Utah company seeks to build largest commercial development in Jackson, Wyo., history

Note to readers • This story has been edited by The Salt Lake Tribune for a Utah audience in collaboration with WyoFile.com, a Wyoming nonprofit newsroom.

For as long as Jim Rooks has lived in Jackson Hole, the north end of town has always been eclectic.

Over his many decades living in this Wyoming resort town, an odd mix of government buildings, rafting company headquarters, and mom and pop shops have been the first buildings to welcome the more than 3 million tourists who visit Grand Teton National Park.

“It’s just been kind of a mix match, like a potpourri,” said Rooks, a former history teacher fresh off a four-year term as a town councilor.

That era could soon be coming to an end, or at least the more laid-back feel for that stretch of town. Mogul Capital, a Utah-based developer, has plans for a mega-sized, multi-use project spanning 11 lots and nearly an entire city block. The project calls for 109 hotel rooms, 17 free-market condos, 16 condos designated for workers, a restaurant, spa and underground parking.

Mogul’s project would be the town’s largest private commercial development to date, even after it was scaled down from a complex four times the size of Jackson’s Target store. The unprecedented scale came as a shock to not just the public, but to the elected officials who, in response, placed a six-month emergency construction moratorium last summer on commercial buildings to study the impacts of large developments.

Though the project has been scaled back, both the public and elected officials have expressed concerns that the designs are still too grandiose and threaten the town’s quaint Western character.

Amy Kuszak is a community planning director with the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, which argues the luxury hotel complex will impact the community’s environment, including water quality, and historic character.

“This is not a development that the community wants or one that it needs,” Kuszak said at an April town council meeting.

Mogul’s project, according to Kuszak, doesn’t align with “community values, vision, or long-term well-being.”

But Mogul CEO Brad Wagstaff, a Utah resident, had anticipated Jackson residents would be excited for a vibrant, economic opportunity to revitalize the now vacant lots.

“It’s a place that’s near and dear to my heart, a place that we have been very intentional in trying to listen to hear what the community wants,” Wagstaff, who has visited Jackson regularly over the last four decades, told the town council in April.

It is one of several proposed large-scale hotels and apartment projects that are in works, including a separate 194-unit apartment complex by Mogul that is now under construction, that have accelerated concerns that the town is losing its small-town feel. The Utah company’s plans are seen as a tipping point for the town’s future.

There’s also concern about what’s lurking underground.

Public health threat below the surface

Concerns about aesthetics, housing workers and traffic have dominated the discourse so far. But Rooks has long felt that the above-ground focus is a distraction from what he said is a legitimate public health threat that lurks beneath the site itself.

The Teton Texaco gas station that once fueled up cars on a portion of the site stored gasoline in underground tanks, as is typical for most gas stations. In 1989, it was found that the tanks had leaked, leaving behind a plume of chemicals.

​​Benzene, a known carcinogen, was one of them. Trace amounts of the chemical was already known to have found its way into Jackson’s water wells before, on the other side of town.

“The environmental aspects of this property are more important than almost any other one in this county because there is a massive benzene plume in the soil right here,” Rooks said.

The proposed redevelopment site is one of the last Teton County sites with underground petroleum leaks that remain to be cleaned up by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.

In a town of high-value real estate, the undeveloped lots stand out. Many of the national park’s visitors stream past the empty lots dotted with shipping containers and a remnant of weathered buck-and-rail fence corralling little more than weeds before reaching sought-after pristine views.

But for Jackson — a town whose mission statement makes environmental stewardship a top priority — transforming this eyesore has been complicated. In Jackson, people fall into two main camps when it comes to development on top of the plume. For some, development introduces more risks. For others, it could be the solution that brings in private dollars to address a potential public health problem.

Carlin Girard, executive director of the Teton Conservation District, is with the latter.

“It’s not hard to look at a private development that’s excavating a large area on top of a contaminated site and removing that material as a bad thing,” Girard said.

If not addressed properly, watchdogs warn that the leftover benzene — now a fifth of its original size, according to the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality — could leech into structures built above it and further contaminate groundwater or nearby Flat Creek in an area that has a high water table.

Mogul pays a $200 annual membership fee to DEQ’s Storage Tank Program, which then enables the developer to take a backseat in the site’s remediation and let the state steer the timing and cost of the cleanup process. Mogul, however, could take on more of the cleanup, though there is little incentive to do so.

“If [Mogul] wants to take on the risk and the financial burden of mitigation, then they would take on that responsibility. If they don’t want to do that, there’s always the case that they could cap [the plume] and build over it, in which we would still come in and clean up the contamination with those buildings there,” Fernandez told KHOL.

When asked whether the developer would take on further remediation, Vice President Brent Layton said via email that Mogul would cooperate but that DEQ’s cleanup would exist “independently and separately from Mogul’s development plans.”

The state’s DEQ recently rejected its own consultant’s recommendation to “dig and haul” the remaining contaminated soil off-site to a neighboring Wyoming county. The DEQ cited funding, risks to nearby infrastructure, potential for spreading pollution by moving the soil and a failure to address contaminates suspended in groundwater. Now the DEQ is planning to collect more samples before devising a new remediation plan by early 2026. The town council, meanwhile, has been uncomfortable having to vote on Mogul’s conceptual design without knowing up-front what the remediation will look like.

The 2026 data point is key for the town to make an informed decision on Mogul’s development plan, at least according to Planning Director Paul Anthony.

“That’s the risk that the developer right now is taking, having a plume on their property. That is their burden to convince us that they have met their burden and provide us the information [elected officials] need ultimately to approve the project,” Anthony said at a May 5 council meeting.

Mogul is still in the conceptual planning phase for its mix of hotel rooms, condos, restaurant and spa. At the recent council meeting, Mogul’s Wagstaff appeared frustrated that the town wasn’t on track to pass his sketch plan quite yet.

“We have a buildable project that is compliant, meets all requirements to move forward with this project [and] we will continue to work with DEQ,” Wagstaff told the council.

Jackson’s Town Council will vote on preliminary plans June 16. With the question of the plume still looming, the council is considering requiring the developer to pay for a third-party environmental review to better understand the risks around building atop the benzene.