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Fixing Jackson Slide Will Cost Millions

Lori Iverson/USFWS via Flickr Creative Commons

A private consultant presented preliminary options for a more permanent fix to a creeping landslide in Jackson at a Town Council meeting yesterday. 

The Town of Jackson has hired Oregon-based consultant George Machan to come up with options for stopping the slow-moving landslide on Jackson's East GrosVentre Butte. Although the earth movement has slowed to less than half an inch per week, town officials want to reinforce the slope to prevent future problems.

The options have price tags ranging from eight million to thirty million dollars. 

Town Manager Bob McLaurin stressed that the cost of stabilizing the slope would be shared by the town and commercial and residential property owners directly impacted by the slide.

"Ideally we are going to come together as the community for a solution, we're going to agree on the pro-ration of cost and go forward in one contract," he said.

But McLaurin said the town is prepared to move ahead with fixing what it considers its share of the problem even if some property owners opt out. 

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.
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