Governor reflects on local opportunities

A national award for a school employee in Newcastle provided the occasion for Governor Mark Gordon to make a trip to northeast Wyoming last week, but also gave him the chance to do some multi-tasking.

Before heading south to recognize Keeley Anderson, paraprofessional at Newcastle Middle School, as the 2022 Recognizing Inspiring School Employees national awardee, the governor made time on Wednesday morning to visit the Hulett School with Wyoming's new Superintendent of Public Instruction, Brian Schroeder, and check in on the status of the Black Hills National Forest Plan.

Forest Plan

"That's big and it's one reason I want to be here. We've been working with the county commissions for Crook and Weston counties, as well as Lawrence and Pennington in South Dakota," he said over a coffee in the Red Rock Cafe.

"The timber harvest was reduced pretty dramatically and we believe that there's more timber there. It's such a core of this community, but also the Black Hills economy. We're anxious to keep moving forward on this."

Early on, Gordon says, he and Governor Kristi Noem met with county commissioners from across the region to discuss the steps that need to be taken.

"When the Forest Service came to look at their allowable cut, it was basically a tabletop exercise. They don't actually come down and look at what the forest resource is, they look at projections and models and kind of said, well, we're overharvesting," he explains.

"What we're working with South Dakota on – and it's at several levels, there's county to county, county to state, state to state – is saying let's actually look on the ground, let's see what the trees look like."

Gordon says there's a general consensus that the U.S. National Forest Service's draft report – which recommended slashing the annual Black Hills harvest from 181,000 CCF to between 70,000 and 115,000 CCF per year – is too drastic.

"There's a big belief that there are more trees there that can be harvested, so we're going to try to identify those with a lidar type of survey, show the Forest Service and see if we can have some more harvest, which is really going to be essential for keeping these mills going," he says.

A stop-gap measure that might have shored up local supplies was unfortunately not successful, he says.

"There was a suggestion that there would be some trees hauled in from California and Oregon from the fires last year. It turns out, those trees have bugs that are not in our forests," he says.

"All of this precedes a forest plan review and revision and I'm particularly anxious that we get after that quickly so that we bring some security and certainty to the industry and I think also to the Black Hills, because it's tourism, it's all the economy pieces that are here."

Local Economy

Speaking further on the economy in the northeast portion of Wyoming, Gordon acknowledges that the state's financial picture has begun to look brighter since the prices of fossil fuels began to climb again. But is there a way out of the boom-and-bust cycle that has long plagued the budgets of the state and local communities alike?

One of Gordon's oft-stated goals through his time as governor has been to work towards a sustainable economy in Wyoming.

"One of the low-hanging pieces of fruit on that is: how can we help with tourism? Tourism really had a phenomenal year last year – not quite to 2019 levels, but I think for Crook County it was above 2019 levels," he says.

"I've been anxious to see how we can sort of spread that wealth a little bit, so it's not just that everybody shows up at the Tower."

Towards this end, Gordon says he has asked the Legislature to look at expanding Wyoming's outdoor recreation opportunities.

"Wyoming loves to have taxes paid by people from elsewhere, and so being able to build a more sustainable thing is going to be valuable," he says. "Like Ranch A, [which] does not get the use that it really could be, so we've had some conversations about how can we improve the selection of opportunities that we have here."

Another area in which Gordon foresees this area expanding its economic diversity is agriculture.

"I've also talked a lot about building more agricultural capacity, because I do think that there are some terrific opportunities for agriculture," he says. "We've obviously got some money that's going to be devoted to expanding meat processing on the smaller, local levels."

Gordon also believes that carbon sequestration will have an impact on the ag sector here. According to the definition provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, biologic carbon sequestration is the process of storing carbon in vegetation, soils, trees and aquatic environments by, for example, encouraging the growth of plants.

"When Secretary [Sonny] Purdue came here a couple of years ago and we rode down through the Thunder Basin grassland, we really were talking about what does better grass management look like in terms of being able to sequester carbon, and if that's the case, then how do we reward farmers by making another market for them?" he says.

"I'm really against regulating on greenhouse gases, but I think if there's a marketplace, and consumers say they're worried about carbon dioxide and willing to pay a little extra to get that carbon sequestered, we can show that in improved rangeland, but also in improved forest health."

Circling back around, this also means paying attention to the health of natural assets like the Black Hills.

"Dead and dying forests don't sequester carbon, they actually off-gas them. Live, managed, vibrant forests do," he says.

"When you look at Campbell County and potentially WYODAK being able to retro-fit with carbon capture technology, if we can start to incorporate some bio-mass into that and have carbon capture, then we have carbon negative, and if that's a really cool thing to do then people should be willing to pay for it."

Carbon sequestration is already happening, but he'd like to see Wyoming reap some of the benefits.

"It drives me nuts because every time anybody checks off that they're going to buy their airplane ticket and pay a little extra to reduce the footprint, that money goes to Elon Musk," he says. "Rather than a clever scheme to bilk well-intentioned individuals out of their extra dollars, let's put it to use."

Urban areas within northeast Wyoming will meanwhile be able to use upcoming funding from sources such as the American Rescue Plan and Build Back Better to update their infrastructure and make improvements that could, for example, encourage tourism, he says.

"There are components there that are going to be great for infrastructure, and the infrastructure bill is coming too – the IIJA, also called the bipartisan infrastructure bill," Gordon says.

"Those funds are going to come, and we've set aside in the budget matching funds to help leverage those grants when they come, which will be important for water systems, sewer systems, curb and gutter, bridges, all of that sort of stuff."

At this time, the final component for Gordon in terms of shoring up Wyoming's economy is education.

"I regard schools as absolutely essential to the viability [of small towns]. You look at Hulett, Sundance, Kaycee where I grew up: the school is the town center," he says. "We need to make sure that we have the schools vibrant, running and working."

Gordon believes there's more to the conversation about education than the financials.

"Our point is, let's start with the community, let's start with the parents, let's ask what we want delivered from that. There's lots of different ways, I know Ogden [Driskill] has been talking about what the potential for charter schools might be, those kinds of things," he says.

"I think this is a really good time to look at how we educate and see if there are ways we can make it work even better, because, again, schools are essential. That's what's going to keep people here and families invested in Main Street."