Wading into Water Quality with Local Candidates
How will our 2020 elected officials address water quality among the other community solutions we need?
Leading up to the local 2020 election, Protect Our Water Jackson Hole talked with candidates about how they planned to prioritize water quality, alongside other community needs, once they are in office.
POWJH compiled the candidate’s responses in videos to help educate the voters on the topic and invited every candidate appearing on the local ballot to speak.
The campaign featuring candidate responses was widely circulated and viewed, garnering 2,222 unique website views for protectourwaterjh.org, a total of 14,666 video views and over 30K Instagram and 74K Facebook impressions.
Beyond this, the biggest success of the campaign was to elevate the issue of local water quality to one of the top community issues, with all candidates incorporating water quality protections into their platforms and campaign talking points.
Longterm water resources planning is a political exercise in which our local elected official must play a role – both through awareness and action. Hear what candidates have to say on this topic in the below videos.
These videos have been paid for by Protect our Water Jackson Hole. All candidates who will be appearing on the local ballot were invited to participate.
Jessica Chambers
Candidate for Town Council
"The role that the county and the town should have with waste water management infrastructure is a huge one. We are all connected and there isn't a resource that makes that more evident than our water."
Pete Muldoon
Candidate for Town Council
"Primarily I think clean drinking water is something we all need. Every single human needs it to survive. Those are the basic requirements of living, and if we don't take care of that and make sure people have that available to them, then we're really failing one of our most basic missions as government."
Jim Rooks
Candidate for Town Council
"We all know these issues, housing/transportation, protection of our environment & wildlife, and the youth. Those are the three things I began running on. In the last several months I think our entire community has come around to understanding that water might need to be placed on the top. If we don't have clean drinking water, I'm not sure what else counts more than that."
Devon Viehman
Candidate for Town Council
"The longer we wait to address these [water quality] issues, whether it be Hoback, or the old septic systems [...] it just gets more expensive, and it takes longer to fix, and its harder to fix, and it's more costly for homeowners to fix. So let's not waste another day, and get to work."
2020 County Commissioner Candidates
Christian Beckwith
Candidate for County Commissioner
"I feel that the water issue has to be the primary concern for every single citizen in this county, because everything else depends on it and right now we can still do something about it."
Greg Epstein
Candidate for County Commissioner
"We can't afford for people to get sick due to water quality issues and a lot of that can be completely out of citizen's hands."
Wes Gardner
Candidate for County Commissioner
"The time was yesterday to solve many of these [water quality] problems. And when I look into my sons eyes and think about 'What's the world he's going to inherit from me?' 'Am I going to be proud of my role in creating that world or not?' That's why I'm running for office."
Natalia Macker
Candidate for County Commissioner
"We can't take it for granted that because we live in a beautiful place, that we live at the headwater, that water is around us, and that we don't have some of the industries that we associate with groundwater contamination, which means when we start to look for where the issues are we have to look in the mirror, because it's probably us."
Peter Long
Candidate for County Commissioner
"I'm very committed to ensuring we're not only addressing the water quality issues we're seeing now, but that we're getting ahead of it and looking forward so that they valley we're handing to the next generation is as pristine as it is today."
2020 Mayoral Candidates
Michael Kudar
Candidate for Town Mayor
"The current leadership is not prioritizing environment, or housing, or transportation. It has to come together. It's all one at the end of the day, and that has to be thought about now, not later."
Hailey Morton Levinson
Candidate for Town Mayor
"People care about this place for many different reasons and focusing in on that is how we can work together to then focus on water quality issues, our natural environment and making sure it's preserved, and preserved in a way that we can enjoy, but for future generations."