Jackson Hole Airport forged a little-known deal and avoided federal fees on millions in revenue

Jackson Hole Airport won’t say how much it avoided paying the federal government due to a little-known deal with Grand Teton National Park that absolved it from fees on millions of dollars of revenue since 2023.

The deal, forged in 2018, came as the airport planned to acquire the private enterprise that sells aviation fuel and other services to airlines and private aircraft — an undertaking that would eventually more than double the revenue it previously collected.

Anticipating the income boost from its new business, the airport sought an adjustment to its longstanding agreement with the Department of the Interior — the parent agency of the National Park Service.

That “use agreement,” crafted in 1983, requires the airport to pay 3% of the first $4 million — and 4% of revenues above that — earned from “operations carried on at the airport.”

Airport officials in 2018 made a “proposal for treatment of new revenues” to then Grand Teton Superintendent David Vela. The “new revenues” in question would come from the to-be-acquired fuel and service business known as the fixed-base operator and fuel farm.

A May 8, 2018, letter to Vela reads: “The Board does not believe the revenues received by the [airport’s new] FBO Division from operating what has been a private business … will be funds received by the Board ‘as a result of operations carried on at the Airport.’”

Under the board’s 2018 interpretation of the use agreement, most of the new income would not be subject to the federal government’s 3-4% fee collected for the use of public land.

Vela agreed with the proposal, calling it “well-reasoned and rational.”

“[W]e concur,” Vela wrote, “with your interpretation of ‘operating revenues’ with respect to the gross income of the fixed base operation and the new fuel facility.”

Five years later, in 2023, the airport took over the fixed-base operator and airport revenues boomed. In FY 2024, the first full year the airport owned the fixed-base operation, it received $33.6 million in revenue from that new business, a line item that didn’t exist two years earlier, an airport audit shows.

Total operating revenue that year was $59.5 million compared to $30.1 million two years before, audits show.

During the same two-year period, fee payments to the government increased $219,632, from $806,599 to just over $1 million, according to information provided by the airport.

Airport officials cautioned against calculating what they would have paid absent the Vela agreement. “There is no other agreement by which to make hypothetical calculations,” their statement reads. 

“We believe we’re paying the amount that’s appropriate under the agreement we have with the Department of the Interior,” Interim Airport Director Bob McLaurin told WyoFile. “If we get a letter from the Department of the Interior [asking for more], we’ll sit down and talk with them.”

How much did the airport avoid paying? “I’m not going to speculate,” McLaurin said.

‘Plausible interpretation’

The busiest airport in Wyoming, Jackson Hole Airport enplaned 580,702 passengers in 2025 and presumably off-loaded a similar number. A Grand Teton transportation study in 2021 showed that between 5%-11% of people traveling to the region arrive at the Jackson Hole Airport.

The airport paid the government about $1.35 million in fees in FY 2026, according to a graph airport officials provided to WyoFile. Meantime, national parks are in disrepair nationwide, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in April, facing a $35-billion-plus maintenance backlog.

Grand Teton itself suffers from an estimated $343 million in deferred maintenance and repairs, according to a 2024 assessment. National Park Service infrastructure “is not always adequate for current visitation numbers,” Grand Teton Superintendent Chip Jenkins told a U.S. House committee in September.

Emails obtained through a citizen’s records request show airport attorney Michael Morgan of Denver, Teton Park Management Assistant Gary Pollock and airport Executive Director Jim Elwood shaping the three-and-a-half page airport proposal to Vela in 2018.

“[W]e are making a plausible interpretation of the 1983 Agreement,” Morgan wrote to Elwood. “I know it is long,” he said of the letter to Vela, “but the length may be necessary to justify the approach.”

The approach was to direct the new revenue to “a separate enterprise of the Board [the fixed-base operator] which will be continuing the operation of a private business,” the letter stated.

That separate enterprise called the “FBO division” would use the new revenue for operating costs, fuel and other materials, fixed-base operator and fuel farm improvements, and related debt service.

What would be left would go to the board’s “airport division” and fall under the 3-4% fee formula.

Greg Herrick, an aviator, businessman and former park service employee who had sought unsuccessfully to open a second fixed-base operation at the airport, obtained the email exchange through a records request and shared it with WyoFile. The letter to Vela, he said, proposed that the airport pay “something less than the percentage referenced in the [1983 use] agreement” that authorizes the Jackson Hole Airport to use 533 acres in Grand Teton National Park.

Whereas

The airport use agreement and subsequent amendments have been high-profile issues debated and advocated at the top levels of government. Secretary of the Interior James Watt signed the 1983 agreement to which U.S. Sens. Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop and U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney added signatures — even though there was no signature line for them on the document.

The Vela deal came to light through Herrick’s probing of airport operations and his records request.

WyoFile could find no record of the “treatment of new revenues” proposal being raised in front of the airport board in 2018 nor referenced in any airport board minutes from that year.

The deal was forged with the involvement of at least four people — Vela, Elwood, Pollock and Morgan, according to emails.

“We are confident that this would have been discussed with the Board President,” airport spokesman Jeremy Barnum wrote WyoFile in an email statement. He called the deal “an administrative action.”

“It did not require a resolution of the Board or other official Board action,” the statement reads.

In pitching their deal to Pollock and Vela (neither responded to WyoFile requests for comment), Elwood and Morgan turned to “recital” clauses in the use agreement. The airport interprets those “whereas” clauses as making the use-agreement contract a “cost-recovery model.”

“The recital is a strong signal of the parties’ intent,” the airport’s statement reads. “We have faithfully implemented the formula set in the … Use Agreement to compensate the Park for costs incurred.”

After steering the 2018 Vela deal, Pollock retired from the park service. The airport board that year passed a resolution “paying homage” to him as a liaison to the airport for 16 years and recognizing him “as a Friend of the Jackson Hole Airport.”

Therefore

Despite the “whereas” recital clauses, the use agreement’s operative “therefore” provision appears to make the use agreement a revenue-sharing contract in which fees increase in proportion to revenues. The use agreement does not appear to limit how much the federal government can receive from the airport.

Franz Camenzind, a Jackson wildlife biologist and conservationist, called the Vela agreement “a loophole big enough to fly through,” and “a maneuver to get away from paying proper fees.” The Vela agreement, which has no sunset date, potentially “gave a life sentence to the park,” he said.

Herrick found fault with town of Jackson and Teton County elected officials, who jointly appoint airport board members, for lax oversight. 

“Everyone should pay their fair share when it comes to fees to the national parks,” Herrick said.

“They’re not flush with cash,” Herrick said of the parks. “They have serious budget issues.”

Barnum’s email discounted any notion of secrecy in the Vela deal.

“The Airport proactively engaged the Park on this issue when the Airport Board first enacted plans to acquire both [fixed base operator and fuel farm] entities,” Barnum’s statement reads. In 2023, airport officials informed Grand Teton Superintendent Chip Jenkins on how the airport would be treating the new revenues and “the Park expressed no concerns at that time,” the statement reads.

Jenkins did not respond to requests for comment.

The fee formula “excludes certain categories” of revenue, the airport statement said. Those exclusions include things like grants, reimbursement for security services and use of the airport copy machine.

Elwood told Vela the airport’s new fixed-base operation should be treated similarly. “These examples of excluded receipts are those the Board receives when it provides services to others, much like a business would provide such services,” Elwood wrote in 2018.

Essential operations

Although the airport does not consider fixed-base and fuel farm enterprises as being airport operations under the use agreement, a 2018 airport white paper described those services as “essential to airport operations.”

The airport can have two fixed-base operators or, if only one exists, take it over. Herrick had sought unsuccessfully to start a second fixed-base operation, but the airport decided in 2017 to take over the lone, existing Jackson Hole Aviation FBO.

That takeover was “not primarily based on finances,” the airport stated in its white paper. Instead, the airport sought to “avoid the construction of duplicate facilities on an already constrained site” and “use our small land area within Grand Teton National Park more efficiently.”

Despite that goal, the airport has struggled to find a location for an aircraft rescue and firefighting building in the airport’s development zone. The airport had two fixed-base operators for four years ending in 1996 when Jackson Hole Aviation and Satellite Aero merged.

Herrick and others sued the airport in 2018 over its planned use of revenue bonds to buy out the lone Jackson Hole Aviation FBO. The case went to the Wyoming Supreme Court, where the airport prevailed. In 2023, the airport took over Jackson Hole Aviation when the FBO contract expired and established its own Jackson Hole Flight Services.

If the airport fails to meet the terms of the contract to use 533 acres in Grand Teton National Park, the Department of the Interior “shall be entitled to terminate this agreement,” the use agreement reads.

Herrick wants an investigation of the Vela deal. Camenzind said because the 2018 Vela agreement was forged at the superintendent’s level, a park superintendent could end it with a new letter.

“It should be that easy to change back,” he said.