Travel and tourism board weighs $50,000 for Elk Refuge roles

The Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board is being asked to put $50,000 toward staffing at the National Elk Refuge and Greater Yellowstone Visitor Center, a pitch that would cover most of the payroll for two winter naturalists and a weekend supervisor. The staff report lays out the ask in plain terms: keep the public-facing interpretive work going, and do it with money that now comes from recreation fees and bookstore revenue. JHTTB Staff Report, Powerpoint Questions Elk Refuge

What stands out here is not a flashy new program but a funding question wrapped around positions that already exist. The naturalist jobs have been around since 2005, the weekend manager since 2025, and staff say the weekend role was piloted last year and has been paid from a mix of Grand Teton Association operations money and carryover American Conservation Experience funding. The board is being told this is not a simple backfill, but a search for a new revenue stream before the current patchwork gets thinner.

The procedural wrinkle is the uncertainty. Staff say digital pass sales now happen without an in-person transaction, which makes future revenue harder to predict, and they do not expect a clean answer on the long-term funding picture for another year or two. For now, the proposal rests on the idea that bookstore sales and federal pass fees can keep these positions afloat, with the tourism board covering 72.85 percent of the total project income.