West Yellowstone, Montana Economic Development Council Purchases Property for Education Project

West Yellowstone Economic Development Council Inc. (WYED), a nonprofit economic development corporation, has purchased an 11,500 square foot building in the Town of West Yellowstone. The new building, to be called the WYED Center, will be the future home of the Yellowstone Studies Center (YSC) as well as the home base for other education and economic development projects for the Greater Yellowstone region.

The building had been mostly vacant for a number of years and lacked a creative use despite its numerous rooms and sound structure. Most recently, it was a beauty salon and a health spa complete with tanning rooms, a dance studio, and two racquet ball courts as well as a full-sized apartment and two retail spaces. WYED directors were looking for a home for the YSC, an ambitious education project for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the large property on the corner of Electric Street and Highway 20 fit the bill.

"For the past year, we have been developing the Yellowstone Studies Center project and it was time to truly kick-start that project rather than to keep talking about it and to do so it needed a home base. This building is a perfect fit," said Glenn Hales, President of WYED.

The building, as well as the education projects that will be housed within, stirred the philanthropic interests of long-term West Yellowstone residents Clyde and Linda Seely. The Seelys made an initial $100,000 donation for the down payment of the building and have pledged to make half the annual payments over the next four years. The building will be fully paid off by September 2014.

The Seelys have been eager to start an education project in West Yellowstone for at least the past 10 years. The goal has always been to start up a college that would use the outdoor laboratory of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as its primary teaching tool.

"The Yellowstone Studies Center project is an excellent first step towards more formal and accredited degree programs to take place in West Yellowstone. That’s been our dream for a long time. With the progress we’ve made over the past year, it made perfect sense to step up at this time to help WYED buy the building," said Clyde Seely who is also a board member of WYED.

The Yellowstone Studies Center will be the anchor tenant in the building. The YSC will provide office space, classrooms, laboratories, storage, board rooms, meeting rooms, study carrels, and a full office infrastructure to researchers and academics from across the United States who are studying issues within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Every year, there are at least 200 researchers permitted to conduct research within Yellowstone National Park. These scientists come from all over the world. If the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is included, hundreds and perhaps thousands more researchers come to the region every year. These students, professors, and research scientists are the target market for the YSC.

"The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is exceptionally unique," says WYED Executive Director Sam Korsmoe and the lead developer of the YSC project. "There are only a few places in the world where you can present a one hour lecture and literally walk out the door and conduct three hours of field work. You can do that on a variety of subjects within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from this Center in West Yellowstone."

Korsmoe said there are multiple goals for the YSC. First, it is intended to provide an academic infrastructure for the hundreds of researchers who work in the region. Many of them currently work out of tents or hotels. With a place to work from, the researchers, whether they are fully tenured scientists or students, will be able to get into and out of their field research more efficiently and ideally with better results. The YSC will be the center to share their research results. The center will also host lecture series, research presentations, conferences, and other meetings.

For the past several weeks, Korsmoe has been traveling all around Montana and will travel to Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah to visit colleges and universities to encourage them to come to West Yellowstone and use the YSC as a home base for their academic work in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Part of Korsmoe’s strategy is to encourage participating colleges and universities in the region to develop accredited block programs and/or multi-day courses in the center. Such courses, said Korsmoe, would be very cost efficient for both the students and the universities because the WYED Center would be providing the required infrastructure and logistics for the courses to take place.

"Our goal is make the Yellowstone Studies Center the most important learning center in the world for anything and everything to do with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem," said Korsmoe. "It all starts in this new building."

For more information about the WYED Center and the Yellowstone Studies Center, contact Sam Korsmoe (406-682-5923) or Glenn Hales (406-646-4100).

Opinion Editorial

Learning from Alaska

Barrow Alaska and West Yellowstone Montana have a few things in common despite being 2,364 miles apart. Both communities are small, isolated, and have long winters with lots of snow. Each community is located in a fascinating region of the earth. Both also have easy access to an outdoor laboratory to study issues that may reveal what ultimately may happen to life on earth.

For Barrow, the northernmost community in the United States, its location on the shores of the Arctic Ocean offers unique access to study how climate change might or might not impact ice flows, shipping routes, energy development, and a range of wildlife from polar bears to whales to migrating birds. Scientists have been researching these issues, and many others, from Barrow for decades.

For West Yellowstone, its location in almost the exact center of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem offers immediate access to one of the most diverse and unique regions of the world. Whether you are a student of geology, geo-science, wildlife biology, fisheries, or even socio-economic topics like land use planning and conservation, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is an outdoor laboratory for all of these subjects. It is larger than 10 states of the United States and every year hundreds of scientists study and research its many wonders.

West Yellowstone has something to learn, however, from Alaska because there is one key difference between the two communities. Beginning in 1995, the Inupiat Eskimo population of Barrow established the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. This nonprofit Consortium provides classrooms, laboratories, transportation, housing, local knowledge, and many other services to visiting researchers. This immensely improved the efficiency of the scientists and probably helped to produce better science. Prior to the Consortium, these scientists were not exactly wandering around the arctic ice, but they did not have all the tools they needed to understand the complexity of the climate change problems that they were facing. The new nonprofit took care of many of these issues. Today, Barrow proudly claims itself as ‘Ground Zero for Climate Change Science’ in the world. This is not just boastful marketing. Every year, there is a constant flow of researchers and scientists from around the world traveling to Barrow to study climate change.

The GYE has never really had a four-season Barrow Consortium equivalent. That is until now.

On December 15th of this year, the West Yellowstone Economic Development Council purchased an 11,500 square foot building in the Town of West Yellowstone. The building will be called the WYED Center and its anchor tenant will be a new nonprofit entity called the Yellowstone Studies Center.

Using the Barrow Consortium as one of its models, the Yellowstone Studies Center (YSC) will be a year-round operation fit-out with the kind of office and educational infrastructure that scientists, researchers, educators, and students can use to research, study, and dialogue with others about GYE issues. There will be classrooms, office space, meeting rooms, internet connectivity, labs, office equipment, storage units, and other supporting essentials to help the learning process succeed. People from any and all disciplines, and proponents and opponents on any issue, are encouraged to use the YSC. It will be a non-ideological, non-partisan center for learning, sharing, and civil discourse.

Every year, there are several hundred university researchers and students working in the GYE on a large range of subjects. Many of them live and work out of tents, campers, and hotels and/or commute back and forth to their universities. Naturally, we will work to provide what they need from West Yellowstone, but we are casting out an even larger net.

We want all of the GYE-focused groups (education, conservation, agriculture, environmental, and recreation) to join the YSC. If you and your organization are passionate about one of the many issues occurring in the GYE, we want to hear from you. We want to invite you to lease out office space for the time you need, short or long term. Use our office services. Attend and be part of our lecture series. Set up and teach courses and seminars under the YSC umbrella. Dialogue with other researchers and groups. Make the YSC your base of operations when you tell the world about your GYE field research.

Of course, we want you to stay in our hotels, eat in our restaurants, and shop in our stores. But more than this, we want you to be part of the creative process of better understanding and/or developing solutions to complex issues for a unique and important area of the United States.

We have a very clear goal. Similar to what Barrow Alaska has successfully been able to do, we want to show the world that West Yellowstone is an excellent place to study from and that the YSC is the premiere institute in the world for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Please join us in this adventure and work with us to make this happen.

Sam Korsmoe is the executive director of the Madison County Economic Development Council and West Yellowstone Economic Development Council Inc. He can be reached by email at [email protected]

Sam Korsmoe

Executive Director

Madison County Economic Development Council Inc.

West Yellowstone Economic Development Council Inc.

Madison Marathon

PO Box 365

Virginia City, MT 59755

Tel: 406-682-5923

Fax: 406-682-4564

Cell: 406-570-4531

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.madcoedc.org

Website: http://www.themadisonmarathon.com