Now that the funnel that allows Jackson to prosper has been blocked, we can see more clearly than ever that our current model — housing the rich in one town, workers in another — is not sustainable.

I live in Victor, Idaho — one of Jackson, Wyoming’s, bedroom communities. Every day, roughly 3,400 Idaho residents drive over Teton Pass to work in Jackson. Only about 11,000 of us live on this side of the pass — 2,000 in Victor — so commuters make up a significant portion of our population.

Commuters include nurses, teachers, police, waiters, cooks, motel housekeepers, construction workers, landscapers, fishing and mountain guides, and salespeople. All are Jackson Hole’s economic lifeline.

On June 8, the highway over Teton Pass failed catastrophically, part of it collapsing into an impassable cliff of rubble. The failure made national news, and now you can spend hours on Facebook reading everyone’s opinions about what should be done. Calls for building a tunnel through the mountain are resurfacing, although the tunnel that was previously proposed would not have bypassed the section of road that failed.

The Teton Pass highway is vital to Jackson’s functioning as a tourist mecca. In good conditions, driving the 24 miles from Victor to Jackson over Teton Pass takes about 35 minutes. Now, a detour means that workers have to drive roughly 85 miles to get to their jobs, adding about two hours to the daily commute.

Jackson town councilor and economist Jonathan Schechter estimates the road closure is costing the local economy roughly $600,000 a day, and he says that’s a conservative figure. Using IRS numbers for mileage reimbursement, the cost for drivers is $88 a day, while the mean hourly wage in Jackson is $40. Not only has the commute become nearly four times longer, but workers also have to put in an extra two hours to cover the cost of that drive time.

Jackson residents have responded to the crisis with compassion and financial aid. Homeowners have opened their houses in Jackson, and many are allowing people to pitch tents in their yards. Businesses are offering parking lot space for RVs. Teton County, Wyoming, eased its temporary shelter regulations, and the daily commuter bus altered its schedule and waived its fees until June 30 to accommodate riders. The Teton Valley Community Foundation set up a fund that accepts donations for affected workers. I am sure there are many other services and resources as well.

But camping in Jackson means you aren’t going home after work. It means you may not see your children, partner or friends for days on end. It means you need to get someone to feed your dog or check in on your cat, horses, gardens or plants. It means you cannot enjoy the natural world — why most of us live here — because you’re driving a car.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with Teton Pass. There’s an Instagram page called TetonPassholes, dedicated to showing people doing stupid things on the road. Most of the time it’s video clips of truckers ignoring the winter trailer ban; sometimes it’s pictures of people driving recklessly. We snarl and complain, but we still drive the road because it gets us where we need to go.

The average list price for a single-family home in Jackson reached $7.6 million at the end of 2022, according to the Jackson Hole Report. In the first months of 2024, 56 homes were on the market, with only three listed for less than $2 million.

In Victor, Idaho, the median price for homes was $537,000, an asking price that’s not reasonable for most working people. Housing is in short supply in Victor, too.

For years, affordable housing has been a hot-button topic on both sides of the pass, as well as an hour south of Jackson in booming Star Valley. Now that the funnel that allows Jackson to prosper has been blocked, we can see more clearly than ever that our current model — housing the rich in one town, workers in another — is not sustainable.

Wyoming Department of Transportation has indicated that it hopes to open a temporary bypass around the landslide in as little as two weeks. A long-term solution will undoubtedly take months, if not years.

In the meantime, I hope our community leaders take this as a wake-up call and address the absolute need for workforce housing. A temporary patch will not address the crisis that this road failure has dramatized.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a writer in Idaho.

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(NewsNation) — A mayoral candidate is vowing to let an artificial intelligence chatbot make all governing decisions if he’s elected to lead Wyoming’s capital city, but the state’s top election official says that proposal violates the law.

Victor Miller, who is seeking the Cheyenne mayor’s office, said Wednesday on NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live” he plans to fully cede decision-making to a customized AI bot he dubbed “Vic” if voters choose him.

“It’s going to be taking in the supporting documents, taking in what it knows about Cheyenne and systems here, the concerns, and it’s going to make a vote yes or no,” Miller explained. “And it’s going to do that based on intelligence and data. And I’m going to go ahead and pull the lever for it.”

But Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said Wednesday on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” that Miller’s candidacy violates state law because AI is ineligible to hold office.

Gray said the Cheyenne town clerk who certified Miller’s candidacy to the county clerk acted improperly. Gray’s office is exploring further action, though it doesn’t directly oversee municipal elections.

“Wyoming state law is very clear that an AI bot is not eligible to be a candidate for office,” Gray said. Only “qualified electors” who are state residents and U.S. citizens can run, he said.

Miller’s application also had deficiencies, Gray said, such as failing to list his full name, as required.

Miller insisted he has confidence the advanced AI model he’s utilizing can adequately govern.

“The best intelligence that we’ve extracted so far is OpenAI’s Chat GPT 4.0, and that’s what I’m using here,” Miller said. “There’s very minimal mistakes.”

Gray pushed back against arguments that AI could make better decisions than human elected officials, calling it “our worst nightmare becoming true.” He advocated for electing “conservative human beings” to uphold founding principles.

Miller has said openly his campaign revolves around AI decision-making: “AI has helped me personally such as helping me with my resume.”

The unorthodox campaign has drawn mixed reactions in Cheyenne so far, Miller acknowledged, but he believes he can persuade skeptical residents to go along with ceding power to artificial intelligence.

Gray believes similar AI candidate stunts could arise elsewhere, calling it “a very troubling trend in our nation.”

Wyoming and Utah have become the first states to challenge in federal court an obscure rule touted by the Bureau of Land Management that marks a major shift in how 245 million acres of public lands are managed in the United States.

The rule was designed by BLM to strike a balance between conservation and extractive mining for natural resources like coal, gold, silver, nickel and uranium, all of which are big undertakings in the Cowboy State.

However, the rule effectively gives the BLM power to kill off mining projects before they even get off the drawing board.

The rule provides BLM with leverage to allow for more complete consideration of land uses, including conservation uses or restoration projects, especially for culturally rich landscapes and the ability to keep intact wildlife migration corridors, such for as pronghorn, in parts of central Wyoming’s Red Desert.

The two states announced Wednesday that they have jointly filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah in Salt Lake City challenging the BLM’s final “public lands rule.”

The BLM’s final rule was announced April 18.

‘Abomination Of A Rule’

The lawsuit claims that the rule isn’t needed, and that the preferred path to preserve public lands would have been the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which gives states like Wyoming and Utah a shot at mining proposals.

Instead, the states wrote in their lawsuit, the rule represents a fundamental “change in how the agency will carry out its mission moving forward,”

Despite the objections of several states, BLM sidestepped NEPA requirements and unreasonably concluded that no “extraordinary circumstances” would ever warrant a NEPA review, thus bypassing the federal law completely, according to the lawsuit.

“Ever since this abomination of a rule raised its ugly head, demonstrating the Biden administration’s disregard for the law, I have fought it tooth and nail,” said Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon in a statement.

Wyoming has a lot at stake with the BLM’s approach to managing public lands and could see a further clamping down on mining should the public lands rule tilt in favor of keeping land untouched for conservation purposes instead of being mined and later reclaimed under federal mining rules.

Overall, the BLM manages about 18.4 million acres of public lands and 42.9 million acres of federal land with mineral deposits in the state of Wyoming.

“This legal challenge ensures that this administration is called out for sidestepping the bedrock federal statutes which guide public land management by attempting to eliminate multiple use through a corrupted definition of conservation, and for doing so with impunity,” Gordon said. “I look forward to our day in court and putting the BLM back on the right path.”

A draft of the BLM’s public lands rule, formally known as the “Conservation and Landscape Health” rule, was unveiled for public comment initially April 3, 2023.

Gordon testified in opposition to the draft rule before the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources in Washington, D.C., on June 15, 2023, and challenged the direction of the rule’s new powers in comments filed with BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning nearly a year ago.