Hoback's New Fire Station Was Funded in 2022. The Land Still Isn't.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk into Firehouse 3 off the Hoback traffic circle and the math doesn't work. The building went up in 1981, 2,300 square feet with a single bay, a meeting room, a kitchen, and a rescue truck that barely clears the door. "The rescue truck is, if you drove it straight, you'd plow the building out," a volunteer lieutenant told KHOL in 2022, describing a station where half the lockers sit empty because the department can't recruit enough volunteers who can also afford to live in Teton County.
Four years ago, voters agreed the station needed to go. This month, the state said no to the ground it would sit on. That gap between what residents approved and what the county has actually been allowed to build is the real story here, and it's not about money. It never was.
On Thursday, the Wyoming Transportation Commission voted against relinquishing a parcel of state right-of-way on the east side of the Hoback traffic circle, the site county officials had spent more than a year lining up as the future home of a rebuilt Firehouse 3. The decision was reported August 25 by the News Letter Journal, and it lands at the exact step Fire Chief Mike Moyer described to Buckrail back in June, when he told the outlet the project was waiting on "the Federal Highway Administration on a final approval from them" before the parcel could even reach the Transportation Commission for what he called a "final check-off." That check-off just went the other way. Without the land, the department can't move into design, and without a design, there's no construction timeline to give the residents who funded this in the first place.
Jackson Hole Fire/EMS has known this station was outgrown for more than three decades. According to reporting from Wyoming Public Media, the Hoback facility was identified as needing replacement back in 1993, and the case for urgency has only gotten sharper since. In testimony delivered to county officials in 2022, the Hoback Volunteer Firefighters Association laid out what an undersized, understaffed station actually costs a rural community:
Those numbers sit on top of a housing problem that compounds the staffing one. Volunteers who might otherwise fill out the roster are working multiple jobs just to stay in the valley, and a station built for a much smaller call volume in 1981 doesn't leave much incentive to sign up for a shift in cramped quarters.
It would be easy to assume this is a funding story, and for a while it looked like one. In 2022, Teton County voters approved a $15 million Specific Purpose Excise Tax measure covering both the Hoback and Wilson stations, a combined ask designed so the department wouldn't have to wait another three or four years for a second SPET election just to fund Wilson separately. Jack Krill, representing the Hoback Firefighters Association at the time, called Hoback the "priority" of the two, and the measure passed by a wide margin, as reporting from the Jackson Hole News&Guide at the time makes clear.
That money has been sitting there for four years, earmarked and ready. What it can't do is buy the county land it doesn't have a path to acquire. Firehouse 3 has always operated on state highway right-of-way rather than county-owned ground, described in a 2017 report on the station as a restricted land lease rather than a deed. SPET dollars can pay for architects, contractors, and demolition. They can't make the Federal Highway Administration or the Wyoming Transportation Commission sign off on handing over a piece of a state highway corridor. That's the bottleneck nobody put on the ballot in 2022, and it's the one still standing in August 2026.
If this feels like deja vu to anyone who's followed Hoback's civic news for a while, it should. Back in 2017, the county had already lined up a different fix: buying 2.4 acres at the old Horse Creek Station site, 1.3 miles north on Highway 89, using funds from an earlier SPET measure, Proposition 9, that had passed with 78 percent voter approval, as Buckrail reported at the time. That relocation would have put the new station closer to Munger Mountain Elementary School and off the state's right-of-way entirely.
That plan never materialized. Nearly a decade later, Firehouse 3 is still in the same 1981 building at 10995 South Highway 89, on the same restricted lease, and the county is now negotiating over a completely different parcel on the opposite side of the traffic circle. Two funded plans, two different sites, one station that hasn't moved.
The mechanics of the current attempt were laid out clearly enough before this month's vote. In October 2025, the Teton County Board of County Commissioners approved a formal resolution requesting that WYDOT relinquish the east-side parcel. As of June 2026, Buckrail's reporting showed the request sitting with the Federal Highway Administration, one step before the Transportation Commission's sign-off. That sign-off is now a no, and there's no public timeline yet for what the county tries next, whether that's a new round of negotiation on the same parcel, a return to looking at other sites, or something else entirely.
What makes the timing sting a little is what else the county was doing around the same time. In that same June report on the stalled Hoback parcel, Buckrail also noted that county commissioners had separately approved a memorandum of understanding outlining plans for an entirely new fire station near Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club, a project that, unlike Hoback's, isn't tangled up in a multi-year federal and state right-of-way process. The county's oldest, most overdue station is stuck on a technicality involving ground it has never owned, while a brand-new project elsewhere in the valley appears to be moving through planning without the same friction.
For anyone who lives off the Hoback traffic circle, none of this changes daily life immediately. The same crew still reports for duty in the same building the department itself flagged as inadequate more than thirty years ago. The same rescue truck still barely fits. What's changed is that a process residents may have assumed was nearly finished, four years after they voted to fund it, just hit a wall that has nothing to do with the money they approved and everything to do with who holds title to a strip of highway shoulder.
This is the kind of story that doesn't show up in a market report, but it's exactly the kind of local detail worth tracking if Hoback is home, or about to be. Following how the county untangles a right-of-way dispute with the state tells you as much about a place as its trail conditions or its restaurant openings.
If you're weighing a move to Hoback, or already call it home and want a real estate advisor who pays attention to what actually shapes daily life here, Sherry Messina works and lives in this valley and follows these kinds of developments as part of the job. Schedule Your Jackson Hole Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next.
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