Norton and Housing Manager Stacy Stoker to whom we owe a deep debt of gratitude.
What would your response be to community members who expressed opposition to incorporating deed-restricted homes into their neighborhoods?
Jessica Sell Chambers: First I listen, because the objection is almost always traffic, parking, height, or whether anyone will enforce the rules, and each of those has an answer. Scale: deed-restricted homes should match the block they join. Two or three smaller homes on a lot fit; a large single building is one option among several. Enforcement: neighbors have watched restrictions go unenforced. A published compliance report with case numbers lets them check. Who lives there: the teacher, the nurse, the line cook, and the plow driver the neighborhood already depends on. Jackson has used conservation easements for decades to keep land open. A deed restriction does the same work for people. Fairness: light density everywhere, including the comfortable “stable” neighborhoods, spreads the change, density, and construction. Piling it all into a few blocks is what creates the opposition. And I would say the honest part that I did not understand 10 years ago when Shelter JH first started: not everyone who wants to live in Jackson will be able to. The restriction exists to keep the people who make the town run. Every one of us is making a choice to live here, to leave here, or to try and make it work against the odds.
Gabe Koerber: Opposition is fair to consider, when in the right context. I wouldn’t fault someone for being nervous to see the next door single family rancher getting torn down to build a six plex rental unit. If all of a sudden you had 6 families in a place where there was one, you could fundamentally change tone of a neighborhood. Overly dense developments are detrimental to our town and the character and culture that so many of us enjoy about living here. I’d also let them know that the people who work in this town and live in deed restricted housing are the true locals. They make the town run, they make the town the place that people want to visit and fall in love with. In the end, I’ll take a neighbor who works here year round over someone who’s here two months out of the year.
Jonathan Schechter: I have spent 16 years as an elected official in Jackson Hole: 8 as a trustee of St. John’s Health, and nearly 8 as a Jackson Town Councilor. During that time, both the hospital and the town proposed ideas which were opposed by people who would be affected. Reflecting on the opposition, it generally fell into two camps. One was people who were opposed and were going to stay opposed. The other was people who were concerned about how the proposed changes would affect them and the things they care about. In both cases, the approach the organization took was to take the time and make the effort to meet with people, hear their concerns, and solicit their advice. For people in the “opposed and staying that way” camp, while the effort didn’t change their minds, it at least gave them a better understanding of what was occurring and why (which often proved very valuable for both parties). For the people in the “concerned” camp, having a clearer understanding made them comfortable enough that they dropped their opposition. In both cases, ideas often emerged for how to improve the project. While time consuming and not always fun, this “actively solicit input” approach is the one I would advocate for dealing with neighbors concerned about affordable housing being built near their homes. While not foolproof, it’s the most effective tool I know. It’s also the right way to treat people and, more broadly, the right way for government to work.
Alyson Spery: Most people I speak to in town support nurses, teachers, firefighters, police officers, serving staff, plumbers and many more living in their neighborhoods. I’d rather focus on them and appreciate the support that continues to provide opportunities for more community housing.
