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By a single vote, the billionaire Joe Ricketts won approval last week to build a luxury resort on his ranch in Bondurant, Wyoming—and locals are crying foul.
“This is a small community, and I feel that he stomped on all of us,” one resident told The Daily Beast.
More than 100 people had gathered before the Sublette County Board of Commissioners on Dec. 7 for a hearing on Ricketts’ proposal to rezone 56 acres of his property for the new retreat.
To many, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The commission had previously nixed a version of Ricketts’ plan in 2020, and the county’s planning and zoning board had shot it down just weeks earlier.
But after hearing from the billionaire himself and weighing modifications his team offered, the board passed Ricketts’ proposal on a three to two vote.
“It was shocking to me that it passed because there was nobody there other than Mr. Ricketts’ camp that spoke in favor of it,” said Joshua Coursey, cofounder and CEO of the Muley Fanatic Foundation, which works to conserve the indigenous mule deer population. The opposition, he said, “was unanimous by the folks in attendance.”
Coursey expressed concern about the environmental toll the resort will take on the area.
“This isn't about prohibiting Mr. Ricketts as a private landowner from being able to do what he wants to be able to do. It's really about taking into account and consideration the impact that it will have on the bigger picture,” he said.
Residents also worried that an influx of tourists will irreparably change the town’s character.
“It'll become a mountain community, the new Crested Butte or Breckinridge or Park City, which we don't want. It drives out the locals and it makes real estate unaffordable,” said Melissa Harrison, who works as a real estate agent in the area.
During the meeting, Ricketts told commissioners he needed approval for the retreat so that his grandchildren could one day continue operating the ranch without him having to subsidize it.
“The only way we’re going to preserve [the Jackson Fork Ranch] is [with] those tourist dollars,” he said, in comments reported by the local outlet WyoFile. “I don’t know of another way that I can generate enough income to take care of it.”
Ricketts cast himself as a conservationist who has donated generously to the region over the years.
He also modified his earlier proposal by reducing the number of rooms on site, and he assured commissioners that the project would not dramatically increase traffic.
“I don't think that he realizes that no matter what kind of concessions he made, it is still going to put pressure on the community,” one aggrieved resident said. “We were very disgusted when we walked out of [the hearing]. We did not feel that what they did was fair.”
Ricketts could not be reached for comment by publication time, and the county commissioners each did not respond to emails from The Daily Beast.
Worth an estimated $4.6 billion, according to Forbes, Rickettsmade most of his money through the online brokerage TD Ameritrade; he founded its predecessor in 1975. He also previously owned the local media outlets DNAinfo and Gothamist, which he infamously shut down in 2017 after the publications attempted to unionize.
Ricketts’ son Pete is the governor of Nebraska, where he has stoked a number of “culture war” controversies in recent months.
One state to the west, Bondurant residents are contemplating their next move. But they are quickly losing hope.
“I don't know how it gets reversed,” said Harrison, the real estate agent. She expects this is just the start of more development, a pattern she has seen elsewhere in the state.
“They bring all the second homeowners in and all the recreation comes in, and then pretty soon it squeezes out the wildlife…You end up just loving it to death,” she said.
“The county planners are going to have a really difficult time saying no to the next development that wants to come to the area,” added her partner, Steve Robertson, who raises cattle.
Harrison said she could “only speculate” about whether Ricketts’ wealth was a factor in the commission’s decision.
Some of her neighbors were less circumspect. “He's like a little boy and he wants all the toys. That's what I kind of equate it to,” one resident said. “Greed is a terrible thing.”