No room in the town for a long time resident

Missy Campbell in her beloved Yellowstone.

_{By ELIZABETH LADEN}

WEST YELLOWSTONE — Missy Campbell, 70, a long time resident, must leave the place she loves because she cannot find a place to put her mobile home.

John McLaughlin, also a long time resident, has been renting Campbell a small space with sewer and water hook-ups on property he owns on lower Madison Street. Now he wants to build a workshop in the space and in February ordered Campbell to move her trailer by June. He later extended the deadline to the end of July.

Campbell has lived in West on and off — mostly on — for 30 years and on McLaughlin’s property for three and a half years. She has been paying McLaughlin $165 a month to rent the space for her singlewide trailer.

In the 1970’s, the town of West Yellowstone initiated a land trade with the National Forest Service so they could add around 165 acres to the north end of town. The West Yellowstone City Council’s main reason for the trade was to have land to develop into a mobile home park where families could have an affordable place to live.

But over the years, that vision changed and the annexed land, known as the Madison Addition, has mainly been developed into single-family home lots. No mobile home complex was developed on the property, largely because new building and environmental regulations made it cost prohibitive to develop mobile home sites, and space rentals would also be too costly.

Year after year, many trailers dispersed through the original town site were left vacant and hauled away so the property could be developed at a higher level — usually for a commercial use. Many mobile homes are still occupied in the town, however, but Campbell’s friends have combed the town in search of a space and found nothing. An Ashton resident offered to rent her a space with utility connections but Campbell does not have the estimated $3,000 it would take to move her trailer to Ashton.

Campbell has a low fixed income she supplements by doing a variety of sewing jobs for people in West Yellowstone, Island Park, Ashton, and beyond. She cannot afford the minimum $400 a month rent pus utilities in the so-called affordable apartment complexes in the original town site and the Madison Addition. She says she has no choice but to leave the mobile home she worked hard to pay for, and the community she loves and has called home for three decades. She plans to move to Overton, Nevada, and live with her mother, who is more than 90 years of age.

Although Campbell knows she will be able to help her mother, she also know that Nevada’s climate will take a toll on her own health because she has difficulty living in high temperatures.

West will not be the same without the petite, redheaded Missy Campbell. Campbell says she will miss the town terribly and miss Yellowstone Park, a place that lives in the center of her heart. Missy has so many wonderful memories of life in West, espcialy good times with her daughter, Jenny, who passed away in October, 2007.

Camobell has always been outspoken about many local issues, from defending snowmobiling in Yellowstone Park to blasting anyone who is against wolf reintroduction. She has through and through been one of those people that add “local character” to a place. It is a tragedy that the place she loved so much has not even a small space for her to park her home.

Anyone who has any ideas about how to keep Campbell in West should call her at 406.646.5192 or 406.641.0129.
 

This is part of the July 22, 2010 online edition of The Island Park News.

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