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Two options for Kelly Parcel

By
Hannah Shields with the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, via the Wyoming News Exchange

Options: Sell to the park or negotiate an 'unlikely' land swap
 
CHEYENNE — The clock is ticking on the Kelly Parcel — if Wyoming wants to save this piece of wild land from being auctioned off to private developers, officials say the state’s best option is to initiate a sale to Grand Teton National Park now, while the funding is available.
The Kelly Parcel is the last of four state trust lands located within the exterior boundaries of Grand Teton National Park to be purchased by the U.S. Department of Interior. The federal government failed to purchase the 640 acres of surface and mineral estate before agreements expired at the end of 2016. After the state failed twice to extend acquisition agreements with the federal government, the Kelly Parcel was placed on a Category II Disposal List in 2021, which started plans to put the land up for auction.
 
In the Wyoming Constitution, policymakers are obligated to maximize revenue off state trust lands to fund the state’s K-12 public education. The decision to dispose of the Kelly Parcel is up to the Legislature and Wyoming’s Board of Land Commissioners, which is made up of the state’s top five elected officials: Gov. Mark Gordon, Secretary of State Chuck Gray, Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, Auditor Kristi Racines and Treasurer Curt Meier.
 
The decision to auction the Kelly Parcel was put on hold last month during a Board of Land Commissioners meeting, largely due to overwhelming public distaste for seeing the land auctioned off to a potential private developer. The Office of State Lands and Investments (OSLI) held a 60-day public comment period that ended days before the December board meeting that received more than 9,000 comments from Wyomingites.
 
“(Grand Teton National Park) is one of the few places in this country that is not developed at all,” said Abbey Matre, a University of Wyoming wildlife biology major who testified at one of four public comment hearings in November. “I would like to see it remain that way for future generations.”
 
The decision to auction off the Kelly Parcel was immediately tabled until this fall at the suggestion of State Superintendent Degenfelder.
 
“That bare minimum of $62 million is not my idea of an acceptable rate of return,” Degenfelder said at the meeting, referring to the appraised value of the parcel. “How, then, do we honor our fiduciary duty to the people of Wyoming, maximize the value, but at the same time keep it available to the public?”
 
There are two other options before policymakers for the Kelly Parcel — enter a complicated land swap agreement with the federal government, or initiate a direct conveyance of the land to Grand Teton National Park.
 
An ‘unlikely’ land swap
 
“The concept of a land exchange is a very easy concept to say, but it’s almost virtually impossible to do,” said Rob Wallace, former assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the last two years of the Trump administration. “In my experience, I’ve never seen one that’s successfully been pulled off.”
 
The Kelly Parcel is a highly valuable piece of land, currently appraised at $62.4 million. One of the biggest complexities in arranging a land swap is finding enough federal land within Wyoming that is equal in value.
 
“An acre of land in Teton County is going to be the equivalent of thousands of acres somewhere else in the state,” Wallace said. “To try to put that together is a daunting task, and the federal agencies really aren’t organized to do big land exchanges — it’s not in their DNA to do those kinds of projects.”
 
At the December board meeting, Degenfelder suggested a federal land swap that included mineral rights. However, a recent Consensus Revenue Estimate Group (CREG) report showed swinging natural gas prices aren’t the best bargaining item.
 
“The value of natural gas prices has swung dramatically just in the last year,” Wallace said. “How do you capture a snapshot in time? ... By the time the land exchange is ready to happen, that value will change.”
 
Wyoming Field Manager Josh Metten, who works for Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said land swaps have been investigated in the past with other land parcels in GTNP and “failed badly.”
 
“I would be very skeptical that an effort to do a land swap will achieve the goals that anyone in Wyoming wants,” Metten said. “The best option for the Kelly Parcel is a direct conveyance to the park.”
 
The Department of Interior had briefly considered a land swap for both the Kelly Parcel and Antelope Flats Parcel in 2014, after it failed to purchase the latter by deadline. The Legislature agreed to the swap and passed Senate File 69, which authorized a conditional exchange agreement with the department.
 
However, the Department of Interior stopped work on the exchange in 2015, and instead purchased the Antelope Flats Parcel, another Wyoming state trust land, in 2016 for $46 million.
 
Metten said another attempt at a federal land exchange for the Kelly Parcel is a “bureaucratic nightmare.” The swap would involve several parties, including Grand Teton National Park, the Wyoming Legislature, the Wyoming State Board of Land Commissioners and, most likely, the Bureau of Land Management.
 
“The best possible thing for Wyomingites is that we convey this parcel to the Park Service,” Metten said. “It’s really up to the Legislature to follow the will of the Wyoming people to authorize the sale.”
 
Now’s the time to buy
 
The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a competitive national grant that was used to purchase the Antelope Flats Parcel. The LCWF is roughly split 50/50 between the state and federal agencies, and can be dipped into by any one of the 61 national parks in the United States.
 
Wallace said the Department of Interior, in partnership with the National Park Service, has already set aside approximately $62 million out of this fund to purchase the Kelly Parcel now.
 
“There’s a lot of interest in that money,” Wallace said. “The fact that they could bundle that all together right now, and have it on hold for the Kelly Parcel, is pretty astounding. And it’s a great opportunity I hope the state can say yes to.”
 
Former President Donald Trump signed the Great American Outdoor Act in 2020, which reauthorized LWCF at $900 million a year. Before the act was signed, money was appropriated by Congress into the fund on a yearly basis.
 
“Sometimes, Congress would put a lot of money into (LWCF), sometimes they would barely put any,” Wallace said. “Because Antelope Flats had already kind of teed up the idea of a Kelly sale down the road, the Park Service (in Wyoming) was much farther ahead than anybody else in the country … they had a jump start of probably two or three years.”
 
When Antelope Flats was sold to GTNP for $46 million, $23 million was supplemented out of the LWCF, and the other half was supplied through private philanthropy.
 
Wallace said the Grand Teton National Park’s share of the LWCF this year is approximately $62 million. Grand Teton National Park Foundation President Leslie Mattson said the proposed $100 million price tag “is not official at this point.” Her organization works to raise funding from private philanthropists, and was a part of the Antelope Flats purchase in 2016.
 
“We are ready to make a deal with the state,” Mattson said.
 
Sara Flitner, owner of public affairs and strategy firm Flitner Strategies and the former mayor of Jackson Hole, said she has worked as a consultant with GTNP and is “agnostic” about a land swap, but foresees a direct sale as the more viable option.
 
“We’re on track to take advantage of the current opportunity,” Flitner said. “We don’t have any guarantee on federal funding beyond this year.”
Wallace added that the best time to purchase the Kelly Parcel is when a current appraisal has already been agreed upon by both the OSLI and Department of Interior.
 
“It’s a perfect time to do this deal right now,” he said.
 
This story was published on January 18, 2024. 
 
 
 

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