Group Works to Guide Growth by Yellowstone

One of the country’s fastest-growing areas also happens to be one of its most delicate, harboring numerous threatened or endangered species and millions of acres of crucial wildlife habitat.

Balancing the growth with the need to protect the environment is difficult but becomes even harder when the world’s first--and perhaps most cherished--national park sits like an untouchable island in the center of a sea of rapid development it helped attract.

In what it described as a unique effort to help manage the growth, a Bozeman, Mont.-based environmental group is trying to work with local governments and residents in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to encourage good planning to control the growth.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, representing more than 7,500 people and 127 organizations nationwide, has distributed a pamphlet outlining various land-use management methods to help balance growth management with environmental concerns.

“You can’t stop people from moving here, but you can say, ‘If you move here, there’s a set of rules that we’d like you to follow.’ We don’t want to destroy the very values that people are moving here for, that we’ve really enjoyed for a long time,” said coalition spokesman Bob Ekey. “There’s a lot of different tools, it’s just finding that common ground and building off of that.”

Residential development is prohibited in Yellowstone National Park and its sister to the south, Grand Teton National Park. But in some counties surrounding the parks, it has become a nearly uncontrollable activity that some feel threatens their traditional way of life.

Ranch and farm lands in scenic areas--of which there are no shortage in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem--are being subdivided into “ranchettes” with multimillion-dollar houses. As the area becomes home to wealthier people, property values climb, and ranchers or farmers are more tempted to sell off land to keep other acreage in production.

“The toughest things on the environment here are 20-acre ranchettes” because of their need for septic systems and other utilities and the likelihood that they will be located in important wildlife habitat, Ekey said.

“We found that the concern about the growth and the changing face of this region is across the board from ranchers and the ag community to people who have been here a long time to sportsmen,” he said. “They’re all alarmed at what they’re seeing because it’s changing so quickly.”

In the Dubois area 50 miles east of Jackson, many people refer to it as “rural sprawl,” a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for what many call a disease: the emergence of ranchettes, said Budd Betts, a Wyoming state representative who bought a ranch 15 years ago.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem covers about 18 million acres in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, encompassing all or part of 20 counties, two national parks and six national forests.

In 1990, those counties had a total population of about 242,000. Based on the coalition’s estimate of an average annual growth rate of 12%, those counties now are home to about 534,000.

“If it were its own state, it would be one of the fastest-growing states in the country on a percentage basis,” Ekey said.

Dennis Glick, director of the coalition’s land stewardship program, said such growth, if uncontrolled or controlled poorly, could ruin the qualities that prompted it.

“We’ve got people coming here to enjoy the quality of life, but when they get here, because of sort of the lack of planning, there’s a good chance that they will actually degrade that quality of life by where they build their homes and the other associated development that they need,” he said.

But Teton County, Wyo., planning director Bill Collins said developing effective land-use plans can be politically difficult as officials seek to please both developers and longtime residents.

“The desire to preserve a small-town character and a rural character is universally held, but what’s not universally agreed upon is how to do it,” he said. “And it’s a very difficult thing to do. From my experience as a practicing planner, the local governments have a tremendous amount of horsepower to regulate land use and typically they have more than they choose to use.”

The coalition’s pamphlet, “Tools for Managing Growth in the Greater Yellowstone Area,” outlines a variety of methods that local governments and area residents can use to help manage growth. The group sent it to members and to residents and government officials in the area.

The pamphlet lists several land acquisition or protection strategies, including purchasing development rights or easements to protect agricultural land from development. The publication also suggests planning, zoning and taxation methods to help balance environmental concerns with residential growth.

Glick, a coauthor of the pamphlet, said the coalition was more concerned with the pattern of growth than growth itself.

“If all these people were moving close to town, that’s one thing. What we see a lot of is a lot of people that want their five, 10 or 20 acres. They want to be out in the country or next to the national forests, which happens to be in the elk winter range,” he said. “Now the pattern is very environmentally destructive and fiscally very destructive.”

Lee Nellis, a Pocatello, Idaho-based independent planning consultant who helped write the pamphlet, said none of the strategies are new, but many of the concerns are.

“The problem has to be very visible before people change their longtime way of doing business and before they’re willing to do something about it,” said Nellis, who has been working in land-use planning in the three-state area for 23 years.

“One of the most important things about the tools listed is that none of them will help you very much if you don’t have clear goals,” he added. “But only a handful of jurisdictions in the area have gone beyond saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is happening,’ to having a set of clear goals.”