$100 Million for One Square Mile: Deal to Protect Land in Grand Tetons
The New York Times
After years of negotiations and threats of development, Wyoming will sell a prized piece of land so that it can be preserved inside Grand Teton National Park.
Wyoming has agreed to a $100 million deal to turn over a prized parcel of land within the boundaries of Grand Teton National Park, allowing the federal government to protect the plot from the threat of development.
The so-called Kelly parcel had been a subject of negotiations for years, as conservationists hoped to permanently secure the land, which sits in a migration corridor for pronghorn and elk and has a sweeping view of the Teton Range. Wyoming had at one point made plans to sell the one-square-mile property in an auction, potentially to a luxury home developer.
As part of the agreement finalized on Monday, the nonprofit Grand Teton National Park Foundation was able to raise about one-third of the $100 million needed for the deal, officials said, while the remainder came from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund.
“Today marks an incredible milestone, decades in the making, to permanently protect an essential wildlife migration corridor and treasured landscape within Grand Teton National Park,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
The end-of-year deal came together amid high-stakes negotiations and a ticking clock, as the park foundation feared that donors might drop their funding if there were further delays and a bloc of conservative lawmakers, rising to power in the State Legislature, had signaled a desire to scuttle the deal in the legislative session that starts in January. Wyoming had made the agreement contingent on the federal government easing restrictions for development, including oil and gas drilling, on other federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Last week, Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, had certified that the federal government met the conditions for the agreement, while also saying that he hoped to alter those land-management plans with the incoming Trump administration.
