Ten and a quarter million Wyss dollars have come into Jackson since 2018, and essentially all of it is human services — food, housing, counselling, a hospital. The Storer Foundation funds the other half: civic engagement, four newsrooms, and the conservation organisations Wyss does not touch. Each node opens grant purposes read verbatim, board seats, and where each connection is documented and where it stops.
Sorted by amount. Column headers re-sort the table. DOC = read off a filing · SEC = a transcription · INF = structural, no traceable dollar.
| From | To | Amount | Period | Conf. | Source |
|---|
$10,255,000 into Jackson and Teton County since 2018, and the list is food banks, housing, youth services, domestic-violence services, mental health, a hospital foundation. The Wyss Foundation funds none of Jackson’s conservation or advocacy organisations — not the Conservation Alliance, not Shelter JH, not Better Wyoming. It is a private foundation and it is legally barred from campaign intervention. Its 990-PF itemises every grantee.
Mark Newcomb’s campaign filing with the Teton County Clerk puts on paper what had previously circulated only as an anecdote.
| Mark Newcomb, 2026 | Way Back PAC, same period | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Raised, from twelve donors | $5,300 | Raised | $6,142,823.26 |
| Spent | $8,657.20 | Spent | $6,430,160.86 |
| Loaned himself to cover the shortfall | $3,357.20 | To the three candidates who beat him | $5,500 |
| Median donation | $250 | Median six-figure cheque to a state PAC | $100,000 |
Eight of his twelve donations were $250 or less. Four were exactly $100. The full ladder: $1,500 · $1,000 · $1,000 · $500 · $250 · $250 · $250 · $150 · $100 · $100 · $100 · $100. The donor names are on the public filing at the Teton County Clerk and are deliberately not reproduced here — they are private individuals who gave to a county race, and the arithmetic carries the point without them.
And every dollar he spent, he spent locally: $3,192 on radio, $2,246 on fliers, $1,573.60 on News&Guide ads, $1,200 on Buckrail — the same platform Keep Jackson Whole’s advertisement ran on three weeks later — $280 for four and a half hours of sign construction and mailer work, $65.60 in stamps, $100 to register. Then he wrote his campaign a cheque for $3,357.20 because the money ran out.
Wes Gardner’s filing has not been pulled. It is the last document needed to finish this table.
In the 2025 session the Wyoming Legislature passed House Bill 337, barring foreign nationals from funding ballot-measure campaigns. Governor Mark Gordon signed it 6 March 2025 as Enrolled Act 61, Chapter 121, effective 1 July 2025. It creates two new sections of the election code: W.S. 22-24-202 and W.S. 22-25-116.
The provisions that make this statute dangerous to a pass-through were not in the bill as introduced. They were amended in on the floor across two days — the second of which was the day Rep. Storer voted no.
| Date | Stage | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Feb 2025 | House Appropriations | Do Pass, 7–0. Allemand, Angelos, Bear, Haroldson, Pendergraft, Sherwood, Smith — the full committee. Neither Storer nor Nicholas sits on it. |
| 10 Feb 2025 | Committee of the Whole | Passed on a voice vote after roughly nine minutes of discussion. Three members spoke. Storer was not one of them. |
| 11 Feb 2025 | Second reading | Sponsor’s amendment adopted, mirroring the prohibition into “chapter 25 of our election code — the chapter that deals with campaign practices and campaign finance.” This is the moment W.S. 22-25-116 is created — the section whose certification now appears on Way Back PAC’s own Wyoming report. Adds the five-year record-retention rule. |
| 12 Feb 2025 | Third reading | A further sponsor’s amendment adopted by voice vote minutes before the roll call. It inserted “knowingly” as a scienter requirement, added the $100,000 / four-year donor affirmation, and added the definition of directly or indirectly. No member asked a single question about it. The roll call followed immediately. |
Presenting the third-reading amendment, Rep. Webber explained the new definition of “directly or indirectly”:
“Acting either alone or jointly with, through or on behalf of any other person or entity — to prevent getting around the prohibition of funding through another entity or person. … Directly or indirectly is used commonly throughout the election code, often times to address workarounds of campaign finance laws.”
And the donor affirmation the same amendment added: that a donor has not knowingly accepted, directly or indirectly, more than $100,000 in aggregate from prohibited sources in the preceding four years. That is a chain rule. An intermediary that took more than $100,000 of foreign-national-origin money over four years becomes a prohibited source itself. Enforcement is a Secretary of State civil action carrying penalties of up to twice the prohibited contribution.
In Committee of the Whole on 10 February, Rep. Ken Chestek — a Democrat, who voted aye — put the question the whole structure turns on:
“In today’s world of super PACs and large aggregations of money, what obligation or duty are you putting on the person signing the certificate … how far are they supposed to dig? The whole purpose of a super PAC is to hide money and to hide the source of money. … Should we bar super PACs from making these kinds of donations? That would be a cleaner way of doing this.”
Chairman Bear, carrying the bill, conceded the limit of the mechanism:
“We depend on attestation … it’s only when we find that there’s a problem that we go in and investigate further to determine who is who and who has brought these funds in. … I wish it were more robust than that, but … we don’t have that capability at this point.”
Rep. Elissa Campbell then asked whether the $100,000 four-year threshold applies to every group or every donor. The question was never answered. The chair moved straight from her question to “any further discussion … question being called.” On second reading, Rep. Mike Yin — the other Teton County member — raised the only other objection heard on the bill, that the five-year record-retention rule was burdensome for a PAC. He then voted for it.
Way Back PAC’s 2026 Wyoming filing carries a certification block that reads, on its face:
“No expenditure of this political action committee or organization was knowingly, whether directly or indirectly, funded by a prohibited source, as defined by W.S. 22-25-116(a)(iii).”
That citation is now confirmed against the enrolled act: W.S. 22-25-116 is the section HB 337 created, and the words “knowingly,” “directly or indirectly” and “prohibited source” are the exact terms added by the two floor amendments of 11 and 12 February 2025. The committee is signing the certification created by the bill Rep. Storer voted against — on a report showing no ballot-measure activity at all.
And the statute defines “foreign national” by direct cross-reference to 52 U.S.C. § 30121(b) — the identical federal provision under which Hansjörg Wyss conceded foreign-national status in his own filing to the FEC. He lives in Wilson, Teton County.
Nothing here shows why either member voted no, and the second name is the reason to be careful. Bob Nicholas is a Republican; Liz Storer is a Democrat. A bill drawing exactly two no votes from opposite parties usually draws them on drafting, vagueness or constitutional grounds rather than on interest. Legislators vote against bills they broadly agree with for many reasons.
What is documented is the sequence, and it is a real one. The representative for the county where Hansjörg Wyss lives — whose foundation seats a sitting county commissioner, and whose husband founded an organisation Wyss funded for eight years — was one of two votes in the entire Wyoming Legislature against a bill barring foreign nationals from funding Wyoming ballot campaigns through intermediaries. She cast that vote on the day the anti-intermediary language was written, minutes after it was adopted, having said nothing about it at any stage. The vote, its timing, and the absence of any floor statement are each a matter of record.
Floor proceedings above are tagged SEC: they are read from the Wyoming Legislature’s own video of the sessions via automatically generated captions, with timestamps given in the sources. The vote tallies are DOC — they come from the Legislative Service Office bill record and match what is announced on the video. The timestamps are given so the audio itself can be heard at each point.
The structure on this map has a transparent half and an opaque one. The Wyss Foundation is a private foundation: it must itemise every grantee on a public return, and it is legally barred from touching an election. The Berger Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) with $387.6 million in net assets: it need never name a donor, and it exists to fund advocacy. Molly McUsic is president of both. She is one of three officers common to the two entities.
| Role | Detail |
|---|---|
| President, Wyss Foundation | compensation $544,785, FY2024 |
| President, Berger Action Fund | the c4 that has moved ≈$272 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund |
| Counselor to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt | Clinton administration — “oversaw the designation of National Monuments under the Antiquities Act”; lead negotiator on a major state-federal land exchange |
| Conservation Lands Foundation | founding board member — secondary source |
| Biden transition team | reviewed Department of the Interior policies and personnel |
| Academic | tenured professor, University of North Carolina Law School; visiting professor, Harvard Law |
| Clerkships | Justice Harry A. Blackmun, US Supreme Court; Judge Dorothy W. Nelson |
| Earlier | Skadden Fellow, Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest |
She is not a philanthropy administrator who drifted into politics. She ran federal public-lands policy at Interior, then took over both arms of the largest private conservation fortune in the American West. The charitable half funds Jackson’s food banks. The political half funds the network that reaches Way Back PAC. The same person signs for both.
Both are described as Conservation Lands Foundation board members, in the same era, by their own biographies and by secondary sources. McUsic is called a founding board member; CLF was founded in 2007. Propst’s own biography from his Sonoran Institute years lists a CLF board seat. The Wyss Foundation gave CLF $4.5 million between 2011 and 2013 and more than $1 million a year from 2010 to 2014.
The relevant record is public. Conservation Lands Foundation Forms 990, Part VII, list every officer and director by name, year by year. Pulling 2008 through 2014 establishes whether Molly McUsic and Luther Propst sat on that board at the same time — and if they did, it is the only direct, personal, documented link between a 2026 Teton County commissioner and the person who runs Hansjörg Wyss’s money. It has not been examined.
Two further coincidences, neither of them established: Propst holds three degrees from the University of North Carolina, where McUsic later held a tenured chair at the law school; and McUsic’s Skadden fellowship was in Arizona, where Propst founded the Sonoran Institute in Tucson in 1991. The dates almost certainly do not overlap in either case.
Arabella Advisors is a for-profit consultancy, not a charity. It manages the fiscal-sponsorship funds that appear on this map — New Venture Fund (c3), Sixteen Thirty Fund (c4), North Fund (c4), Windward Fund and Hopewell Fund. Two features of that arrangement do all the work.
Jonah Meyers was at Arabella Advisors from 2016 to 2021, rising Program Associate → Program Manager → Associate Director → Director, Managed Organizations — the fiscal-sponsorship arm itself. He left in September 2021 and founded Blue Moon Strategies, which sells “fractional COO support to multi-entity advocacy organizations, including 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, and PAC organizations.” That is the Arabella model, unbundled and sold retail.
Today, by Western Futures Fund’s own Form 990, Blue Moon Strategies is responsible for its day-to-day operations — while Meyers is simultaneously assistant treasurer of Way Back PAC, the committee that fund bankrolls and now declares as its connected organization. Way Back PAC has paid Blue Moon $56,156.70 since 2025; the retainer tripled from $1,000 to $3,000 a month in July of that year.
He is named nowhere in Western Futures Fund’s own filings — not as officer, director, agent or contractor. Its only listed officers remain Hennesy, Krones and Hirsch, each at one hour a week and no compensation.
The philanthropic rail and the political rail run in parallel down this map, out of the same national network and into the same county. They are legally separate at every hop — and they touch in four documented places.
| The philanthropic rail | The political rail | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Wyss Foundation, a 501(c)(3) private foundation | Berger Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) |
| Shared officer | MOLLY McUSIC is president of both | |
| Into the network | New Venture Fund (c3) — Wyss $27.6M, Storer $165,000 earmarked | Sixteen Thirty Fund (c4) — Berger ≈$272M |
| Into Wyoming | direct grants to Jackson human services | Western Futures Fund, Sheridan — $5,082,850 from Sixteen Thirty |
| At the county | food, housing, counselling, a hospital | Way Back PAC and Wyoming Way PAC |
| What it may fund | charitable purposes only | independent expenditures and state races |
Both Jackson foundations are inside the same national fiscal-sponsorship structure. Wyss at $27.6 million into New Venture Fund; Storer at $165,000 into the same entity, earmarked to Trust for Learning and the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund. That is a real, documented relationship and it is drawn on this map.
What it is not is a dollar path to a PAC. New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund share a manager, not a taxpayer; the c3 cannot fund the c4’s political work, and a private-foundation grant that did would create §4945 exposure. The parallel is the finding. The chain is not.
And one place they conspicuously do not cross: Shelter JH funding. Western Futures Fund gave it $70,000; Arnold Ventures gave it $250,000. The Storer Foundation gave it nothing — housing is not a Storer program area. The Storer Foundation funds no housing organisation at all.
| Organisation | His role | Funder | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sonoran Institute | Founder 1991, executive director to 2012 | Wyss Foundation | $1,982,000 documented 2008–12 |
| Conservation Lands Foundation | Board seat per his own Sonoran-era bio | Wyss Foundation | $4.5M 2011–13 |
| Outdoor Alliance | Director — not chair | Storer Foundation | $875,000+ |
| George B. Storer Foundation | Trustee | — | $49.2M; his wife is its CEO |
Conservation Lands Foundation is a Wyss institution in all but name: Hansjörg Wyss and Molly McUsic sit on its emeritus board, and two serving Wyss Foundation officers sit on its current one. McUsic is president of both the Wyss Foundation and the Berger Action Fund — she is the single person joining the charitable and political halves of that structure.
None of this is improper. Conservation professionals sit on conservation boards, and in the American West these are the boards. What it establishes is that Luther Propst is not adjacent to this funding network. He has been inside it for thirty years.
A Ryan Lance sits on the Storer Foundation board alongside Luther Propst. A Ryan Lance is treasurer and custodian of records of Way Back PAC and signs every filing. No document connects them. The PAC’s Form 1 gives only a registered-agent mail drop and has no employer field; the foundation publishes no director biographies. A different Ryan Lance — Cheyenne, president of Pathfinder Ranches, Wyoming Business Council, “Conservation, Law & Land Management” — fits the profile a conservation foundation recruits.
Mark Newcomb and Wes Gardner did not return to the commission after 18 August 2026. Both voted yes on every major Northern South Park measure — the March 2024 plan for 1,437 units, the May 2025 Master Site Plan, the December 2024 Pennrose ground lease, the March 2026 $10 million. Propst cast the sole no vote on 19 May 2025. The frame that the incumbents were anti-housing does not survive their voting record.
Gardner canvassed personally — thousands of doors. On terminating Pennrose he objected on affordability grounds: “We’ve increased the rents considerably… I am very uncomfortable with Pennrose.”