Joint town/county set FY27 human-services priorities, shift Title 25 line item

At an April 27 special joint meeting, the Town of Jackson and Teton County will walk through FY2027 Health & Human Services (HHS) applications and talk funding scenarios before each body sets its own budget. The agenda packet lays out a new approach: tighter service-category tracking, advance questions from electeds, optional applicant “impact videos,” and a quantitative look at who gets served and how requests line up with the 2020 allocation plan. See: Special Joint Meeting Agenda Packet.

The numbers aren’t small. County-side HHS requests total $2,743,628 (up 9.5% from FY2026, excluding Title 25 hospitalization), while town-side requests total $1,681,372 (up 15%). Staff also flag that historical awards from FY2021–FY2026 often tracked precedent more than the plan’s priorities—despite county HHS contract totals growing from about $1.39M (2021) to $2.36M (FY2026 budgeted).

One nuts-and-bolts change worth paying attention to: Title 25 hospitalization ($70,000 in FY2026) is being removed from the county HHS funding budget and placed in the County Attorney’s budget. That’s the kind of line-item move that can make programs look “flat” or “growing” on paper when the workload in the community hasn’t changed—just which department is holding the bill.

For the FY2027 conversation, staff present three scenarios (full funding, FY2026 status quo, and a “light prioritization” model). The “light” model would fully fund Priority 1 areas—behavioral health, childcare, and violence/abuse/neglect—while generally not funding new requests in lower-priority categories and trimming returning Priority 2–3 awards (about 5% county / 7% town) to hit level funding. This is a budget discussion, but it’s also a governance one: staff float rethinking who allocates these dollars long-term, including a community board option under state law.