Ready, Set, Recreate

Teton County’s new recreation district is an opportunity to support activities that bolster physical and mental health for all valley residents. So, what might it become?

Megan LaTorre has big plans. As in, changing the lives of hundreds of Teton Valley athletes—kids and adults.

As executive director of Teton Valley Foundation, Megan oversees the Kotler Ice Arena, a behemoth building (for this area) in Victor’s Sherman Park. Most nights from October through March, its open-air walls spill the sounds of scraping skates, loud cheering, and bodies clattering against boards into the soft, snowy surroundings.

But what happens at the Kotler in the summer? Not much. 

After the bustle of hockey and skating season, the rink goes dormant, as it isn’t set up for other athletic pursuits. It’s a reality Megan wants to see change. “I’ve got big goals about what I want to do for our community in terms of creating a year-round, weather-protected space for youth and adults to practice and play,” she says. 

Her vision: Once the ice melts, replace it with turf or a court material that would allow baseball, soccer, lacrosse, and other warm-weather sports teams to practice and play. Then Megan wants to build walls around the facility to enclose the space and add three new locker rooms, including a girls’ locker room. Summer is fleeting around here, but unless you’re the parent of an aspiring athlete, it’s hard to grasp the impact of that. “It’s so weird to say our children are losing their edge,” Megan says. “But because of not having access to field space, people are losing their edge compared to other teams that are building fieldhouses and things like that.” 

Teton Valley Foundation is one of the largest purveyors of community recreation in this area, serving 1,500 local users weekly through programming like youth and adult hockey and figure skating lessons. But it is just one of many organizations that enable our community to be active and outside, despite limited budgets and volunteer time. 

To support this multitude of nonprofits and government agencies, Teton County voters created Teton Valley Parks and Recreation District in November 2024, building an entirely new governmental body and instating a permanent property tax levy to fund it.

The district was given the power to own and operate facilites for virtually everything people come to Teton Valley to do, from ice rinks to snowmobile trails. Basically, if it’s recreational, the district could, in theory, support it.  

Volunteers for the nonprofit Friends of Teton Valley Sports and Wellness spent months collecting signatures to get the rec district on that 2024 ballot. Their argument was that, despite Teton Valley’s reputation as a recreational hub, the low-cost community offerings—soccer fields, trailheads, city parks—were struggling, shortchanging those who depend on them. “These kinds of things just lead to a better quality of life,” says Nate Carey, who sat on the Friends’ board and is also the executive director of Valley Adaptive Sports, a nonprofit that provides sports-related opportunities for people with disabilities. “I believe that the lowest income brackets are the ones that are going to benefit from this the most.”

  Voters were amenable to that argument, passing it with 55.3 percent in support and 44.7 percent opposed. In a county where local control often swings between parties and most political races are within one or two percentage points, a margin of over ten points represents broad support. “The turnout was astronomical this last election,” Nate says.

Still, 2,976 residents said no, so the idea has its detractors. “It’s a tax, that’s how people view it,” rec district director Sara Warhol says. “That’s why people voted no—it was another tax.” 

Nate, who talked with many of the naysayers during his signature collection, backed up Sara’s thoughts, saying most who were opposed didn’t want a higher property tax burden. His rebuttal is that a property tax, which hits second-home owners with high-value homes as well as year-round residents, “is a great resource,” one that allows full-time residents to reap benefits above what they put into the district’s coffers.   

Boiled down, the new 0.028 percent tax for recreation costs homeowners $28 per $100,000 of assessed value. (Multiply the property assessment you get from the county by 0.00028 to figure out your cost.) It will certainly add to bills, though Teton County is one of Idaho’s lowest-taxed counties by tax rate, coming in at seventh lowest among Idaho’s forty-four counties in 2024.

Now that the rec district is in place and those bills will start to hit in January 2026, the question is: What can it do?

LOOKING AT BLAINE’S RECREATION DOMAIN

We pull into Galena Lodge, twenty miles north of Ketchum, Idaho. Dogs and mountain bikers zoom around the parking lot. A pair of retired-age men sit in folding chairs, feet bared to the October sun; in their hands, dripping, brown bottles of beer fresh out of the cooler. My wife Ellen and I are on a savor-the-last-of-fall trip with her sister Angela and brother-in-law Miles. Our dogs, Huck and Addie, add to the chaos as we grease bike chains and pump up tires.

At the top of the Rip and Tear trail, we drop into a series of immaculately built jumps and berms, the dogs launching off the lips right behind us. Later, when I speak with Morgan Buckert, director of communications and development at the Blaine County Recreation District (BCRD), I’m surprised to learn the rec district owns the lodge, which a concessionaire operates. “In 1994, the community fundraised $500,000 for BCRD to purchase Galena Lodge, and that was our big entrée into Nordic skiing,” Morgan says, alluding to its wintertime draw.

If Teton County is in the larval stage of recreation district development, Blaine County emerged from its cocoon long ago. Approaching its fiftieth year, Blaine County’s district seems to do everything: It built the community’s aquatic center and the Wood River Trail, a paved, multi-use, year-round path that connects the entire Wood River Valley along the old Union Pacific Sun Valley railroad line. It runs all kinds of traditional sports and summer camp programs, and it built a pump track and other bike trails at Quigley Park near Hailey.

All that on a $5.2 million annual budget that includes roughly $1.7 million from taxpayers, a similar amount to what Teton County stands to collect. Philanthropy makes up about 25 percent of the revenue, while program fees are the biggest bucket at 40 percent. “A lot of people don’t realize that we are a taxing district, because our tax rate is the equivalent of the cemetery districts,” Morgan says. “So, it’s a really small number on your property tax bill.”

Hearing about BCRD’s breadth of programming might raise some hackles among detractors in Teton County. In the 1970s, Blaine voters approved their rec district with the express purposes of building the aquatic center and the Wood River Trail, capital campaigns that took at least a decade each.

Some Teton Valley residents have advocated for an aquatic center, with Teton Valley Aquatics helping facilitate the donation of a seven-acre parcel to the city of Driggs. The parallels concern Driggs resident Robert Boyles. “I worry that they’re going to try to build a pool, rec center, those type of things, things that have both large capital expenditures and large amounts of ongoing and continuous expenses,” he says.

Members of Teton County’s inaugural rec district board say it’s unlikely district funds would go toward a pool. “$1.9 million sounds like a lot, but it will go really fast,” rec district director Olivia Goodale  says. Her term ends in January 2026. “I don’t know if the community would want to see that entire budget focused on one specific thing when there are so many different user groups.”

LAYING THE FOUNDATION 

On August 12, a handful of members of the public and a few county staffers sat in the commissioners’ chambers at the Teton County Courthouse. At the staid affair, the rec district board approved its first budget, a $1.9 million plan that includes tax revenue to be collected next year and a loan of roughly $175,000 the board took out to get up and running. 

That loan, permitted only in its first year, allowed the board to hire lawyers and an executive director, build a website, and take care of administrative pieces that are “not sexy,” as several board members put it, but are necessary. 

Katie Bradbury began her role as the inaugural executive director in late October. She previously served as the recreation services superintendent for Sandpoint, Idaho. 

The directors explained that the first-year expenditures make them ready to serve the community the day they start collecting taxes. Their idea is to have the infrastructure in place to offer recreation right away when they have revenue.    

“Our first priority is the backlog, things that have been neglected and need to be brought up to speed,” director John Beller says. Mending soccer fields that have ankle-breaking holes, making bathrooms at trailheads accessible, and improving heavily used paths and trails in need of maintenance are all projects that continually float up in conversations with rec district board members. “It’s not an inexpensive effort,” John says, “but that’s a pretty simple request.”

Other immediate priorities include supporting small nonprofits that offer specific sports, like baseball, softball, and lacrosse. Right now, each of these groups runs its own registration system and has its own director and admin. John hopes the rec district can take on some of that load. “Some of these organizations pay $3,000, $4,000 a year for a sign-up software,” he says. That’s money they could direct toward equipment or scholarships if it were freed up. 

Mostly, these ideas are still just that: ideas. It may take years to move through the maintenance backlog, but the district already has money set aside in its budget to support both nonprofits and city governments through a contract system. Then comes the fun part—finding creative ways to build new infrastructure and programming. For instance, Sara lives in Tetonia; many of her constituents value the Teton County Fairgrounds, which could be a candidate for funds. “It’s an existing multi-use facility, and they have a clear vision for the improvements they want to do there,” she says. “It’s also a way to help preserve and celebrate our Western heritage.”

Mountain Bike The Tetons could use rec district funds, executive director Chris Brule says, to help with the growing trail network it maintains. Grand Targhee Ski and Snowboard Foundation executive director Gary Mackenzie says money to support the return of the Winter Sports Program, in which schoolkids ski, sled, Nordic ski, and otherwise play in the snow, would be a great way to level the playing field in the expensive winter activities Teton Valley boasts. “I know for a fact that when I was a kid, had the winter sports opportunity not been available, the majority of my school peers would have never been able to experience any of that,” says Gary, who grew up in Tetonia.

Nate sees an opportunity to build accessible bathrooms at trailheads so athletes with disabilities can use public facilities. And Megan at Teton Valley Foundation has those big plans for the Kotler Ice Arena. Still, she sees the new district not just as a resource for her organization, but as an advocate for recreation throughout the valley. “We are a community that recreates in lots of different ways and making sure that everyone has equal representation and equal access to funding, I think it’s really great,” she says. 

All this is to say, the possibilities are endless. If Blaine County is an example, it’s hard to know what Teton County’s rec district may offer in twenty years, let alone fifty. But one thing’s for sure: it will be community-guided. Board members are elected officials, so if members of the public aren’t satisfied with the direction it takes, they can run for office to help steer the ship themselves. This November, Matt Thackray was elected to fill Olivia Goodale’s open seat and John Beller was elected for a second term. Each director serves a four-year term, and Sara’s seat will be up for election in 2027.

John, who helped the push to form the district, notes one interaction he had while signature-gathering that encapsulates the need for this funding and gargantuan effort. He was sitting at the Teton Valley Aquatics seasonal pool last summer, and a pair of young mothers who had grown up in the valley approached him.

“They said, ‘We really need something for our kids that is better than just going partying in the hills.’ There’s not a lot of opportunity for kids to do things if they don’t have money,” John says. “So if the rec district can help make those things happen, I think that might be pretty cool.”