Wording in a Northwest College policy prevented nearly 100 people in the Frannie area from voting for, or running as, a college trustee for decades. But starting in 2024, those Park County residents will finally be full participants in local elections.

NWC President Lisa Watson said the change was initiated by the Park County Clerk’s office.

“They came to us in a desire to make sure people are not disenfranchised,” Watson said. “The clerk’s office is engaged in actively seeking out fair representation.”

The problem stemmed from a mismatch between Northwest College’s tax district — which encompasses all of Park County — and the way college policy defined its trustee subdistricts.

Until the recent change, NWC policy called for the board’s trustees to be drawn from within the Powell, Cody and Meeteetse school districts (Park County school districts 1, 6 and 16). The issue is that there are Big Horn County school districts that stretch into Park County’s northeast corner around Frannie.

As a result, Park County residents living in that area were paying property taxes toward the college, but races for the college’s board did not appear on their ballots. There were 93 voters in the impacted area in the 2022 election, all within Big Horn County School

The Northwest College Board of Trustees fixed the issue in May by unanimously approving a change to Policy 2200; they added the three Big Horn County school districts to Subdistrict A, which had previously only been composed of voters in the Park County School District 1 boundaries. Voters in the Powell area subdistrict elect three of the college’s seven board.

Those in Subdistrict B, made up of Park County School District 6 in Cody, also elect three members, while Subdistrict C voters elect one representative from Park County School District 16 in Meeteetse.

Kaitlyn Johnson, elections clerk in the Park County Elections Office, said no one noticed the error until they were wading through the changes made by the Legislature’s 2022 redistricting process.

First Deputy County Clerk Hans Odde said the oversight had been in place since well before he arrived in the county. He attributed the odd situation to the Frannie area straddling the border of the two counties.

Big Horn County school districts 2 and 4 also reach into Park County, as Odde said they drew snaking lines to capture some of the revenue from the nearby Elk Basin oil fields. However, those districts have no Park County residents.