Wyoming is experiencing a workforce exodus that will set the state on a long-term economic decline unless it grapples with how to enable communities to attract quality, knowledge-based jobs to compete with surrounding states, the Wyoming Business Council’s top officials say.

“What we’re finding is that, by and large, the [job] opportunities in Wyoming are not good enough, and there aren’t enough of them to retain our youth,” the council’s CEO, Josh Dorrell, told WyoFile. “It’s actually not just the youth. We noticed that our out-migration was twice that of the national average, where we have more out-migration than any other state.”

Some 60% to 70% of Wyoming-born residents permanently leave the state by the time they are 30, according to analysis prepared for the business council. Businesses looking to expand or open up shop in the state report that the available workforce is their No. 1 constraint, creating a “chicken-and-egg” crisis that will require several strategies to overcome, Dorrell said, including — potentially — reforming Wyoming’s tax-and-revenue system currently built around its extractive industries.

Wyoming Business Council CEO Josh Dorrell.

“They want places that have a vibrant workforce,” Dorrell said. “They don’t want a lot of the things that we think are important, like low taxes. Very rarely, if ever, do we hear a company say, ‘We like you because of your low taxes.’ It just doesn’t happen.”

The business council began ringing alarm bells in May when it was scheduled to appear before the Joint Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee. It prepared a presentation highlighting the problem, “long-term economic decline in Wyoming,” and proposed policy changes to address it. The committee ran out of time to hear the business council and rescheduled the discussion for its next meeting July 29-30 in Casper.

Reformations

Wyoming’s long-beleaguered tax-and-revenue system that stunts economic growth is at the root of the problem, according to both the business council and the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. That’s a larger conversation for lawmakers, they say. For its part, the council wants to reform its own Business Ready Community grant and loan program.

The program, which typically requires a small match, is intended to help towns and counties fund business-related infrastructure, like extending water and sewer to business parks. But it has proven ineffective in the face of increasing competition for businesses that require a skilled workforce for knowledge-based jobs, according to Dorrell and his team.

From 2004 to 2019, more than $416 million has been granted to support 396 projects across the state. “And what we found,” Dorrell said, “is that it has not made the difference that it should have.”

Wyoming’s gross domestic product has lagged behind neighboring states. (Wyoming Business Council)

What’s needed are projects that enable businesses to tap into infrastructure and that improve the quality of life throughout the community. The focus, Dorrell said, should be more broadly rooted in community-wide resiliency. Rawlins, for example, can extend water lines to a business center, but that wouldn’t fix the town’s larger need to modernize its water system throughout the community where workers would live.

That particular concept “is on the right track, fundamentally,” Wyoming Association of Municipalities Executive Director Ashley Harpstreith said. “If you’re looking at the core of what government should be doing to be ready for businesses, it does come back to infrastructure and adequately funding our infrastructure.”

But the other reforms the business council proposes for the program will be hard to swallow for towns and counties. The council proposes increasing the grant and loan program’s required match to a minimum of 25%. The purpose, according to the business council, is to entice communities to raise more of their own revenue via the optional sales tax and mill levies.

“When we put a little pressure on leaders in our communities, they always rise to the occasion,” Wyoming Business Council Chief Strategy Officer Sarah Fitz-Gerald said. Raising the match requirement will force local leaders to engage more closely with residents about how they want to secure their economic future and, ideally, result in smarter business projects, Fitz-Gerald added.

Harpstreith doesn’t necessarily disagree with the premise, she said. But local governments have long struggled to increase their revenues via optional sales taxes and mills. Communities are even in a tighter pinch now that lawmakers slashed property taxes by 25%.

“I just think it’s going to highlight, honestly, the inability for locals to raise funds right now in these trying times,” Harpstreith said. “But I also think, on the positive side, it does really realign the [Business Ready Community] program the way I think it was initially intended.”

Click here to learn more about the business council’s proposed rules changes regarding the Business Ready Community program. The council is accepting public comment on the changes through July 27. Click here to comment.