CODY — With the nation’s unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent amid continuing signs of a faltering economy, President Barack Obama last week proposed a new round of up to $447 billion in tax cuts and federal pubic works spending aimed at putting millions of Americans back to work, as well as boosting his own future job prospects.

It is too soon to know what the proposal might mean to Wyoming. But everyone from contractors to program administrators say there are lessons to be learned — good and bad — from how federal stimulus dollars have been spent in the state since the February 2009 passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

President Barack Obama speaks Thursday before a joint session of Congress to discuss his jobs bill, a $447 billion package of tax cuts and public works projects. (Photo courtesy of The White House - click to enlarge)

As of June 30, the most recent reporting period, the Recovery Act has pumped a total of $710 billion into state and local economies. More than $664 million in stimulus funds have been awarded to Wyoming, producing a total 1,017 jobs from April 1 – June 30, according to the most recent records from the federal government. Most of that money must be spent by Sept. 30, the deadline for many recipients nationwide to complete their projects or commit program funding.

Proponents of the stimulus plan in Wyoming say the money has employed local workers and allowed cash-strapped government agencies, nonprofits and businesses to address serious needs that otherwise would not get funding, all while staving off an even worse economic downturn.

“The sense that ARRA didn’t work is just really not founded once a person takes a little time to look into what it did,” said Dan Neal, executive director of the Equality State Policy Center, a Casper-based government accountability group that advocates for working families.

Neal said that stimulus spending “kept the wolves at bay” when the state was losing thousands of jobs, and that the program as it was carried out in Wyoming has been a model of how it was meant to operate.

Critics contend that too much of the money has gone to contractors in other states or been wasted on unnecessary projects, that reporting requirements are onerous, and the net result hasn’t produced enough jobs or other measurable economic benefits to justify the cost.

Sven Larson, research fellow for a libertarian Cheyenne think tank, Wyoming Liberty Group, said that stimulus spending has been “an incredibly inefficient way of producing jobs,” with government figures for late 2010 showing more than $400,000 spent for each job created.

“There is a great deal of misunderstanding or under-reporting of what the stimulus package actually meant when it comes to wasting money,” he said.

Stimulus funds in Wyoming have paid for a wide array of projects, programs and capital improvements. Examples include obvious and expected expenses like hiring additional police, making low-income housing loans and completing miles of highway and road improvements. Funds have also been used in Wyoming for such mundane needs as buying textbooks and office furniture, as well as more esoteric projects like traveling to Antarctica for atmospheric research and field work in Argentina to collect volcanic ash samples.

Road and highway projects throughout Wyoming benefited from federal stimulus funding, including resurfacing projects in Yellowstone National Park. (NPS photo by Nancy Ward - click to enlarge)

In some cases, funds that would have been spent on existing federal programs under normal circumstances were instead funneled through stimulus channels.

That was the case for nearly $1.4 million in stimulus funds awarded to Western Nuclear, Inc. of Golden, Colo., for groundwater monitoring and environmental consulting performed at the site of a former uranium mine in Jeffrey City.

Spending records at recovery.gov, the federal web site used to track stimulus spending, show the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $1,393,252 in stimulus funding in 2010 to Western Nuclear.

“We’ve been awarded money like that every year since 1994. It just fell under stimulus money this time,” said Ann Thomas, an outside contractor handling accounting work for Western Nuclear.

Every year for the past 17 years, the government has reimbursed Western Nuclear for reclamation work and water testing as part of a standard federal program that will eventually see the former uranium mine site turned over to DOE, Thomas said.

“No jobs were created and all our work for that period is done,” she said. “It hasn’t made any difference in anything we have done.”

Thomas said the company was not paid earlier than usual, and she did not know why the annual reimbursement for 2010 was routed through the Recovery Act.

Saving energy, saving money

Stimulus funding has been key to the success of two energy efficiency improvement projects in Cody, program managers say.

The Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a nonprofit museum and top tourist attraction in Cody, received $592,000 to upgrade and replace heating and cooling equipment, add additional insulation and install LED lighting in exhibit spaces.

“The timeliness of this grant was really fortuitous for us,” said Phil Anthony, operating engineer for the BBHC.

Steam boilers that were nearly 50 years old had rusted through, and the museum had been struggling for the past decade to develop a master plan for upgrading and improving the facility’s failing heating and cooling systems.

Working through the Wyoming State Energy Office, the museum pledged a 15 percent match and received stimulus funds allowing it to upgrade all of its heating and cooling systems at once.

“We were in desperate straits before we got the opportunity to get this money,” Anthony said. “This grant solved all that.”

Anthony said he expects the thousands of dollars in monthly energy savings already being realized to cover the museum’s matching pledge within two years, and to recoup the total system costs within 10 years.

Compliance and reporting requirements, while detailed, were not unreasonable, he said.

“One downside I saw to the concept of the ARRA program was that our contractors didn’t add jobs,” Anthony said.

Rather than hiring additional employees, contractors had existing crews work overtime, which caused minor inconveniences and delays in the project, Anthony said.

Bert Pond, left, head of Cody's Electric Division, displays a new LED streetlight. Cody city worker Devin Bult, who has been installing the new lights, shows the older model being replaced through a federal stimulus grant. (Ruffin Prevost/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

“The president has no control over how individual contractors manage their business,” he said. “I felt that our mechanical crews should have brought in new employees. This didn’t happen.”

The city of Cody is enjoying impressive savings from LED streetlights funded through the Recovery Act.

The light-emitting diodes use no filaments, burn cooler, last longer and use half the electricity of conventional streetlights, but are four times the price.

Lower maintenance and energy costs mean the city should save more than $110,000 per year, said Bert Pond, head of Cody’s Electric Division.

The last 40 lights out of a total of more than 1,000 will be installed this month, he said, bringing the project to completion.

The city applied for the competitive grant of $440,000, which included a 10 percent local in-kind match, because it wanted a to fund a project that would provide long-term savings that would lower future budget obligations.

Pond said the annual savings will allow Cody to hold the line for a longer period on eventual electric rate hikes for residents who buy power from the city-owned utility.

The city has received only a couple of complaints from residents who say they don’t like the new lights, while compliance, reporting and reimbursement went smoothly, Pond said.

That was not the case for a Jackson well driller who said he waited nearly 100 days, far longer than usual, to get paid for a job on public land near Pinedale.

“It seemed like we got the runaround so much. We dealt with people in Casper, Denver, Washington (D.C.) and Portland. It was just unreal,” said Jack Weber, owner of Weber Well Drilling.

Weber said he was contacted by specialists from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who asked him to bid on a project to drill water wells at the Scab Creek Trailhead, about 24 miles southeast of Pinedale.

Funded through the Recovery Act, the $109,000 project was completed in September 2010, and involved installing a drinking water well near a campground and another well with a solar pump near a parking area used by backcountry horse riders.

Though he has worked well with the BLM on past projects during his 43 years drilling wells, Weber said the stimulus reporting and payment requirements were needlessly complex and time-consuming.

“We called everybody we could. After 30 days, we expect to get some money. We never did till the end of the year, so we were hurting pretty good,” Weber said. “We had to rob from Peter to pay Paul.”

Weber said he was unaware when bidding on the job that it was funded through the Recovery Act, and that he thought the horse watering well was unnecessary.

“They didn’t really need the damn thing to start with, because most of the people who go up there go with horses, and they ride on up the trail where there’s plenty of water,” he said.

Weber said he has had steady work since 2010, and that he would carefully consider working on future projects based on the Recover Act model.

University projects

The University of Wyoming received about $51 million in stimulus funds, with just over half of that going toward major maintenance, modernization and renovations, said Don Richards, UW director of governmental and community affairs.

Richards said the $27 million in maintenance funding was important for UW and the state’s community colleges because the legislature did not appropriate maintenance funding as part of its most recent higher education budget.

The Engineering Building at the University of Wyoming. The university received about $51 million in stimulus funds, which were spent on building maintenance and academic research. (Photo by

But there were numerous federal restrictions on how those maintenance funds could be spent, making it difficult to put together qualifying projects, and causing the university to select ones that it otherwise would not have chosen, Richards said.

Funds could not be used for administrative or office buildings, he said, and compliance and reporting was time-consuming and difficult.

UW also received $5.2 million for library expansions and enhancements and an estimated $2.5 in additional Pell grants for students, Richards said

Federal funding helped UW meet its goal of maintaining a top-tier library system, he said, while Pell grant funding allowed the university to delay a tuition rate increase.

Another $16.4 million was allocated to various UW research projects, including: $458,171 to study the hydrology of the Greenland Ice Sheet; $273,064 to analyze carbohydrate structures in insect cells; $586,581 for the continuation of ozone and stratospheric cloud measurements in Antarctica begun in 1986; and $326,140 to study underground geologic processes in Argentina.

According to reports filed at recovery.org for the most recent reporting period, about 13 jobs were created during that time by the $16.4 million in basic research funding, provided primarily by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Richards defended the role of basic research and said that more than $11 million, or roughly two-thirds of the funding for those programs, went to study carbon capture and sequestration, a process that could play a major role in the future of Wyoming’s energy economy.

Quarterly reports offer only a snapshot of the overall employment picture, he said, and the University benefits any time it can show “its ability to compete nationally for prestigious awards.”

Larson, the libertarian research fellow, said it didn’t make sense to address unemployment by using stimulus funds for costly research.

“How many jobs does it create in Wyoming if we send some government bureaucrats or researchers to Antarctica to study ozone?” Larson said.

He said that private markets could produce more jobs at less public cost if the federal government would cut corporate taxes and reduce regulations.

“You have to give the private sector everything it needs in terms of confidence in the future,” he said.

Public parks

But the private sector typically doesn’t fund improvements in public parks, including road maintenance, new buildings and other infrastructure in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

Yellowstone received $14.7 million in stimulus funding, while Grand Teton got $18.8 million. Both parks have extensive backlogs in deferred maintenance not covered by their annual budgets. Stimulus projects include road resurfacing, new maintenance buildings in Colter Bay and Moose, a new wastewater treatment plant at Madison Junction and a hydroelectric power plant at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Suzanne Lewis, then superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, listens to remarks from Vice President Joe Biden, who visited Yellowstone in July 2010 to discuss federal stimulus spending on projects at national parks across the country. (Ruffin Prevost/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

The new $9 million wastewater treatment plant will replace a facility that has been operating far beyond its original design life, said Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash. The aging wastewater plant has long given park officials “serious concerns” about its ability to perform adequately in the park’s harsh environment, he said.

“We have had that project on the books and had been unable to come up with funding to date,” Nash said.

During a July 2010 speech near the base of National Park Mountain in Yellowstone, Vice President Joe Biden said the Madison wastewater project was an example of the unglamorous but important role of stimulus spending in Yellowstone and other national parks.

“The single greatest jewel we had was always the last item on the agenda,” Biden said during that visit, and repairs were “kicked down the road” to be addressed in future budgets.

But despite the vice-presidential hype, the Madison project remains unfinished. It is slated for completion in July 2012, Nash said, while the Mammoth hydro-electric project — the only other uncompleted Recovery Act project in Yellowstone — should wrap up in the spring.

Nash said Yellowstone’s short construction season and difficult operating environment makes it a tougher place to build compared to other places.

“This is not a run-of-the-mill kind of place to do work in,” he said.

Federal contracts in Yellowstone and Grand Teton do not allow for a 5 percent Wyoming contractor preference, as is mandated by state law with state-funded work. Much of the work in the parks has been done by contractors in Montana, Idaho and Utah, as well as Wyoming.

Bob Moberly, president of Think Wyoming First, a local business advocacy group, said that “it obviously would have helped Wyoming contractors” if stimulus spending in the state could have included a 5 percent local preference.

“If you want the profits from these jobs to stay in Wyoming, that resident preference is important,” he said.

Richards, from UW, said that federal stimulus spending rules also prevented the university from extending the 5 percent preference to Wyoming contractors.

He said that the detailed reporting required as part of stimulus funding produced lots of information, but not necessarily in a form that is meaningful for the public.

Richards said the methodology for tracking “jobs created” did not offer the best insight on how stimulus funds were putting people to work. Federal stimulus reporting standards have eventually changed to more closely match UW preferences for showing “hours worked,” Richards said.

Federal research grants outside the stimulus program are beginning to adopt similar reporting requirements, but without making the proper context and background information available to the public, such data often “raises more questions than it answers,” he said.

Larson, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, said that concerns about transparency and financial reporting were “not limited to the stimulus, but cut across almost everything the government does.”

Both Larson and Richards said they had potential concerns about any new federal spending that may result from Obama’s jobs bill.

“One area of public policy worth reviewing is that the original stimulus bill gave incentives to — and in fact required states to — cut portions of their (education) budgets to be eligible,” Richards said.

If future federal spending follows similar “perverse incentives,” Richards said, it’s likely that Wyoming and other states with fiscally conservative budget practices would receive a proportionally smaller share of available funds compared to states that have spent more freely in recent years.

Larson said that if the country enters another recession “and the federal government decides it wants to repeat this, we could be in for quite a ride if there is more heavy-handed and inefficient spending.”

Neal, the Casper worker advocate, said it was “clear that the recovery act poured millions of dollars into the state’s economy and it helped things from being worse.”

Focus on infrastructure

Jerimiah Rieman, a policy advisor to Gov. Matt Mead who has continued to oversee the state’s stimulus spending since he began that role during former Gov. Dave Freudenthal’s tenure, said infrastructure spending has yielded the best results.

Stimulus spending on roads, bridges, water projects and other public works “had the most direct and quickest impact on unemployment in Wyoming,” Rieman said.

Contractors in 2009 resurface part of an 11-mile stretch of road in Yellowstone National Park between the Lewis River Bridge and the park's South Entrance. The $1.2 million project was funded with $14.7 million in stimulus funds allocated to Yellowstone projects. (NPS photo by Jim Peaco - click to enlarge)

Though most stimulus spending will wind down in the state by the end of the month, the team of state agency workers who helped shape stimulus spending remains in place, and could resume work to allocate additional federal funds.

But that depends on the extent to which the governor wants to participate in any spending programs that may result from a federal jobs program, Rieman said.

During a press conference Thursday before Obama’s jobs speech, Mead said that relatively low labor and material costs make it an attractive time for the state to focus on improving roads, landfills, high-speed telecommunications and other infrastructure and maintenance projects.

“If we don’t spend the dollar today to take care of some of those maintenance costs, they don’t get any less expensive,” he said.

As for his specific priorities for any potential new federal spending, Mead said road and highway projects remain high on the list.

“I think we need a good plan for funding highways, not just in Wyoming, but across the country,” he said.

Federal transportation spending under the Recovery Act includes billions allocated for high-speed rail projects, but that doesn’t do much to help rural states like Wyoming, Mead said.

“Roads are absolutely critical to Wyoming,” he said.

Wyoming’s all-Republican Congressional delegation voted against the Recovery Act, but funds allocated to the state have been spent with relatively little fanfare or controversy.

Despite regular and staunch opposition from many in Wyoming to myriad forms of federal spending, the state has long received more in federal benefits than it pays in taxes.

From 1990-2009, Wyoming was returned an average of $1.19 in federal spending for every dollar it paid in federal taxes, according to U.S. Census figures.

For some in state government, closer federal cooperation and coordination through stimulus spending efforts has been an unanticipated but beneficial side effect of the Recovery Act.

“There were some glitches here and there,” Rieman said, “but if anything good happened out of the Recovery Act, it did increase communication between federal and state agencies.”

Contact WyoFile special correspondent Ruffin Prevost at ruffin@yellowstonegate.com or 307-213-9818.

Doug Cooper stands on a ridge looking east across the grassy swales of the 7 L Livestock Company ranch just north of Casper. One hundred and fifty years ago, his family came to Wyoming from Scotland and, after moving around the state for a couple of decades, his great-grandmother homesteaded here in the 1890s. His grandfather and father later added their own homesteads to the ranch base. The family ran sheep and cows for over 100 years. Now Cooper and his son, who works for him, have several hundred head of cattle. With a kind, clean-shaven face and oval wire glasses, a checkered button-up shirt, worn jeans and lace-up cowboy boots he’s at ease on this spread of more than 50,000 acres.

Related Story: Clock ticking on sage grouse listing

The big ranch his family has pieced together over the generations is also valuable habitat for the imperiled greater sage grouse. “When I was a boy we had thousands. Now we have a few hundred,” he says of the grouse. The species could become the “spotted owl” of the Intermountain West. If listed as endangered, the grouse would halt resource extraction — from cattle grazing to oil and gas drilling — over more than half of Wyoming, much like listing of the owl did to old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest.

Cooper has been caught in the middle of efforts to keep that production halt from happening, and in the course of things, he’s lost a valuable development opportunity on his land. He pulls a wind energy lease marked with scribbled question marks and notes from a folder. A few years ago, he started talking with a wind turbine manufacturing company called Clipper Windpower about leasing a portion of his ranch for a wind farm.

Cooper hired an attorney to help him work through the lease and took Clipper staff on tours of his ranch. And he invested not only in the negotiations with Clipper, but also paid a premium for a piece of land he’d recently added to the ranch, entering a contract with the previous landowners to split those wind rights. He stood to make as much as $6,000 to $8,000 per turbine per year, and he calculated a conservative ten turbines would rope his family up to $2.4 million over the estimated 30-year life of the project.

But before the lease was finalized, Clipper Windpower stopped discussions with him. Then-Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D) had just issued an executive order updating Wyoming’s sage grouse core area map and forbidding wind development in those designated areas. A new piece of core area on the updated map exactly covered the part of Cooper’s private ranch land Clipper had wanted to lease. State lands he leases for grazing were outside the core area. The state would still be able to lease for wind development while Cooper could not. Clipper walked away from negotiations with Cooper before signing anything.

Doug Cooper, president of his family's 7 L Livestock Company ranch north of Casper where sage grouse habitat conflicts with potential wind development. (Emilene Ostlind/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

“I don’t feel they have right to take property without due process of law,” Cooper says of the governor’s plan, arguing that he can’t find out how the boundary was drawn because the groups designing the core areas didn’t keep minutes of their meetings. He believes the sage grouse core area boundaries were gerrymandered to cut him off while benefiting his neighbor, and that the governor overreached his authority by prohibiting private land development.

“My opportunities are restricted so someone else can have opportunity elsewhere. It’s a transfer of opportunity,” Cooper says. “It’s like finding out that people on your side of the street can’t get mail or go to work or something.”

Cooper’s case highlights potential flaws in Wyoming’s sage grouse conservation strategy. It shows that core areas trace economic or even political as well as biological boundaries, while individual landowners — those who’ve protected sage grouse and their habitat so far and ended up inside the core areas — are asked to make development sacrifices. But Cooper’s situation may provide just the kind of test the core area strategy needs to prove its merit. His case could give Wyoming a chance to show how firm it will be about protecting core areas from new development, thereby protecting existing activities and future development from a possible listing of the sage grouse. And Cooper’s situation, ironically for him, illustrates the care and attention to detail that has gone into core area planning so far. More than 80 percent of the state’s grouse breed and nest inside the core areas.

Meanwhile, Gov. Matt Mead is preparing to take Wyoming’s sage grouse conservation strategy — hailed as “groundbreaking” — to other states around the West. Even the Bureau of Land Management is looking to Wyoming for guidance as the agency starts to design its own range-wide conservation plan for the grouse. (See the accompanying story, “Clock ticking on sage grouse listing.“)But exactly how Wyoming’s and other conservation plans will be implemented remains to be seen. And while a listing decision looms, it will take thorough application of the conservation measures throughout the species’ range to ward off an ultimate listing, which would shut down everything from grazing and wind development to oil and gas drilling and coal mining across most of Wyoming.

Wyoming’s plan more than a decade in the making

“People would like it if we could do x, y or z to solve the sage grouse issue,” says Tom Christiansen, sage grouse program coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “There is no silver bullet. More or less the problem is human impact, and there’s not an easy answer.”

Bob Budd, chairman of the governor's sage grouse implementation team. (Emilene Ostlind/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

Wyoming’s comprehensive sage grouse conservation strategy started when former Gov. Jim Geringer appointed Bob Budd to lead the effort way back in 2000, and Budd has been at the helm ever since. From a longtime Sublette County ranching family, with a past that includes working not only for the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association but also The Nature Conservancy, Budd is quick talking, firm and gruff, with friendly, bright eyes and a tidy moustache. His philosophy, he says, has been to work transparently with people representing various interests in the state, and to let locals make as many decisions as possible. Because he doesn’t work for a regulatory agency and doesn’t rely on votes, Budd says he can be just as harsh with agencies as he can with industry or agriculture. “Everybody understood it was a fair setting,” he says.

Back in the early 2000s, Budd’s team examined a range of threats to sage grouse from parasites and disease to predation and habitat loss. They determined that habitat fragmentation, largely from energy development, was a major threat to sage grouse in Wyoming, and wrote a statewide sage grouse conservation plan published in 2003. The plan called for extensive sage grouse mapping to prioritize places for conservation and for establishing local working groups to implement regional, on-the-ground conservation measures. Over the next few years, the state implemented this plan. Then, in 2007 Gov. Freudenthal convened a state sage grouse summit and created a state-level sage grouse implementation team with Budd at its head. The governor asked Budd for realistic things the state could do to prevent a sage grouse listing.

Later that year, Budd’s sage grouse team presented Gov. Freudenthal with a list of 21 recommendations for ways to protect grouse. The next year, the team followed up with a rough map of sage grouse core areas, and the governor adopted the map and some, but not all, of the team’s recommendations as his first sage grouse executive order in August of 2008. For example, he included a call for more mapping and for suppression of wildfires, but did not include incentives to minimize the footprint of housing developments. The order required state agencies — and requested other landowners and land managers in Wyoming — cooperate on efforts to keep sage grouse off the endangered species list by concentrating conservation efforts in the designated core areas. Those areas, identified on the map, cover about 15 million acres or roughly 24 percent of the state’s land area and are home to an estimated 80 percent of Wyoming’s sage grouse.

Still, Budd knew the map needed more precision, so he took it to the local working groups and asked them to scrutinize the core areas in their regions and modify the maps. In the Bighorn Basin, for example, the local working group added areas where leks — breeding grounds where sage grouse congregate in the spring to strut — had been left out. In other areas, existing infrastructure, like a uranium mine and a town, were carved out of the core areas. Meanwhile, the state had completed half a million dollars worth of mapping, which also added precision to the core areas. The updated version of the map, which did a much better job than the first of both including key sage grouse habitat and excluding existing development, was finalized and implemented with a second executive order in August of 2010. It added roughly 400,000 new acres to the sage grouse core areas, including a piece over Cooper’s ranch.

“What Doug Cooper got caught in is the only reasonable metric we could use of whether something was developed or not, is if it had a permit,” says Budd, explaining why the core area traces the edge of the ranch. “We’d literally get 30 wind companies coming in and saying, ‘I’m going to develop that. I’m going to do this. I’m going to lease that.’ I’d go check with the landowner. They didn’t have a lease. They’d never heard of the company. We needed something that was realistic. We needed a lease, a plan of development, something more.”

Notably, adding to Cooper’s frustration, the state had finalized leases with Clipper Windpower on trust land within Cooper’s ranch in April of 2009. So the state trust land was outside the protected core area, while Cooper’s private land was inside, even though the current quality of the sage grouse habitat on both sides of the core area boundary is comparable.

Many landowners in Wyoming, so far, have accepted the restrictions of the core areas in hopes of avoiding the more severe restrictions of a possible endangered species listing. “My frustration with Mr. Cooper arises from the fact that he never attended a meeting,” says Bruce Lawson, an industry representative on the Casper region local working group. Budd’s sage grouse implementation team and the local working groups invited public input about the core area revisions. Lawson attended half a dozen local working group meetings in different regions of the state for the bentonite mining company he works for. He didn’t see Cooper at any of those meetings. “He didn’t attend, didn’t participate. Now he cries foul. I felt that was wrong. He had plenty of opportunities to participate.”

The region that covers Cooper’s ranch had a working group that met in Gillette, more than 100 miles from Cooper’s ranch. Cooper says he didn’t go to the local working group meetings because he’d seen an early draft of the sage grouse map and believed his ranch would fall outside the core areas.

Even though it has caused hassle for some landowners, the long and involved core area process has set a benchmark for widely coordinated and comprehensive species conservation plans. Pat Deibert, national sage grouse coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that will ultimately decide whether to grant sage grouse endangered species protection, is impressed by Wyoming’s approach. “They’ve been incredibly proactive. It’s amazing they have taken this on and accomplished this.”

After the core areas were first designated in 2008, the state and local sage grouse working groups made revisions. In 2010, Gov. Freudenthal issued his second sage grouse executive order, implementing this updated map, which Gov. Mead has kept unchanged.

Putting the core area strategy to the test

None of Wyoming’s sweeping plans to protect sage grouse offer Doug Cooper peace of mind.

“The Wyoming constitution says you can’t lose property right without due process of law,” he says. “It’s shocking to me that we would lose our wind rights.”

He’s met with Gov. Mead seeking due process. “I want them to start over and do it the right way,” he says. Cooper doesn’t believe the process that created the core areas was legitimate, and says the governor has no authority to restrict development rights on private property through executive order. “We never had an ‘orderly proceeding’ or any of those things. It’s kind of a Kafkaesque thing where you know you’re in trouble, but you don’t know exactly why and there is no procedure that works,” he says.

Cooper argues that if the core areas had been adopted as a regulatory mechanism through the Game and Fish Department, there would have been public review and comment period. He is working with an attorney to build his case.

Landowners who find themselves in core areas do have avenues to seek support. This year the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service made over $27 million available to private landowners in Wyoming for sage grouse conservation efforts such as purchase of conservation easements, habitat improvements and infrastructure like bird ladders to help grouse escape from stock tanks. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been working with Wyoming to develop a programmatic Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, a contract landowners can voluntarily enter wherein they promise to undertake specific conservation measures for sage grouse on their land in exchange for relief from some Endangered Species Act restrictions should the grouse be listed. The programmatic agreement should be ready for landowners to sign up by early next year.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service emphasizes that Gov. Mead’s sage grouse executive order can only be effective if it is fully implemented, even on private land. One thing the agency looks for in making its listing decision is presence of adequate regulatory mechanisms to protect the species from threats. Wyoming’s plan “is not quite regulatory,” says Mark Sattelberg, supervisor of the Wyoming field office for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“But I think it’s probably the best we’re going to get in the near future,” Sattelberg says.

Deibert of the Fish and Wildlife Service is watching closely to see how Wyoming will react the first time the sage grouse core areas are challenged, such as by a wind company seeking to develop in a core area. “How the state reacts will be an important litmus test for how good a regulatory mechanism it is,” she says. “They have not been challenged yet.”

Still, Deibert says, Wyoming’s plan “is a huge step forward. They absolutely have laid the railroad tracks for everybody else.”

Budd calls it, “one of the greatest citizen triumphs I have ever seen. People sat down, they were civil, they were honest, they tried to figure out ways to make things work, but they never lost sight of their objective, which was conservation of sage grouse.”

NOTE: Information regarding property boundaries and sage grouse core area boundaries was clarified at 1:45 p.m. August 9.

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JACKSON — Investors, fund managers and other heavyweights from the financial world spent much of Friday morning at Snow King Resort lamenting newly released, unexpectedly weak economic growth figures from the first half of the year. They spent much of the afternoon reassuring each other that the United States would not default on its financial obligations — while at the same time wondering what to do if that happened.

“There’s nothing the fed can do to remedy a failure to raise the debt ceiling,” President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis James Bullard told nervous investors attending a panel discussion on economic policy at the Rocky Mountain Economic Summit.

Technicians set up for a cable TV news interview during the Rocky Mountain Economic Summit on Friday in Jackson. (Ruffin Prevost/WyoFile - click to enlarge.)

It was exactly those nervous investors congressional leaders and the White House sought to reassure Sunday evening as they announced a debt ceiling deal had been struck — just in time to stave off what could have been a punishing drop in the early-opening Asian financial markets.

The House on Monday voted 269-161 in favor of a final compromise bill to raise the debt ceiling. The Senate approved the measure today in a 74-26 vote, and President Obama quickly signed it, narrowly averting what could have been a financially disruptive default if an agreement was not reached by midnight tonight.

“While not perfect, the Budget Control Act of 2011 is the result of the changing debate in Washington,” Rep. Cynthia Lummis said Monday in a statement released on her web site after she voted in favor of the measure. “This bipartisan compromise takes steps to bring accountability to Washington by cutting up the credit cards, putting in place future spending controls and decreasing the size of government.”

Sen. John Barrasso released a statement after voting for the measure saying the debt ceiling debate was “the first round in a 15-round fight on spending.” He called the bill a small victory over “more wasteful Washington spending.”

Sen. Mike Enzi also voted in favor of the bill, but did not post a statement online immediately after the vote.

The compromise deal would increase the debt limit in stages over several months by between $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion, while establishing a bipartisan congressional committee to study additional spending cuts and new tax reforms meant to reduce deficit spending by an additional $1.5 trillion. It does not raise taxes or cut entitlements in the short term, and enacts 10-year discretionary spending caps generating nearly $1 trillion in deficit reduction, spread across defense and non-defense spending. It enacts triggers for deep spending cuts in cherished programs like defense and Medicare if Congress fails to reach consensus on a plan for additional cuts and revenues, providing a strong incentive for bipartisan cooperation.

The members of Wyoming’s congressional delegation, all Republicans, have each said for months that federal spending must be sharply curtailed as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling. But they have differed somewhat in which ideas they said they would consider as part of any final deal.

Sen. Mike Enzi speaks July 21 in support of passage of the Senate version of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act. (click to enlarge)

Enzi, a member of the Senate Budget and Finance committees, offered preliminary backing for the so-called Gang of Six plan. The proposal, crafted by a bipartisan group of six senators who served on Obama’s budget deficit commission, would have trimmed $3.7 trillion from the deficit over the next decade.

“This plan could be the way out of all the angry rhetoric coming from both sides,” Enzi said after meeting with a bipartisan group of about 50 senators July 19, according to a statement released on his web site.

“I’m sure there is not 100 percent agreement on all the decisions, but they realize that something has to be done. It sounds like a positive effort at a passable solution,” Enzi said, adding that he would have to review the plan in detail before making a final decision. But the plan lacked sufficient backing to advance.

The Gang of Six plan was largely based on the final recommendations made last year by the presidential deficit commission co-chaired by former Sen. Alan Simpson, of Cody. The Gang of Six plan called for about $1.4 trillion in savings from discretionary appropriations — a broad category that includes everything from highway projects to military spending, for example, and accounts for about one-third of the total budget. It proposed nearly $740 billion in cuts, caps or restrictions on entitlement spending, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It would have raised an additional $1.2 trillion or more through tax reforms that would lower overall rates, but eliminate many loopholes, deductions and other tax expenditures.

House Speaker John Boehner looks on as Rep. Cynthia Lummis speaks during a September 2009 Republican leadership press conference on regulatory reform. (click to enlarge)

Lummis voted for an earlier bill backed by House Republicans that would have trimmed $111 billion from the 2012 fiscal year budget and capped annual spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. The bill also called for raising the debt ceiling only after Congress had approved a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, a change that would eventually require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the idea that a divided Congress could pass a balanced budget amendment by Aug. 2 was “foolish” and “bizarro,” and read on the Senate floor from a Wall Street Journal editorial that ridiculed some House Republican Tea Party members as “hobbits” striving to defeat Mordor.

“The attention is not on the House any more,” Lummis said during a July 22 Republican leadership press conference after House passage of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, which later failed in the Senate. “Go stick your microphones in the faces of the senators and the president and say, ‘We want to see your plan.’ The House is done.”

Just days earlier, in a July 11 op-ed published on Politico.com explaining why she opposed raising the debt ceiling, Lummis acknowledged that “all major solutions that pass the House are dead on arrival in the Senate.”

Rep. Cynthia Lummis speaks during a July 22 press conference after House passage of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act. (click to enlarge)

The Senate and White House had failed to put forth a credible plan, Lummis wrote.

“Consequently, should the debt ceiling vote fail to include significant front-end loaded spending cuts and, more important, structural reforms, I will continue to vote ‘no,’” she wrote.

Lummis wrote that financial markets lacked confidence that Congress and the president would fix the nation’s structural deficits.

“Citing the unlikelihood that Washington can reach agreement, Standard & Poor’s outlook on Treasury bond is now negative. Bill Gross of PIMCO has dumped all Treasuries from the world’s biggest mutual fund,” she wrote.

‘Don’t mess with the debt ceiling’

Gross manages the $241 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, and has long wielded considerable influence as the one of largest buyers of government bonds.

But just two days after Lummis’ op-ed, writing in the Washington Post, Gross explicitly warned Congress not to risk financial default — or even a downgraded credit rating — by failing to raise the debt ceiling.

“The debt ceiling must be raised and not be held hostage by budget negotiations. Don’t mess with the debt ceiling, Washington. Bond and currency vigilantes will make you pay,” he wrote, referencing the virtual certainty of increased interest rates on Treasury securities in the event of default.

Gross’ stance on the issue was hardly new information. He had been warning Congress for months not to forgo raising the debt ceiling as a forced means of deficit spending reform.

“It’s the wrong way to do it,” Gross told the Associated Press in January. “Obviously, I’m all for a move to a balanced budget over time. But this is like imposing the death penalty for shoplifting.”

“The signal it gives to countries that hold Treasurys is that their assets are hostage to a rogue Congress,” Gross also said. “That’s the message it sends. It’s unacceptable.”

That same day, July 13, Lummis dismissed concerns about the financial repercussions resulting from failing to raise the debt ceiling, telling Wyoming Public Radio that the federal government could find a way to pay its bills without borrowing more money.

“The United States has over two trillion dollars in financial assets, including stock in General Motors, as well as other financial assets,” she said.

In her July 11 op-ed, Lummis said she would rather instruct Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to pay principal and interest on government-issued bonds, pay combat troops and make social security payments “than add to the weight of our debt burden and send America plunging into the ravine – with our children and grandchildren on board.”

Sen. John Barrasso speaks July 22 on the Senate floor during debate on whether to raise the debt ceiling. (click to enlarge)

Barrasso did not publicly express the same openness to the Gang of Six Plan as Enzi. But he did, along with Enzi, co-sponsor a Republican-backed Senate version of Cut, Cap and Balance. He opposed a plan put forth by Senate Democrats and backed by Obama. He criticized the plan from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, telling Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on July 26 that the proposal contained “a lot of budget gimmicks, a lot of accounting tricks.”

But he also warned against the dangers of default, or even a credit downgrade.

When asked by Van Susteren why America is “held hostage” to Moody’s and other credit rating agencies, Barrasso warned that the consequences of default would be dire.

“If we do get downgraded on our ratings, that means that interest rates are going to go up,” he said.

“If interest rates go up a percentage point on $14 trillion of debt, you know, you’re talking $140 billion a year of additional debt payments that we would have in this country,” he said.

Political football

There would have been virtually no chance of having a less rancorous vote on the debt ceiling sometime next year, said Jim King, a political science professor at the University of Wyoming.

“If they approve a six-month ceiling, in five months, we’ll be doing all this again,” King said last week, when a short-term fix was being considered. “That’s why some participants are arguing in favor of getting a big deal done now.”

There is no Constitutional mandate that requires Congress to set a limit on how much money the U.S. Treasury may borrow, and almost every other democracy operates without one.

The idea of a debt ceiling was first adopted in 1917, King said.

It was initially used as a way for Congress to set broad limits on executive branch spending. Though the president still submits an annual budget, Congress must vote on the final federal budget, and has for decades exercised close control and statutory authority over appropriations and spending.

The debt ceiling has typically been raised by the president and his fellow party members in Congress, with opposing party members voting against the move — a process played out dozens and dozens of times over the last 70 years.

“In the past, this has been handled as a more routine matter,” King said. “This time around, some members of Congress have insisted that it be linked to other budgetary decisions.”

Many Democrats have said they offered Republicans almost everything they’ve wanted in negotiations, including trillions in spending cuts without any tax hikes. Some Republicans have said that simply raising the debt ceiling at all is a compromise, and that proposed budget cuts don’t go deep enough, while planned tax reforms that would raise revenue are actually tax hikes in disguise.

Simpson, a Republican who represented Wyoming in the Senate from 1979-97, said the only long-term path to eliminating deficits and taming the national debt is to decrease spending and raise taxes, a conclusion the deficit commission spelled out last year in its final report. An alternative deficit reduction plan released last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center reached a similar conclusion.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, speaks at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference. (Gage Skidmore photo - click to enlarge)

But so many Republicans have signed a “no new taxes” pledge initiated by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, that Congress appears able to consider only spending cuts, Simpson said. The group’s web site lists Enzi and Lummis — but not Barrasso — as signers of the pledge.

Likewise, many Democrats are ideologically opposed to any cuts in entitlement programs like Social Security or Medicare, he said, a position that is at odds with the reality of their unsustainable long-term fiscal prospects based on current and projected revenues.

“They act as if they are in thrall — slaves to some ideology,” Simpson said Friday. “If this nation’s representatives are in thrall of Grover Norquist and the AARP, then we haven’t got a prayer.”

“What can Grover do to you? He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house down. He might hurt your shot at reelection. But if that means more to you than your country, you shouldn’t be in (Congress) anyway,” he said.

Though partisans on both sides of the debt ceiling debate have expended plenty of rhetoric explaining their positions, those positions have often been reversed under different administrations.

Barrasso and Enzi both voted in January 2010 against a resolution under the current administration to raise the debt ceiling. But they both voted in favor of a September 2007 bill signed by then-President George W. Bush to increase the debt limit by $850 billion to $9.8 trillion.

Likewise, while he was a senator from Illinois, Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling in 2006.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” Obama said during debate on the 2006 measure. “It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It’s a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”

A failure of leadership is what investment manager Robert Grady said Obama has shown by not backing the plan developed by Simpson and the rest of the debt commission the president appointed.

“The president could have started the debate by endorsing that plan, but instead he has made no specific proposal, which is very unusual,” said Grady, speaking by phone last week. He is managing director of Cheyenne Capital Fund, a Denver-based private equity firm that manages about $225 million in investments by the state of Wyoming.

Robert Grady

Born in New Jersey but now based in Jackson, Grady also heads the New Jersey Investment Council, which manages $75 billion in public investments for that state. He previously served as a senior official in the Office of Management and Budget under President George H.W. Bush.

In a panel discussion during Friday’s economic summit, Grady told investors he was confident a debt ceiling deal could be struck, but he also saw a “likelihood” of some kind of downgrade to the nation’s credit rating.

“One thing the drama of the last month or two has revealed is there is no consensus” on tackling the major debt and budget issues beyond the debt ceiling, he said.

Grady said during the discussion that he disagreed with Norquist — his friend and college classmate — that reforms to the tax code resulting in greater revenues should be rejected as harmful tax hikes.

The tax reform plan proposed by Simpson and the deficit commission “would see us go to three rates that are radically lower,” but it would generate additional revenue for the U.S. Treasury and “be good for growth,” he said.

Wyoming well-positioned

With a continuing sluggish economy and uncertainty among some investors about buying additional U.S. debt, Wyoming is well positioned among the states to attract businesses, Grady said.

A favorable tax climate, business-friendly regulatory environment and recent state budget surpluses bolstered by strong energy prices means Wyoming is better able to handle fiscal uncertainty and the higher costs of debt financing that could come with a credit downgrade, he said.

Wenlin Liu, senior economist with the state’s Division of Economic Analysis, agreed.

“Right now, our state government’s finances are among the best in the nation,” Liu said.

Wyoming has not incurred the same level of debt as other states, has relatively low unemployment and a comparatively stronger housing market, he said.

But while a credit downgrade might not hit Wyoming government as hard as other states, consumers would feel the pinch, Liu said.

The sinking value of the dollar would likely translate to higher energy prices, costing drivers more at the gas pump and adding to home heating costs, he said. Home mortgage interest rates and credit card rates would also climb if U.S. credit ratings take a hit.

King, the political science professor, said that Wyoming’s state and local government entities are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, but that doesn’t mean they don’t borrow money.

“A city does not build a new water treatment plant with cash on hand. It floats bonds,” King said.

And passing a balanced budget amendment won’t mean the federal government won’t continue to incur debt.

President Barack Obama meets with National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform co-chairs Erskine Bowles, left, and Alan Simpson in the Oval Office, Feb. 18, 2010. (Pete Souza/White House— click to enlarge)

“Deficit spending is a part of almost every government operation in every way,” he said.

Simpson said that voters are “in absolute disgust” from the long deadlock over raising the debt ceiling, but they should be even more horrified about the national debt of more than $14 trillion.

“It’s a monstrous figure,” he said. “And whatever they do over the debt ceiling will be like a mountain giving birth to a mouse.”

“The American public knows that Amy Winehouse died, and they know Lindsay Lohan had the cuff removed from her ankle. But they were asked if they know the difference between the debt and the deficit and 70 percent didn’t,” he said.

Simpson said the most viable option for starting to tame the nation’s deficits and long-term debt is, not surprisingly, the Gang of Six plan based on his own recommendations and from others on the president’s deficit commission.

Though the bipartisan group of six senators were unable to convince their colleagues to back that plan, Simpson said that if he were still in Congress, he would pitch it to his fellow legislators in the simplest terms.

“I’d get them all together and I’d say: ‘Here’s your choice. Do you want to be members of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Or do you want to be Americans?”

Contact Ruffin Prevost at 307-213-9321 or ruffin@wyofile.com.

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LANDER — The first sign that something was wrong came Monday, April 18, when Walker Kuhl, a Salt Lake City federal bank examiner, failed to show up for work.

Kuhl, 27, and his climbing buddy, Montana emergency room doctor Gregory Seftick, 31, had gone on a weekend backcountry ski trip to Grand Teton National Park, intending to explore the Teepe Pillar and Teepe Glacier features of 13,770–foot Grand Teton.

More than a week later, after what is believed to be the most expensive search and rescue operation in Grand Teton National Park history, Kuhl and Seftick’s bodies were found still tucked in their sleeping bags, crushed by a massive April 16 Garnet Canyon avalanche that buried them under 13 feet of snow.

According to Teton County Deputy Coroner David Hodges, the two men, both superbly fit and experienced mountaineers, died of asphyxiation within minutes of the avalanche. Rangers at the scene found no ice crystals near the men’s faces that would have indicated they had been breathing for any significant period of time after the slide. At that depth, the weight of the snow on their bodies was between 195 and 260 pounds per square foot. Hodges believes the immense pressure on their diaphragms prevented them from drawing a breath.

“I don’t think that they had a conscious thought of their impending death,” said Hodges. “Death was rapid if not instant.”

Jason O'Neil and his dog, Murphy, with the Grand Targhee Resort ski patrol and canine team, board a helicopter April 23 to search for lost skiers in Garnet Canyon. (National Park Service photo by Jackie Skaggs - click to enlarge)

But back on the morning of April 18, when Kuhl’s girlfriend reported him missing, park officials were uncertain about the skiers’ whereabouts.

Imbued with a proud National Park Service tradition of saving those who can be saved and recovering the bodies of those who can’t, personnel from the Jenny Lake Ranger Subdistrict launched an extensive search that was often complicated by difficult weather and technical problems.

Three more feet of snow fell on the searchers as they hunted for the two missing men, probing the snow with standard 10-foot telescoping metal poles. Under the new layer of snow, however, the Kuhl-Seftick campsite was now well below their reach.

“I’m sure we probed right over the top of these guys’ bodies,” said Jenny Lake Subdistrict Ranger Scott Guenther.

The Teton County Search and Rescue helicopter that the Park Service leased for the search — at a cost of $33,000 — was grounded repeatedly by bad weather. According to park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs, the rescue-recovery operation cost $115,000 — more than double any previous search on record at Grand Teton.

A tradition of rescue and recovery

America’s national parks have a tradition of coming to the rescue of visitors in trouble and recovering the bodies of those who die on park grounds. In 2009, the most recent year for which national records are available, Park Service workers conducted 3,568 search and rescues that cost a total of more than $4.8 million.

“We average about $5 million a year taken from our general funds,” said Jeffrey Olson, a Park Service spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Most search and rescues are relatively simple matters: a child wanders from a campsite in Yellowstone National Park; boaters have too much to drink in New York City’s Gateway National Recreation Area; an elderly visitor gets disoriented in Yosemite National Park.

Rescuers use poles to probe an avalanche debris field while searching for two lost skiers April 19 in Garnet Canyon in Grand Teton National Park. (courtesy photo by Jay Pistono - click to enlarge)

But in some of the more remote and rugged parks, searches are very costly. In the past five years, for example, Alaska’s Denali National Park has had three prolonged searches that cost taxpayers $127,000, $132,000 and $118,000 respectively, according to Denali spokeswoman Maureen McLaughlin. Neither the people rescued nor the families of those whose bodies were recovered were charged for the Denali operations.

Nor were the families of Walker Kuhl and Gregory Seftick at Grand Teton.

In light of the national budget crisis, Denali and other parks are exploring the idea of charging additional “special use” fees for particularly hazardous adventures. Denali recently proposed charging a $500-per-climber fee to scale Mount McKinley.

Climbing organizations such as the American Alpine Club and Access Fund accept “special use” fees in principle but contend $500 is too high.

“The question is whether people who are engaged in high-risk activities pay more,” said Alpine Club executive director Phil Powers.  Powers said his non-profit organization has recently begun offering climbing insurance to its members that covers up to $5,000 in rescue costs.

On May 17, Powers himself was seriously injured in a fall outside Golden, Colorado that required rescue by the Golden Fire Department and evacuation by helicopter to Denver. (For more on this incident see Pitch).According to Alpine Club spokesman Luke Bauer, the rescue would be covered by the membership insurance.

As yet, nothing similar to the Denali fees has been proposed for Wyoming’s Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.

Some national park policy experts have proposed reforms in the search-and-rescue accounting system.

Travis Heggie, Recreation and Tourism Studies professor at the University of North Dakota, in 2009 published an article in the Wilderness and Environmental Medicine journal, examining search and rescue operations in all the national parks from 1992-2007.

A former risk assessment officer with the Park Service in Washington, D.C., Heggie contends that the actual cost of search and rescue operations in the parks is underreported.

“I think if all the dollar figures were added — such as hidden equipment wear-and-tear and medical costs — there would be a doubling of the true search and rescue figures,” Heggie said in an interview with WyoFile.

The problem, said Heggie, is not the money, which in 2009 averaged $1,345 per incident. Even at the $10-million-a-year figure that he thinks is a more realistic total, the annual cost of search and rescue in the 394 national parks is a tiny fraction of the Park Service’s $2.75 billion annual budget.

Moreover, search and rescue efforts save hundreds of lives each year. In 2009, the Park Service reported 370 “saves” — defined as a rescue where “death or serious harm” would have occurred without Park Service intervention.

But Heggie said that paying for search and rescue by taking the money out of the Park Service general funds — as is the current practice — “pilfers” resources from other valuable programs.

“Trust me,” said Heggie, “it really comes out of the interpretive division that is on the front lines of the people coming into the park. These are the people who greet you at the visitor center and the ones who give you the guided tours.”

A helicopter heads toward Garnet Canyon in April during a search for two lost skiers in Grand Teton National Park. (National Park Service photo by Jackie Skaggs - click to enlarge)

The solution, said Heggie, would be to have “a designated search-and-rescue fund at the highest administrative level.”

“We know it [search-and-rescue] is happening every year,” said Heggie, “so it would be better to have a fund rather than just stick a hand in the bag and take it from someone else.”

Another way to tackle the cost of search and rescue, Heggie said, would be to borrow a page from European countries, where alpine mountaineers and other adventurers are required to have private travel insurance that pays for search, rescue and medical treatment.

“Maybe people like these guys going into the Teton ought to be carrying some kind of insurance,” Heggie said.

Unlike Europe or South Asia, where Pakistan and other Himalayan countries require climbers to post security bonds, the United States as a rule does not charge people for searches or rescues in its national parks. About the closest we’ve come to it are park officials citing someone for creating a public nuisance.

Oppose billing for rescue

Most experienced park rangers, in fact, are opposed to the idea of sending a bill to those they rescue.

“I absolutely do not think that people should be charged for rescues based on the experience of these high-risk users,” retired longtime Grand Teton National Park ranger Renny Jackson told WyoFile. “Are you going to charge for kids lost in a campground?”

Said Olson, the Park Service spokesman and a budget expert: “Our policy is that if we start charging for search and rescue, people would not ask for help or would delay asking for help. We could see that it would easily drive up the cost. When somebody is in trouble we want to go out there and bring them back alive. We like to sleep at night.”

Rescuers set up a temporary heliport on Teton Park Road to transport people and rescue dogs to Garnet Canyon during the April search for lost skiers. (National Park Service photo by Jackie Skaggs - click to enlarge)

Searches like those for Walker Kuhl and Gregory Seftick, which cost more than $100,000 — a Park Service trigger point that requires approval in Washington— are rare.

“Last year,” said Olson, “we had 3,849 search and rescue efforts and only 832 of those cost more than $500. That means that 79 percent of search and rescue operations last year cost less than $500.”

According to Skaggs, Grand Teton National Park “averages” 15-30 major search-and-rescues a year. But even in a busy year like 2003, which included a daring rescue of 13 climbers who had been struck by lightning on Grand Teton’s Friction Pitch, the search and rescue bill for the entire year was $160,000. The bill for just the Kuhl-Seftick search was $115,000, including $18,000 in wages for park employees reassigned to help in the effort.

National parks are not legally required to conduct search-and-rescue operations, although Park Service management policy does instruct employees to “make reasonable efforts to search for lost persons and rescue sick, injured, or stranded persons.”

In addition, a landmark 1991 federal appeals court decision found that park rangers have almost complete discretion in deciding whether to order a search and rescue operation. The case, Johnson v. United States, involved an inexperienced climber named Ben Johnson, who in 1987 became separated from his friends after climbing Buck Mountain in Grand Teton National Park.

Rangers found Johnson’s body the next morning in a melt pool near Timberline Lake where he had died from hypothermia the previous night.

Johnson’s parents sued the Interior Department, alleging that park rangers failed to “adequately regulate climbing in the park”; failed to launch a prompt rescue effort after a companion of Johnson reported him missing; and failed to conduct a reasonable search when they finally went looking for him.

The case drew considerable national attention among outdoors enthusiasts fearful that a ruling in favor of the parents would greatly restrict public access to potentially or — as in the case of climbing — obviously dangerous wilderness areas. To avoid liability, the government would have to curtail risky activities in which safety could not be assured.

In dismissing the claim on the grounds of subject matter jurisdiction and policy discretion, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver said ruling otherwise would “jeopardize the Park rangers’ autonomy to make difficult, individualized search and rescue decisions in the field. We seriously doubt Congress intended to expose these decisions to the second guessing of courts far removed from the exigencies of the moment.”

Current and former park rangers are well aware of the decision and its implications. The Johnson decision grants rangers authority similar to that of a captain at sea when it comes to rescue or recovery missions. Among other things, the decision meant that rangers could put the hazards faced by the rescuers first and foremost in deciding whether to make a rescue.

Recovery an easier decision

The decisions are easier when rangers know the object of their search is already dead. In 2009 there were 151 fatalities in national parks.

“On the one hand,” said Renny Jackson, “you like to return people to their loved ones. However, putting your life at risk for the return of a dead body is not something you want to do.”

Jackson recalled a case in the 1980s when a rescue team spotted the body of a fallen climber in a couloir— or steep, narrow opening— below a Teton formation known as Molar’s Tooth. Searchers decided the risk of ongoing rockslides made it too dangerous to make a recovery. The body, said Jackson, is still there.

According to deputy coroner Hodges, Walker Kuhl and Gregory Seftick had been dead nearly two days before rangers began their search on April 18. But until their bodies were found a week later, the rangers diligently went about their work in hopes the campers were still alive.

“Until we actually lay hands on the dead bodies, I’m not ready to write anyone off,” said Guenther, who commanded search operations.

Timeline of search for lost skiers. (graphic by Kathryn Palagonia/Jackson Hole News&Guide - click to enlarge)

The first ranger assigned to the case on April 18 was incident duty officer Chris Harder, who found the missing skiers’ two vehicles at the Taggart Lake trailhead. A check that afternoon with the ranger office in Moose revealed that the two men had obtained the necessary backcountry permits and told the staff they were headed to Garnet Canyon in hopes of exploring Teepe Pillar and Teepe Glacier. (Ironically, the features were named for Theodore Teepe, an early mountaineer who died in a climbing accident in 1925).

Other skiers reported seeing two men resembling Kuhl and Seftick in the area on Saturday.

“Another party of four had seen them,” said Guenther. “Now we had them in Garnet Canyon. By Monday night we really ramped up and knew we were going to have a big search.”

The rangers managed to get the leased helicopter into the Garnet Canyon area during a brief window on the evening of April 18, but erratic winds and poor visibility hampered their efforts.

On Tuesday, April 19, four-person teams skied into Garnet Canyon and the helicopter made another sortie in hopes of spotting the two men or their campsite.

As weather cleared on Wednesday, April 20, the searchers mounted their biggest effort yet, with more than 60 people on the ground. Rescue teams with avalanche transceivers, probe poles and sonar devices were joined by two canine search teams.

Because of the difficult weather, continuous threat of avalanche and generally hazardous conditions, Guenther deployed a mixture of trained park employees and professional searchers, paid $27 to $37 an hour, to do most of the work. The teams included trained rescuers from Teton County Search and Rescue; Teton Interagency Fire; Bridger-Teton National Forest and Bridger-Teton National Avalanche Center; Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Ski Patrol; Wyoming K-9 Search and Rescue; Grand Targhee Resort Ski Patrol and canine teams and mountaineers from Exum Mountain Guides and Jackson Hole Mountain Guides.

Driven to continue

Guenther said he felt driven to continue the search because of an experience he had in 1995 when he was working as a seasonal climbing ranger in the park. A 25-year-old climber from Oregon named Aaron Gams disappeared near the summit of the Middle Teton as a winter storm swept into the range.

Searchers are briefed before using probe poles to search an avalanche debris field in Garnet Canyon. (National Park Service photo by Mike Nicklas - click to enlarge)

“We spent two days out there looking for him and I was sure he was dead,” recalled Guenther. “But I was standing on the summit of the Middle Teton and here was this guy sitting on a ledge. Ever since then, I’ve been reluctant to give up hope.”

Guenther said the mounting cost of the Kuhl-Seftick operation was never a major factor in his decision.

“We look for efficiencies but in my time as a ranger we have never made a determination to go out based on cost,” he said.

But by Friday, April 22, still with no sign of the missing men, Guenther talked to the men’s families, informing them the search would scale down to a “limited continuous response.”

“I told them that we would do the most thorough search we could on Saturday, but that after Saturday we are probably going to be scaling back,” said Guenther. “But on the eleventh hour of that last day we finally found something — a beacon hit by one of the searchers.”

On literally the last sweep of the day, Saturday April 23, ranger Nick Armitage picked up a signal on his avalanche transceiver. Although most backcountry skiers turn off their avalanche beacons in the campsites, Kuhl and Seftick had left theirs on.

The search teams “dug like heck” through the dense snowpack and picked up a second signal before it became too dark for the helicopter to land. They returned on Sunday, April 24, and found the two men’s bodies.

In a website created to honor Walker Kuhl, an Iraq war veteran who studied Arabic upon his return to college, the families posted a thank-you notice:

“We thank the National Park Service and all the people involved in the rescue efforts of our sons Greg Seftick and Walker Pannell Kuhl. We recognize that the rescue mission required hard work under trying conditions over many days. We appreciate the professional and caring manner in which the mission was carried out.”

Still in Jackson Hole after his 1995 brush with death, Aaron Gams, now 40 and a massage therapist, recalled his own gratitude to Guenther and the Jenny Lake rangers. Gams, whose core temperature dropped to 86-degrees before he was rescued, lost eight of his toes to frostbite.

“I put all those guys in a precarious place. There were more than 40 people looking for me,” Gams said. “I was in late-stage hypothermia. I was hallucinating and believing all the hallucinations. I don’t think I would have lived for another hour if they had not found me.”

Gams said his medical care after the incident cost him more than $20,000 but that, for him, the national park rescue was free.

“I would have been glad to pay for the rescue if they had asked me,” Gams said. “But at the same time I’m really glad they didn’t give me a bill.”

WyoFile consulting editor Rone Tempest is a former Los Angeles Times national and foreign correspondent who lives in Lander. Contact him at rone@wyofile.com

Fund supports Grand Teton search and rescue efforts

To create a way for people who have been rescued or their families to support search and rescue, several national parks have created non-profit funds where citizens can make tax-deductible contributions.

The Grand Teton Association, the nonprofit organization that runs the park bookstores and other enterprises that benefit the park, recently created the Jenny Lake Ranger Fund so people can donate money for additional training and equipment.

“This gives people like grateful families a place to donate and support search and rescue without giving directly to the government,” said association executive director Jan Lynch. Donors can send checks to the Jenny Lake Ranger Fund, c/o Grand Teton Association, P.O. Box 170, Moose, WY 83012.

DOWNLOAD a high-resolution .PDF graphic detailing the lost skier search timeline.

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The Jobs Machine of Campbell County is the second of a three-part WyoFile series, Hispanic Wyoming, looking at changing immigration trends in the Cowboy State, and how Wyoming’s Hispanic population has become more diversified.  A Shift From Agriculture ran on April 26 and ‘A Good Place to Live‘ appeared on May 10.

GILLETTE — In Campbell County, Hispanic migrants originally come from all over Mexico, plus Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and even Puerto Rico and Argentina.

They come to Gillette for the money, but stay for sense of security and the schools.

Energy-based jobs provide the primary draw. A booming economy based on the troika of coal, oil and gas development, and major industrial construction (most related to energy) has turned Campbell County into an employment machine.

Between 2000-08, Campbell County’s unemployment hovered between 3.1 percent and 2.0 percent. In Wyoming only Sublette County had a lower rate, 1.7 percent in 2008, according to Wenlin Liu, senior economist with the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division.

The Powder River Basin produces roughly 40 percent of the coal mined in America. The number of miners needed to produce that coal has doubled in the past decade to nearly 6,000, according to information provided by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Carlos Ortiz, a baker at El Ranchito in Gillette, prepares dough to make specialty bread that is popular with local Hispanics and others. (Adam Jahiel/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

In addition, since 2005, Campbell County has seen the construction of two major power plants: the $1.3 billion, 385-megawatt Dry Fork Station coal-fired power plant (which required 1,300 workers) and the $224 million, 110-megawatt WyGen III power plant.

In fact, a February 2010 report issued by the City of Gillette estimates that from 2000-09, companies and municipalities invested $3.2 billion in Powder River Basin infrastructure, including commercial development, power generating stations, coal mine improvements, upgraded or new public facilities, roads and upgrades to the railroad network.

In 2005 and 2008, natural gas prices spiked to over $13 per thousand cubic feet, driving up Power River Basin coal-bed methane gas production. In 2000, Campbell County produced 10.5 billion cubic feet of gas per month from coal-bed methane wells. By 2005, the industry was producing 25 billion cubic feet per month.

All this growth provided opportunity not only for transient, poorly educated laborers, but for people with different skill sets: equipment operators, educators, managers, retailers and merchants. Hispanics with those skills were among those who have come to Campbell County to work and make a home.

“I am here for the work,” said Carlos Ortiz, a professional baker who recently moved from Colorado with his wife and two children, age five and two. “Too much competition in Denver,” he said.

Ortiz operates a bakery for the Rosiles family, who own a grocery store/bakery in downtown Gillette called El Ranchito. The store caters to Hispanics seeking what they can’t find in Smiths or Albertsons: menudo, brown sugar cones, coconut juice, Mexican baked good, spices, corn meal, cookware, piñatas and the big seller, telephone cards to various Central American countries.

Marco Rosiles walks outside El Ranchito in Gillette, a store that caters to local Hispanics and others. (Adam Jahiel/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

Co-owner Marco Rosiles said he moved to Gillette from Yakima, Wash., in 2010.

For Hispanics, most work in Campbell County is found boca a boca, word of mouth. Labor officials agree.

“They (Hispanics) have a network already established,” said Vermona Petersen of the Gillette branch of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services.

“It was easy to find work. I had friends,” said Jose Miranda-Ramirez, a builder for Pro-Built Homes of Gillette.

Miranda-Ramirez and his wife, Judith, their children Noel, Cristobal and Brianna moved to Gillette three years ago from a town in the eastern-central Mexican state of Hildalgo.

Hispanics have the reputation as hard workers, an appreciated attribute in Gillette. The former slave and writer Fredrick Douglass once observed, “There is nothing like the lash and sting of necessity to make a man work.”

This urgency might also apply to Hispanics working in Wyoming.

“We have to work,” said Berta Nava. “You know those men dressed in Carhartts and coveralls out there working at 20 below zero? Many times their skin is brown,” said Nava, who owns a grocery, La Casita, which operates just around the corner from El Ranchito.

Filing for unemployment is out of the question for most Hispanics, said Nava, unless they are citizens. The majority, who have work permits – the “green cards” officially known as a U.S. Permanent Resident Card — can’t file for unemployment. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issues green cards on the basis that a company can employ an immigrant on a permanent basis. A claim of unemployment proves otherwise.

Furthermore, most Hispanics have financial obligations in their home country. No figures are available for Wyoming’s Hispanic out-of-country remittances. But in 2009, Mexicans alone working in the U.S. sent remittances worth $21.2 billion, according to the Bank of Mexico.

Georgianna Lopez Hernandez, a Spanish-English translator, is married to Juan Lopez, a migrant from Jalisco, Mexico. He and other Hispanics work for United NRG, one of the dozens of companies that builds, or helps build, pipelines around the Powder River Basin.

The crew of United NRG is biding time, working inside as they wait for better weather and the lifting of seasonal regulations concerning the sage grouse. In order to protect the diminishing sage grouse population, state and federal regulations prohibit oil and gas development activity in certain areas during certain times of the year.

The pre-fab building where Lopez and others are working resonates with the din of off-season repairs: hammers bang out dents, compressors roar and paint guns hiss. Even though it’s bitter cold outside, the men keep an overhead door open to provide adequate ventilation. In a relatively quiet cubbyhole of an office, safety manager JD Eickbush, tries to settle his 6-foot, 5-inch frame into a chair.

“There was a time, say five years ago, when if you had a heartbeat, you get hired. I’ve been here 18 years and I’ve never known the economy to be bad,” said Eickbush. “It’s just one of those rare places. Last big bust we had was in the 1980s.”

About 70 percent of the applicants for labor jobs at United NRG are Hispanic, said Eickbush.

Pipeline companies like United NRG will hire migrant labor, employ them for as long as it takes to get the job done, usually four to six months, then let them go. But usually a worker can get another job. “They rotate from one place to another,” said Eickbush.

Still, there are slow periods. United NRG is down to a skeleton crew of 11 men. At peak time, they have about 40 employees.

Lopez says he’s grateful for his job at United NRG. He’s climbed his way up to pipeline work from tending sheep and cattle (mostly around Douglas), irrigating, landscaping, tree trimming and landscaping. He cannot read or write, either in Spanish or in English. Although he works fairly steadily, he still worries about finances. Two years ago, he went seven months without a job.

“I showed up every day (at various pipeline companies) looking for work. Eventually I got re-hired,” he said.

United NRG equipment operator Victor Quiñones first came to Wyoming from Chihuahua in 1993 and worked sugar beets and beans in Torrington. Then, following energy development, he moved to Douglas and, in 1999, to Gillette. Throughout the years, he acquired skills as a trackhoe and excavator operator and rarely has trouble finding work.

“I came here legally and never came here to take someone’s job,” he said.

Quiñones is not sympathetic to illegal immigrants, especially those who run afoul of the law. “Give them the boot,” he said.

Quiñones’ intolerance of immigrants who don’t play by the rules creates a curious dynamic.

“Most of the reporting to the authorities of illegal immigrants are called in by other immigrants, some of whom are illegal themselves,” Hernandez said.

Marco Rosiles stocks the shelves at El Ranchito in Gillette, a store that caters to local Hispanics and others. (Adam Jahiel/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

Mexicans have some camaraderie with fellow expatriates from various states such as Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, San Luis Potosí, and Chihuahua, but there’s not necessarily friendship among between all Spanish speakers, she said. Mexicans accuse Hondurans of acquiring fake Mexican papers so, if they are apprehended and deported, they end up just on the other side of the U.S. border, not 1,000 miles south in Tegucigalpa.

Both Quiñones and his wife have green cards. They have four children, ages 18, 15, 12 and 10, in the Gillette schools, which he says, “are the best.” His daughter won an essay on “why we celebrate Martin Luther King day” and, as a reward, got to spend the day tagging along with then-Governor Dave Freudenthal.

“I’m inside the American dream,” he said. “Go back to Chihuahua? Never.”

Fighting the Stereotype

And what of prejudice? Older Hispanics who grew up in Torrington or the Bighorn Basin recall unvarnished discrimination. Inez Ontiveroz, a 70-year old Latino who grew up in Lovell, said each morning the school bus driver would tell any Hispanic student, “get to the back of the bus.”

Carlos Donjuan, another laborer with United NRG, says he’s never felt the crush of blatant discrimination. “Naw,” he said, “and I’ve worked all over Wyoming. Sometimes, I feel Hispanics have got to put in more effort. But that’s it. I want to be just like anyone else.”

While rarely overtly hostile, some in Gillette did not put out the welcome mat. When Nava and her husband moved up from El Paso in 2001, they were not warmly received by all quarters.

“The second day we were here, we were moving into a house trailer when the police showed up. They said someone in the trailer court had reported a stolen TV and had seen Mexicans driving in a truck with Texas license plates and assumed we had committed the crime,” she said.

“But Gillette is getting used to us,” said Nava.

Ten years ago, Nava’s sister invited her to visit Gillette. Nava, a legal U.S. resident, lived in San Antonio, and struggled to make ends meet. “I was making minimum wage and could barely pay the rent.”

Marco Rosiles stands behind the counter of El Ranchito in Gillette, a store that caters to local Hispanics and others. (Adam Jahiel/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

After her visit, she and her truck-driver husband decided to move to Gillette permanently.

Nava said it wasn’t easy at first. She got a job at Walmart. People stared at her and made rude comments when she spoke in Spanish on her cell phone. In 2007, she started a bodega-style Mexican grocery, La Casita, in downtown Gillette, and has had to move once because demand for her products required expansion. She sells mostly groceries, but also clothing that Hispanics can’t find elsewhere in Gillette, such as men’s white jeans, and children’s outfits for first communion or quinceañera, the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday.

Nava says she appreciates the schools in Gillette. Her son goes to Meadowlark Elementary, a school that, until last year, had 131 Hispanic children out of a total student body of 301. “My son loves that school,” said Nava.

In contrast to previous generations of migrant Hispanics who saw education as a luxury, this generation sees schooling as critical.

“They are hyper-concentrated on taking advantage of the opportunities before them. They expect a lot of their kids,” said Barry Jankord, principal of Meadowlark Elementary. “People respect that.”

Meadowlark became so heavily weighted toward Hispanics that in 2010 Jankord asked for a de facto integration, sending some Hispanic students to Hillcrest and Rawhide Elementary schools.

“They were overwhelming our ESL (English as a second language) teachers. Plus, they were not getting the opportunity they deserved to mix with the other kids,” he said.

The Hispanic concentration tends to be in the elementary grades, said Jankord. Hillcrest Elementary now has 96 Hispanics out of 705 students; Rawhide Elementary has 61 out of 291. The entire Campbell County school district has 705 Hispanics out of 8,499 total students.

“New immigrants have zest for learning,” said Jankord. “It creates some interesting motivation. You might have a white kid from a comfortable family, smart enough, but not really that interested in school, sitting next to a Latino kid who’s really busting his tail. Chances are that white kid is not eager to see himself get surpassed by the new kid in town.”

The writing is on the wall, said Jankord, citing a January 2009 Education Week article titled Immigration Transforms Communities.

The article detailed the community of Springdale, Ark., which, like Campbell County, once had few English-language learners, but then the good economy began drawing new immigrants. By fall 2008, Springdale’s “English-learner population alone stood at 7,000 children — roughly 40 percent of the total enrollment of 17,400 students,” wrote author Lesli A. Maxwell.

Some Hispanics have taken education as a career. Adriana Gutierrez moved to Gillette in 1997, barely able to speak English. Now she is a teacher’s assistant for English as a second language at Twin Spruce Junior High. Educated (she was an accountant for a construction company in Mexico), motivated and endowed with surplus energy and enthusiasm, she has taken a liking to Gillette.

“It’s a little town with people who really care,” she said.

Gutierrez is not afraid to tackle political issues, making her a very visible Hispanic immigrant in Wyoming. In a space of less than 10 years, she moved from someone functionally illiterate in English to an advocate for Even Start, a state- and federally-funded program aimed at academic achievement for young children and their parents who are learning English as a second language.

When the 2010 state Legislature wavered over funding all five Wyoming Even Start centers, Gutierrez began writing letters and successfully campaigned to prevent any center from closing.

“They (Even Start) gave me an opportunity. I did not want to see that denied to anyone else.” And now, she says, her mission is clear. “I am here for a purpose: to help Hispanic children learn English.”

More Than Hustle and Cheap Labor

The temperature outside shrivels the mercury in the glass to minus 21. Yet, step in the door of the La Frutería De La Cruz, and the smells and colors of Mexico greet visitors. The tang of oranges and tomatoes mixes with the earthy odors of yucca. Pale green chayote, a squash, lie beside a shade of aqua belonging to the prickly leaves of aloe vera.

Francisco Delacruz Jr. unloads tomatoes La Frutería De La Cruz, a Gillette specialty store that carries hard-to-find fruits and vegetables sought by local Hispanics and others. (Samuel Western/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

La Frutería De La Cruz specializes in fresh produce. The store has no refrigeration system, not that they need to worry keeping vegetables cooled on a day like this. The problem is too much chill.

Worried about possible damage, Francisco Delacruz and his father, Francisco Sr., hurry to unload a truck they drove up from Denver the previous night. Each Wednesday, father and son drive to Denver and visit various fruit and vegetable wholesalers, and fill up their truck with specialty items like fresh tortillas. They return by Thursday afternoon to get ready for Friday sales, their busiest day.

“Nothing here comes from a greenhouse,” said Francisco Delacruz Jr., 18, a partner in this family business. “It comes from the dirt.”

Francisco Sr. sold fruit in Mexico, moved to California and, eventually, ended up working in the oilfields of Wyoming. Injured while on the job (he declined to talk about the incident), he had time on his hands during recovery. Two summers ago, he began roasting chilies in downtown Gillette. This led to selling produce, two or three boxes at a time. He consistently sold out and began prowling the produce sections of the chain grocery stores in Gillette, including Smiths and Walmart, and thought he could sell produce “a little lower” than anyone else and make money.

Delacruz said his mother Maria is the brains behind the operations. “She keeps the whole place together.”

La Frutería De La Cruz is small (one room) and located on the west side of Gillette, out of the commercial mainstream. Still the customers, both brown and white, come for the unique products. The patronage of the store, even in sub-zero weather, might be seen as another acknowledgement by Gillette that Hispanics can bring more to a community than hustle and cheap labor. Delacruz says they are not getting rich. “It pays the bills. But what more do you want?”

Yet with typical ambition, Delacruz aspires to not only sell produce. He wants to grow it.

“You know what I’d really like to do? Start our own garden. Not too big, maybe an acre. If we have enough water, we could do it, even here in Gillette. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Samuel Western is a freelance writer living in Sheridan.

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If you’ve listened to Wyoming Public Radio recently, you’ve heard pleas for support as part of the organization’s regulator on-air spring membership fund drive. You also heard that listener support is more important than ever due to a mostly GOP-led movement to cut federal funding for National Public Radio through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Proponents of the cut say it’s part of fiscal belt-tightening to address the nation’s staggering debt. But much of the dialogue is also centered on whether National Public Radio is guided by a left-wing bias. Recent dust-ups over the firing of NPR correspondent Juan Williams and an undercover video by right-wing activist James O’Keefe have highlighted criticism of NPR as too left-leaning.

Public radio proponents say those concerns were apparent in the partisan split on a House vote in March to defund NPR. Wyoming Public Media general manager Jon Schwartz said he believes the real motive to defund is driven more by ideology than economics.

“This House bill that passed is, in an ironic way, is helpful in that it made clear this is a partisan attack on public radio alone,” Schwartz told WyoFile in a recent interview.

Indeed, there is a rally to support public radio in Wyoming. WPR wrapped up its spring membership drive Friday morning after 61 hours on air, and raised $295,000.

“It was our strongest pledge-drive ever,” said Peg Arnold, WPR development director.

The fund-drive exceeded every goal set, including the number of new members, returning members and additional gifts from existing members. The drive resulted in gifts from 3,258 donors, a 10 percent increase from WPR’s fall fund drive.

“People, in their comments, said that they support public radio regardless of where they were politically,” said Arnold. “It was fantastic.”

Staff members said response had been slow to mailings sent out ahead of the on-air portion of the spring membership fund drive. Then the staff noticed a definite boost in support after the story broke about James O’Keefe’s undercover video of NPR fund-raising chief Ron Schiller, in which Schiller allegedly spoke derogatorily about conservatives.

“Our phone volunteers reported that many of the people calling in donations mentioned the controversy or the fear of CPB cuts,” said Roger Adams, WPR programming director. “We are also receiving many second, and even some third, gifts this spring. And from my vantage point in the studio it seems we are thanking more new members than usual.”

HOW CPB FUNDING WORKS

Click to enlarge

Since the late 1960s, the federal government has funded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB’s current annual take is about $445 million. The CPB distributes, through competitive grants, about 72 percent of its funds to hundreds of public radio and television stations across the country, including Wyoming Public Radio and Wyoming PBS. These stations then use those CPB funds to buy such programs as:

Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Fresh Air, World Café, On Point — from National Public Radio.

BBC World Service US distributor, Classical 24 (which is Wyoming Public Radio’s source of classical music), Bob Edwards Weekend — from Public Radio International.

A Prairie Home Companion, The Writer’s Almanac, American Radio Works documentaries — from American Public Media.

Antique Road Show, NOVA, Masterpiece, Lawrence Welk Show, News Hour, Need to Know, and dozens of children’s programs — from Public Broadcasting Service.

If federal funding of CPB is cut entirely, it would trim some $288,000 from Wyoming Public Radio’s annual budget. That’s about 15 percent of the organization’s budget, and it would force immediate cuts, possibly of nationally-produced programs, according to WPR officials.

“If we get cut we might drop a show which results in less money for NPR, PRI or APM which in turn hurts their ability to produce programs,” said Adams.

WYOMING PBS

WPR and Wyoming Public Broadcasting Service officials expect some cut in federal funding, whether it’s a 100 percent proposed in the recent House measure or something less drastic. For now, public radio and television professionals in Wyoming are considering the ramifications of the worst-case scenario.

Wyoming PBS is particularly vulnerable. CPB accounts for $700,000, or 30 percent, of the organization’s annual budget, and those funds are primarily used to pay for PBS dues and programming.

“We’d have to look at a number of cost-savings measures that run the whole gamut, from reducing the amount of programming we purchase to reducing the amount of staff we use to produce local programming,” said Bob Connelly of Wyoming PBS.

When former Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal trimmed the state budget in 2009 it resulted in a 10 percent cut to Wyoming PBS’ total budget. The station responded by cutting two staff positions, “And we had to pull back on the (local) projects we were involved in,” said Connelly.

Wyoming PBS general manager Ruby Calvert said there’s very little chance the organization could make up a $700,000 shortfall with extra support from Wyoming viewers. The annual membership dues for PBS is $430,000.

“I just don’t have that money in my state budget to pay for it and maintain staff and services we have. There’d be some very difficult choices,” Calvert said on Friday while in Washington DC lobbying against cuts to CPB.

Cuts at Wyoming PBS could include local programming, and those are programs Wyoming PBS staff believe that viewers value, such as Capitol Outlook, Main Street Wyoming, Wyoming Voices, and documentary profiles of Wyoming personalities such as Alan Simpson and Chief Washakie.

“Nobody else is going to do (televised Wyoming) election debates or a two-hour biography on Al Simpson,” said Calvert. “I think it’s important to capture the history and culture of Wyoming.”

SUPPORT V. FISCAL & POLITICAL CONCERNS

In March, Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) voted for a measure to cut off all federal funds to NPR. Explaining her vote, Lummis issued this statement:

“Washington’s spending addiction has led our nation to the brink of bankruptcy. It’s time to cut up the credit cards. Non- essential government programs of all sizes must be carefully scrutinized and difficult decisions must be made. Although I prefer a glide path to self-sufficiency for Wyoming Public Radio, I voted for this legislation because I believe NPR must stand on its own.”

House Resolution 1076 passed 228 to 192, but it isn’t likely to make it past the Senate. WyoFile requests for comment to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) were not returned.

Despite HR 1076 not becoming law, many in the GOP promise to keep pushing for the measure. Wyoming Public Radio and Wyoming PBS officials say they enjoy wide support in conservative Wyoming, but can’t help but feel their budgets are under political attack in Washington D.C.

“Is it punitive? Unfortunately, I think it is,” said Wyoming PBS general manager Ruby Calvert. “All of us recognize the need to cut spending. If we’re part of the problem we should be part of the solution … On the other side, I don’t think they’re looking at the right places.”

Supporters of public radio and television note that CPB’s $445 million in federal funds accounts for less than .0003 percent of the $1.5 trillion federal budget deficit.

Approximately one out of every three adults in Wyoming listens to Wyoming Public Radio, according to Schwartz, and the organization enjoys greater listener support than pubic radio stations in more populous states. Given the fact that listeners already contribute a lot for a small population, it’s uncertain whether Wyoming Public Radio listeners would fill a $288,000 to $300,000 per year gap if CPB is completely defunded.

“We’re not going to be able to increase (that listener support) much more,” said Schwartz.

RURAL SERVICES AND BIAS

Public radio is particularly important in a rural state where people spend hours driving across wide spaces with only radio available for entertainment and news. Similarly, public television provides essential services in Wyoming where local television and children’s programming is limited.

Yet, public radio and television face the same criticism here as they do on the national scene.

In response to a WyoFile blog query, Wyoming resident Patricia Ullery-Whitaker wrote:

“I have enjoyed public television and radio dating back to the 1980′s – and have made financial contributions to local stations. I am not convinced public radio or television need federal handouts to stay afloat. Each program these days has a laundry list of the nation’s most prestigious corporations and foundations “advertising” their support. As for news coverage, the criticism leveled at NPR for a “liberal bias” is well founded and documented. Unfortunately, when politicians are asked to provide financial support to media outlets, the administration that writes the biggest check becomes the master of the message.”

Adams said both Wyoming Public Radio and NPR proudly claim an unbiased approach toward journalism, and managers felt the best thing to do was to address current skepticism head-on. WPR staff repeated this statement during the fund drive, written by Adams: “As the debate over federal funding for NPR plays out in Washington and on the air in broadcasts from our rivals, we want you to know that our commitment to journalism remains unchanged. We promise to produce the most ethical, comprehensive, intelligent, thoughtful … and UNBIASED journalism you will get on radio.”

Geoff O’Gara, a producer and writer for Wyoming PBS, and occasional WyoFile contributor, said that as a journalist it can feel awkward knowing that your paycheck comes from public funding. But just like public school teachers are trusted to speak about political topics in an unbiased manner, so can reporters for public television and radio.

“I try to separate myself from any sense that the government is my employer,” said O’Gara, who hosts Capitol Outlook for Wyoming PBS.

As for Wyoming’s congressional delegates, Wyoming PBS general manager Ruby Calvert said she hasn’t heard any concerns from them about bias.

“That is not what I’m hearing from Wyoming constituents and, frankly, I’m not hearing from our congressional delegation,” said Calvert.

Contact Dustin Bleizeffer at 307-577-6069 or dustin@wyofile.com.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Members of WyoFile’s staff are supporters of Wyoming Public Radio, both as listeners and as journalists. A big part of WyoFile’s mission is to support all Wyoming media — newspapers, commercial radio, public television and otherwise. WyoFile actively encourages Wyoming media outlets to run WyoFile content free of charge. In addition, WyoFile actively seeks to collaborate with news organizations on reports regarding Wyoming issues. Unlike public radio and television, however, WyoFile does not receive any public funding. Learn more about WyoFile.

I was in the pre-op room at Sheridan Memorial Hospital earlier this month when the anesthesiologist, Dr. Garry Rains, breezed in about a half-hour before surgery. Cheerful, informative and solicitous, a perplexed look came across his face when I asked him what sort of discount I’d get if I paid in cash.

“I don’t know. In all my years of practice, nobody’s ever asked me a question like that before. I sure appreciate you being up front with me, though,” he said. “Try calling my billing service.”

The idea of cash negotiation for medical care came from a physician friend, Tom Wendel. While antelope hunting a few years ago, we got in a discussion about healthcare. He encouraged me to start a health savings account.

“Exploit a dynamic faced by every physician I know,” said Wendel, “too much paperwork and too little cash.”

I had to do some research, and I had to get over the “MDeity anxiety” that prevents most patients from trying to negotiate with doctors. But I was able to whittle down the total cost of my surgery 32 percent — a savings of roughly $2,250.

First and foremost, however, I wanted to find a local solution to curb my healthcare costs. Insurance premiums continue to rise, despite recent attempts in Washington to keep them down. So why not bypass the Beltway and do something on my own?

Wyoming provides both a blessing and a curse in this area. While Wyoming has limited choices in healthcare, some physicians still work for themselves and have the freedom to negotiate fees.

“This fall, I traded a side of beef for an MRI,” said Dr. Jim Ferries, an orthopedic surgeon and partner in Sheridan Orthopedic Associates.

This wheeling and dealing may not last forever, however. The trend in medicine is for physicians to work as employees, thus they have limited power to negotiate fees, according to Sheila Bush of the Wyoming Medical Society, an organization that supports physicians.

GETTING MY FOOT IN THE DOOR

The pain started two years ago in Moab, Utah. After hiking in reliably comfortable boots, I felt an ache in the front of my left foot, just behind the toes. Pain had occurred there before, but it would fade in a matter of weeks.

Not this time. A stabbing, just-tolerable ache lingered on for months. A podiatrist gave the malady a scary-sounding name: Morton’s neuroma, a non-cancerous tumor that develops usually between the third and fourth toe.

Author Samuel Western saved approximately 32 percent on the cost of medical care by negotiating cash discounts. (click to enlarge)

I tried a series of what the medical profession calls “conservative treatments,” including wearing shoes that actually fit. Burdened with feet sporting a generous beam, I’d been squeezing my dogs into the widest shoes I could find, commonly EE. The podiatrist informed me that my reluctance to accommodate my true width (EEEE) was the primary cause of the neuroma.

This meant tossing most of my footwear and buying new models, acquiring cushy insoles, and getting cortisone shots. This worked, but only so long. Eventually, it became clear that surgery was necessary, which, for a Morton’s neuroma, is pretty minor.

Yet the orthopedist examining my foot noticed that in addition to my neuroma, I now had acquired what’s called a hammertoe — a deformity that made my second toe curl up like it belonged on the pedal extremity of the Wicked Witch of the West.

This meant real surgery, like in a hospital or surgery center, and an initial price tag of about $6,800. For a person with a medical insurance policy with a $5,000 annual deductible, this represented a substantial outlay, especially since I had deducted little this calendar year.

So I decided to do some homework and negotiate.

FIRST STEPS

First rule I learned: assume nothing about medical finance. A mélange of Medicare payments, varying insurance reimbursement, private pay and charity care governs the financial life of physicians and hospitals.

“Every practice is going to be completely different,” Bush said.

Second rule: expect a wide range of prices. U.S. antitrust regulations prohibit physicians and hospitals from collecting data on what their competition charges. My hospital and surgery center fees varied from $4,460 to $2,100 for the same set of procedures.

Third rule: be a discerning listener and devotee of facts, not hearsay. Medical finance is a politically charged topic rife with people trying to shift costs, either onto you or another provider.

For example, through a misunderstanding, I thought the Sheridan Surgical Center of Sheridan only gave privileges to a select group of physicians and that my orthopedic surgeon was not one of them. I was misinformed and that probably cost me.

Three additional requirements await those wanting a cash discount:

• The ability to pay promptly in cash and, usually, in one lump sum. Unless you’re awash in disposal income, this requirement eliminates more expensive procedures like a hip replacement (which costs between $32,000 and $44,000), not to mention any sort of transplant (don’t ask).
• The willingness to research standard fees set by Medicare and individual surgery disciplines, such as the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. Some of this information is available online. If not, ask the person scheduling surgeries to show you how they determined the price.
• The persistence and willingness to negotiate directly with physician, hospitals or surgical center. Get over your case of MDiety. This includes — most importantly —shopping for services.

I have a health savings account, which works like a debit card. Anyone with a high-deductible health insurance plan can stick up to $3,000 per year in an account, all tax deductible, and use the funds expressly for medical purposes. This can be the source of cash to leverage a discount. My HSA account only had $1,500 in it. That meant coming up with additional $5,500 if I was going to pay sticker price for the procedures.

I made my haggle list: surgeon, anesthesiologist and surgical center or hospital.

DO THE MATH

I got immediate encouragement from my surgeon, Dr. Steve Rabon of Sheridan Orthopedic Associates. I asked his billing service about a cash discount. They said they would ask Rabon personally and get back to me.

While I waited for a reply, I looked up the American Medical Association’s Current Procedural Terminology, or CPT, code. These codes are medical identifiers and represent what Medicare will pay a surgeon and hospital for a specific procedure.

It’s rare for a surgeon to make money on Medicare reimbursements. In fact, according to David Carter, a business manager for the Sheridan Surgical Center, “it’s very difficult to even cover your costs on Medicare payments, although it does depend on the procedure.”

Thus a surgeon has to find some way to make up the difference. If you go to the website of Noridan Administrative Services, which contracts services to Medicare, and click on the Medicare Part B-Wyoming link, then look under fee schedules, you can get a pretty good idea of compensation rates. Again, you’ll need the CPT code.

Medicare, while only for people over the age of 65, has such rate-setting power for physicians and hospitals, that anyone set on cash negotiations needs to know what it pays. Medicare will pay a physician about $365 for a hammertoe correction and $250 for a removal of a Morton’s neuroma. That should add up to $615 for an hour’s work, but it doesn’t, because it involves Federal government-style math.

“If you do a second procedure during one operation, they cut your reimbursement in half. If you do a third procedure, they cut it to a quarter,” Rabon said.

In addition, reimbursement from Medicare can take up to 120 days.

Patients can use online and printed guides to look up codes and prices for medical procedures. (click to enlarge)

In the meantime, Sheridan Orthopedics has to carry that cost of that operation. To recover the actual cost, they use a fee schedule provided by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Musculoskeletal Coding Guide (available at Amazon for less than $100). For a combination hammertoe correction and removal of a Morton’s neuroma, they recommend a fee of $2,144.

But that’s negotiable. Actually, what I discovered is that all medical care costs, up and down the line, are negotiable. Insurance companies, in fact, hire secondary “repricers” to badger a physician to accept a lower fee for a bill they’ve submitted.

“We are used to competition,” Carter said. “I get calls every day to negotiate fees.”

The reward for a negotiated fee is a quick payout from insurance companies, often within three days, Carter said. Rabon offered me a 30 percent cash discount, preferably paid within five days of the operation. Thus, I was able to reduce my initial surgeon’s fee of $2,144 to $1,500.

Negotiating with my anesthesiologist was not so easy. Due to rotation schedules, I would not know who my anesthesiologist was until two days before surgery. Moreover, most anesthesiologists do not keep standard office hours. Attempts to negotiate with the billing service that represents most Sheridan anesthesiologists were not fruitful. Discounts, the billing service said, had to be authorized by the physician.

Although he had never negotiated with any patient before, Dr. Rains was anything but dismissive. When informed that he, not his billing service, had to authorize any discount, Rains asked:

“Is Dr. Rabon giving you a discount?”

“Yes. Thirty percent.”

“That’s fine. I’ll do the same.”

Two down. One to go.

HOSPITAL LIMITATIONS

I knew this was going to be the tough one. Hospitals, particularly rural hospitals, must fight tooth and claw to survive. According to Dan Perdue of the Wyoming Hospital Association, uncompensated care (bad debt and charity) for Wyoming’s 26 hospitals in 2009 amounted to $170,949,712.

That means those hospitals have to get their money from someone else or run a perpetual deficient.

Sheridan Memorial Hospital loses about $410,000 per month in uncompensated care, according to chief financial officer Ed Johlman.

“Medicare pays 78 percent of the cost. Thus, I’m losing 22 cents on cost for every dollar I bill,” Johlman said.

I knew that Medicare (if I were over age 65) would pay any Wyoming hospital or surgery center $636 for my two procedures. How much more would they try to get from me? Laurie Green of Sheridan Memorial Hospital’s finance department gave me the bad news: $4,270 for the two procedures. Better news: a 25 percent discount for cash, paid within 30 days of surgery. That knocked it down to $3,417.

I asked Green if she would give an additional five percent discount to match the 30 percent of the physicians.

“No,” she said.

Hospitals have to be careful giving deep discounts, Johlman said.

“Federal law says I’ve got to treat everyone the same. If I give you a 50 percent reduction then I’ve got to give that to everyone,” he said.

It didn’t take me long to eliminate one potential competitor, however: Casper Orthopedic Institute, a state-of-the-art facility that provides both orthopedic care and surgery, through the Wyoming Surgical Center, under one roof. First off, the receptionist was reluctant to give out any information about how much the surgeon or the surgical facility would charge.

“We usually don’t give out that kind of information,” the operator said. “Give me your number and we’ll get back to you.”

When Terry (who declined to give her last name) of the Wyoming Surgical Center did call me back, she said that the procedure would cost $5,600.

That stopped any further serious inquiry.

Surgical centers across the nation have made names for themselves by offering efficiency and often undercutting the local hospital. According to the Ambulatory Surgery Foundation, patients can expect to pay about 44 percent less for procedures performed in a surgery center as compared to a hospital outpatient department.

Yet here was a surgical center with a sticker price $1,330 higher than the local hospital.

Later, I called the Wyoming Surgical Center back and asked if they negotiated prices.

“Sure,” said chief administrator Charlie Robertson. “We give a discount right up front for cash. Usually, it’s about 20 percent.”

That would cut it down to $4,460. From a consumer’s point of view, however, that price looked grim in light of my next offer. The Yellowstone Surgical Center in Billings said they would give me a cash price of $2,101.

But that meant trade-offs. Having the operation done in Billings meant a different doctor, of course. My Montana surgeon of choice, foot and ankle specialist Dr. Michael Yorgason, agreed to do the procedure for $1,772, cash up-front and paid two days in advance of surgery. That added $272 to the bill (when compared to Rabon), plus there would be weekly trips to Billings (135 miles each way) for post-op care.

I took the written estimate from Yellowstone Surgical Center and e-mailed it to Green at Sheridan Memorial Hospital, asking her if she could match the cost.

After consulting with her boss, Green called back with a counter offer: $2,500. If I added my additional physician’s fees and mileage costs, the Sheridan Memorial Hospital was my best deal.

A DONE DEAL

The procedure went well. I’m still gimping around with a titanium pin sticking out of one my toes, pleading with man and beast alike to avoid so much as touching the pin.

I spent a total of $4,750 for the surgery, saving myself roughly $2,250 — the equivalent of my yearly premium for my catastrophic health insurance. Actually, I’ll probably spend that much in the next few years buying new shoes.

But that’s negotiable.

CASPER — Customers who wander up to the cheese case will find store owner Nancy Wayte pulling out the wheels for an impromptu cheese tasting. “If you like blue cheese, you’ve got to try Roaring ‘40s from Tasmania. It’s my favorite. … I melt this sage-infused cheddar onto scrambled eggs so my grandkids can have green eggs and ham.”

The customers check out with Nancy’s husband, Bill Wayte, who tells them about his most recent trip to Las Vegas while employee Johnie Richman bags the groceries and gets the door. On Tuesdays, the pace at Grant Street Grocery in Casper is less leisurely. Dozens of customers who take part in the Colorado-based Grant Farms food-share program rush in to pick up apples, cider, beets, giant winter squash, eggs, mushrooms and cherry wine.

I have been working off and on at Grant Street Grocery for three years. I’ve done a bit of everything, but most recently I’m there to help Johnie deliver groceries. I work for food — partly because I want to help support the store I love, but also because the people at Grant Street have become my family. I help them out and they feed me, just like mom and pop.

Store owner Bill Wayte visits with a customer in his Grant Street Grocery in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile — click to enlarge)

There used to be lots of neighborhood grocery stores in Casper. According to the Polk City Directories for Casper and Natrona County, Casper had 72 grocers in 1924, 99 in 1925 and 70 in 1928. Grant Street Grocery is the only one left. In 2008, Grant Street Grocery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

But the Waytes struggle to keep the doors open. Although the consumer-supported agriculture movement is gaining momentum and bolstering many neighborhood groceries, Grant Street Grocery may not have enough local support to stay in business.

“We bought this store in 2004 and have never taken a salary, but our family and friends eat well,” Nancy said. “We just hope to keep the doors open.”

NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICE

Americans are becoming more aware of so-called “smart growth” concepts like environmentally sensitive land development that minimizes dependence on transportation and makes infrastructure investments more efficient. This has helped the neighborhood grocery come back in style, and the 91–year-old Grant Street Grocery may be a model for the smart-growth philosophy often discussed in Casper.

Children who can barely open the door come in to buy milk or bread for their parents. The Waytes greet the children by name and write down the total on the family’s charge account.

Groceries like milk and bread make up very little of the store’s business but Nancy shakes her head at the idea of discontinuing grocery items.

“When people go to the big stores, they will get a hundred different choices of, say, a toothbrush. Here, you can pick up the blue one or the red one. But we feel like we have to keep these items in stock so we don’t ruin the integrity of the neighborhood store,” Nancy said.

Bill and Nancy Wayte own Grant Street Grocery, the last neighborhood grocery store in Casper. The town once had nearly 100 neighborhood grocers. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile — click to enlarge)

The Waytes feel like they do have to do something to compete with the hundred-toothbrushes stores.

“I sell a gallon of milk here for $4.99,” Bill said. “But I have to buy it for $4.29. I don’t make much profit selling milk. But the big stores like Safeway and Albertsons take a huge loss on milk. They sell it for much less than they buy it for in order to get people to shop there. We can’t do that.”

The Waytes have had to get people into their store in other ways. Earlier this year, they partnered with Grant Family Farms in Fort Collins, Colo., to provide Casper residents with fresh, organically grown food. Grant Family Farms is an example of community-supported agriculture (CSA), an arrangement that provides farmers a sure market for their labor. In return, the community members receive a share of the harvest. Participants in Casper come to Grant Street Grocery once a week to pick up fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat, fresh flowers and herbs.

COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE

Grant Family Farms contacted the Waytes, at the beginning of 2010, seeking a drop-off site in Casper. Nancy and Bill said they were happy to oblige. They do not profit from this arrangement, but merely provide a place for Grant Family Farms and its customers to do business with each other. Grant Family Farms operates its own farm store in Cheyenne, which serves around 300 participants. They were hoping for the same success in Casper, which currently has 100 participants.

“People seem to love it and we hope even more people will participate next year,” Bill said. “Although I’m not sure we have room for 300 boxes of food in here.”

Grant Farms is also happy with the arrangement. Michael Moss does marketing, sales, delivery and farm work for Grant Farms. He said he is excited to work with Casper, an area that he considers a “food desert.” He drives the food orders up from Fort Collins every Tuesday.

“It is important to support local food in Colorado, but also where it is needed. I believe in Grant Farms’ mission; I’m passionate about getting local, organic food to those who needed it,” Moss said.

Frank Moran, who just came back from eating at the Barolo Grill in Denver — a restaurant that buys vegetables from Grant Family Farms — is here to pick up his order of fruit and eggs. Moran said he believes in community-sustained agriculture and even tried to use local foods in his Domino’s Pizza franchise.

“It didn’t work for too long because the locally grown food couldn’t meet the rules and regulations of Domino’s,” Moran said.

Even though he only ordered a half-share of fruit and eggs, Moran gets many of the Grant Farms vegetables because friends share with him. A majority of customers share with each other; many because they say they could never eat everything they receive. There is even a “share” box where people can leave an item or take an item.

This sharing helps create a sense of community that is important to customers like Jess Ryan, yoga teacher and co-founder of Healthy Life Studios in Casper.

“I come to this store to see my community and my friends. I love this program because I believe in being invested in the place you live, because when people are invested, they care,” Ryan said.

Ryan grew up in Ohio, where local produce and farmers markets abound. She said the produce from Grant Farms has made her family more creative and healthy in their cooking.

Linda Nix, a Grant Street neighbor, said she has also become more creative in her cooking and is glad to eat foods that are in season.

“Why should I eat a pineapple in winter? I’ve long been interested in CSA and seasonal eating, and Grant Farms has given me an avenue for conscious eating. Bill and Nancy have done our community a great service by working with Grant Farms,” Nix said.

THE NEIGHBORLY TOUCH

As you walk up to the store, a life-size John Wayne cutout stares out the window at you. The butcher’s dog, Samuel H. Bone (Sammy Ham Bone) greets you, hoping he can come in, too. The front door is covered with fliers, mostly made by the owners’ grandchildren, letting you know about their latest deals.

Most Grant Street Grocery customers are regulars. They know the routine; Sammy can’t come in, but there are treats for him at the counter. They talk to Johnie about his sports teams. They ask Kanyon Gaskins, the butcher, what’s good today. They come for specialty items: gourmet meats, cheeses, and chocolate.

Chocolate truffles, Irish cheddar, chipotle aioli and house-made pesto decorate the inside of a deli case at Grant Street Grocery in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile — click to enlarge)

Bill and Nancy sell the highest quality meat they can find and they import cheese from around the world: Jamaican jerk, Spanish manchego, Bavarian mushroom double-cream, Guinness-infused cheddar from Ireland and smoked gouda with bacon from New York.

The Waytes also contribute to their neighborhood and community in more direct ways. They donate to nonprofits as well as individuals who are struggling financially. They organize block parties, have cheese and wine tastings and deliver groceries for those who really need the service. For a $3 fee, they deliver to elderly customers, group homes and housebound customers. Johnie, the deliver boy, will even put the groceries away. Sometimes his delivery service includes opening lids, filling ice trays and fetching the newspaper that was thrown under the porch.

Johnie began working at Grant Street Grocery five years ago after graduating from Natrona County High School’s special-education program.

“When he first came to us, he just had a blank stare and didn’t do much. Now, he has learned pricing, shelving. He anticipates what we need, he speaks to customers, he has humor, and he is proud to be here and be a part of the store. He has really blossomed,” Nancy said.

But, all their efforts may not be enough to keep the store’s doors open. Small, locally-owned stores often have higher inventory and per-customer operating costs, and face intense competitive pressures from large, corporate chain stores.

In a few years Bill and Nancy will be in their 70s. Last year, Bill had a heart-attack and six bypasses. The couple has great visions of what Grant Street Grocery could become, if only they had the energy and money to do it.

“We think about selling this place all the time; finding someone young who wanted to take this place to the next level. But, for now, I guess we’ll just have to keep it going. Besides, if we sold it, what would happen to Johnie?” Nancy said.

CODY — Montana officials have pledged to “take a step back” and re-evaluate a plan to haul tens of thousands of tons of contaminated mine tailings next summer from Cooke City, Mont., over the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, one of Park County’s steepest and most serpentine highways.

At a recent public meeting, Richard Opper, director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, apologized to dozens of Wyoming residents who raised concerns about expected heavy truck traffic, and who said they had felt shut out during earlier project planning.

Opper said he understood why Park County residents might “feel like this project got sprung on you, and I would feel exactly the same way if I was in your position.”

The $24 million cleanup project connects several disparate policy issues, including government transparency, public involvement, environmental laws and highway regulations. It has developed amid a history of sometimes fractious interstate relations and a legacy of failed mining operations in the region.

The haul plan got off to a rocky start locally after a Wyoming Department of Transportation engineer learned this spring that trucking companies were bidding on a contract to haul nearly 69,000 tons of mine waste over the 47-mile Chief Joseph Highway to Whitehall, Mont., a 640-mile round trip.

Traces of gold left in the mill tailings — a fraction of an ounce for every ton of waste — will be extracted at a Whitehall facility and used to help offset the cost of their removal from the site, as well as the rest of the cleanup. But most of the tailings will be moved to a repository a few miles from the current mill site.

Photos taken May 14, 2009 by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality show how runoff from mine tailings stored near Cooke City pollute Soda Butte Creek. The top photo was taken upstream from the site, while the bottom one taken downstream from the site shows acidic runoff that kills fish in the creek, a tributary of the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Montana Department of Environmental Quality (click to enlarge)

For decades, acidic pollutants from the tailings have been leaching into Soda Butte Creek, which flows into Yellowstone National Park and the Lamar River.

Opper denied claims that Montana would profit from the extracted gold. He said the plan to spend the first summer of the six-year project hauling away about 20 percent of the tailings arose only after engineers realized late in the process that the new repository was too small to safely hold all the waste.

Opper said the hauling plan only became viable in early 2010, as the price of gold rose, although he has given conflicting figures for the “break-even” price at which gold sales make hauling tailings economically possible.

Planners had initially considered spending two or three summers hauling additional tailings away, since processing revenues would cover trucking costs, Opper said.

But subsequent objections from Wyoming residents made that option less attractive, he said.

SPECIFIC ADVICE

Elected officials and residents attending the meeting offered Opper specific advice on everything from avoiding vehicle collisions with federally protected grizzly bears to what kind of heavy equipment is best for towing disabled trucks and trailers.

“This was one of the most productive public meetings I’ve been to in a long time,” Opper said after the gathering.

Rep. Pat Childers (R-Cody) said he was satisfied with the belated chance for local input, and was optimistic that Montana DEQ would revisit its haul plan based on comments from residents and state and local officials.

“There’s a whole lot of things they had missed, and they’re receptive to those things,” said Childers, who was among the first to voice objections about the haul plan.

Among the issues Montana’s plan does not address are handling any spilled diesel fuel resulting from thousands of truck trips through the area, concern from WYDOT about maximum load weights and environmental permitting required for staging dozens of heavy trucks near a Shoshone National Forest campground.

Though the U.S. Forest Service supports cleaning up the contaminated mine waste, Montana DEQ’s plan “is going to have impacts on us that have not been addressed,” said Terry Root, Wapiti district ranger for the Shoshone National Forest.

Map of proposed mine waste haul route. (click to enlarge)

The plan calls for hauling up to 35 double-trailer loads every weekday June 1 – Sept. 15, which concerns WYDOT officials because the road is particularly vulnerable to damage until it dries after spring thaws.

“Mother nature is going to tell us when we can haul on that road,” said Ron Huff, a district maintenance engineer for WYDOT. “If we have a late spring, it may not be until July 1, or it may be July 15.”

Huff also objected to a special permit contractors plan to use that would allow for overweight loads to be hauled during a temporary, one-year window.

“We would not support that at all. We feel that if we allow overweight loads, that road will suffer tremendously,” he said.

“I’m adamantly opposed to that (permit) for safety reasons as well,” said Wyoming Highway Patrol Capt. Ed Peterson.

Peterson said he planned to focus on motorist safety along the route.

Federal law prohibits commercial trucking through Yellowstone, and the cleanup project does not meet criteria for a superintendent-issued exemption, said park spokesman Al Nash.

The only other route, over the 10,974-foot Beartooth Pass and along the Beartooth Highway, has even more switchbacks and steep grades.

WINDING ROUTE

One portion of the Chief Joseph route climbs nearly 2,000 feet in two miles along a series of tight switchbacks to the top of Dead Indian Pass, at 8,051 feet above sea level.

“These trucks are going to be going along slowly, about 22 mph, and Mom and Pop are coming up with their motor homes,” Peterson said. “They’re going to discover two things at 8,000 feet: they have no power and they can’t pass.”

Contractors working on a mine cleanup project near Cooke City plan to use double-trailer truck rigs like the one seen here during an October test run over the Chief Joseph Highway and back into Montana. Wyoming residents have expressed concerns about safety and other issues connected to using the slow-moving, heavily loaded rigs, which measure 97 feet from front to rear axle. Photo: Montana Department of Environmental Quality (click to enlarge)

The trucks and two trailers that make up each rig will stretch 97 feet from front to rear axle, and may leave the mill site as often as every 20-30 minutes between 7 a.m. – 7 p.m., according to the haul plan.

Nev Hardin, a trucker who drove a similar rig in 2002-03 during the New World Mining District cleanup around Cooke City, said that project was accomplished without incident, but it wasn’t easy.

Hardin and other drivers hauled up to 40 loads of gravel each day from Ralston over Dead Indian Pass, but “it was tough,” he said.

“We had a number of drivers that simply did not want to drive that road,” he said, adding, “all the concerns I’ve heard tonight about safety are valid.”

Childers and others said their preference would be to move all the contaminated tailings to the new repository. But Montana planners say seismic concerns allow for only about 80 percent of the tailings to be safely stored there.

Park County Commissioner Dave Burke said more than two dozen potential alternative repository sites were considered by the Forest Service, and other private mining claims exist throughout the area.

“Is there any possibility one of those sites could store the 20 percent you want to haul over the Chief Joseph?” Burke asked.

“If we can find a better way to do this and make sure we get those tailings, that material, out of the flood plane and get it stored — if we can find a better way to do that than hauling it 350 miles to Montana, we will do that,” Opper said.

Planners said they would ask Forest Service officials about using alternative sites previously deemed unsuitable for storing the full amount of tailings, but that might safely hold the remaining 20 percent.

Montana officials said that regardless of what final haul plan is developed, they will remain focused on removing the tailings from near Soda Butte Creek, a move that would benefit not just Montana, but also Yellowstone, Wyoming and the region.

“If this were easy, it wouldn’t have taken all these years” to find a solution, Nash said.

READ or DOWNLOAD the Montana DEQ mine waste cleanup haul plan.

VISIT the Montana DEQ web page for the mine waste cleanup project.

READ a related August 2010 WyoFile story  about the mine waste cleanup project.

Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net. 202/628-6500

By Debra Kahn, ClimateWire

Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D) is determined to levy a production tax on wind power to level the playing field against mineral resources.

Speaking recently at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Freudenthal explained why he felt that wind power should be subject to the same taxation as extractive industries that make up 60 percent of Wyoming’s tax revenue and 40 percent of all U.S. coal.

“Wind guys make the argument that ‘We’re so special, we don’t need to be taxed,’ but we need to be more practical and honest,” he said. “If it’s an energy source for which there is so much demand, they can bear the same burden as the rest of us. They get so much support from the federal government, I don’t know that the taxpayers of Wyoming need to subsidize them.”

“If they can’t contribute to schools, roads, etc., it’s not an industry that I want,” he added. “We’re talking about 3 to 4 percent, not some huge tax.” Wind power producers currently pay property tax and sales tax; their sales tax exemption ended at the beginning of this month. Oil, natural gas and coal pay 4 percent in severance taxes, and counties and municipalities can choose to add up to 2 percent more.

Freudenthal is working on a bill that would tax wind production and will submit it through the state Legislature by Feb. 12, spokesman Jonathan Green said.

Wyoming had the fourth-highest growth in wind installations in the third quarter of 2009, with 170 megawatts added for a total of 986 megawatts, according to the American Wind Energy Association. That’s dwarfed, however, by the state’s wind potential. It has 50 percent of the best-quality wind in the United States, totaling 235,000 gigawatt-hours per year, according to federal studies — as well as a big share of the nation’s oil, coal and natural gas production.

Wind industry says ‘no consultation’

Industry representatives were wary. “We are puzzled as to why Wyoming would want to impose a tax on a promising new business and drive investment away to other windy and eager states,” said AWEA spokeswoman Christine Real de Azua. No other states have a statewide production tax on wind, she said, but at least one town, in Minnesota, exchanged a property tax for a local generation tax. “The key element is they worked with the wind industry, whereas here there’s no consultation,” she said.

Jeff Hymas, a spokesman for PacifiCorp subsidiary Rocky Mountain Power, which owns eight wind power facilities in Wyoming, said only that he was concerned about a tax’s effect on ratepayers. “Until we see proposed legislation, it’s too early to say what the company’s position will be,” he said. “Our primary concern is the effect any potential changes would have on our customers.”

Freudenthal added that most wind companies don’t make their equipment in the United States, so towns don’t get many new jobs. The petroleum industry has the potential to generate more green jobs through carbon capture and sequestration, he said.

“The guy who has the Ready-Mix company gets to pour the big slab to support it, there’s a guy who does a little dirt work, might get a little uptick at the hardware store. Frankly, wind energy just doesn’t bring anyone,” he said. “The more commonplace thing is having people working at the oil patch controlling emissions.”

Concerns about jobs and open space

Wyoming residents are also protective of their open space, he said.

“Now that the novelty’s wearing off, maybe we don’t like these wind turbines,” he said. “We’re used to being able to go out and see for miles, but if we’re going to develop a wind resource, we’re going to have to live with some power lines. No one wants to live with power lines.”

Brad Mohrmann, Sierra Club Wyoming’s assistant regional representative, said Freudenthal’s motivation likely stems from the oil and gas industry’s prominence. “The oil, gas and coal industry runs Wyoming,” he said. “I think they see it as a threat, and since that industry runs this state and the wind industry is a newcomer to the game, oil, gas and coal have their say.”

“Any gains in the wind industry could potentially take away revenue streams from extractive industries,” he said. “I think the fear is that we need to get something large in return for wind, because it could take away other revenue sources.”

The Republican-dominated state Legislature is by no means sure to pass Freudenthal-backed bills, however. It killed his attempt last November to pass a similar bill. “They generally haven’t been in favor of taxing wind heavily like Gov. Freudenthal has,” Mohrmann said.

• Retool the Wyoming Industrial Information and Siting Act to include wind farms of 30 turbines or more. Developers of such projects would be required to provide bonding or other financial assurances to ensure decommissioning and reclamation.
• Provide minimum state standards, such as buffer zones between wind turbines and other existing facilities. Counties would be allowed to provide their standards that go beyond the state’s minimum requirements.
• Impose a $3 per megawatt hour excise tax on wind energy produced in Wyoming, which compares to about a 5 percent severance tax on minerals. This includes a provision to send 40 percent of the revenues to local governments and 60 percent to the state General Fund.
• Suspend the power of condemnation, or eminent domain, for one year “where it might be used to gain access to private lands to construct wind energy collector lines.” The purpose is to give the Legislature a year to study the issue before adopting a permanent solution.