The Lander Story

What do you do when the mines shut down?

By Bill Sniffin

LANDER -- In February, 1993, a book was widely quoted around the country, which rated the 100 best small towns in America. Lander ranked number-5 and was prominently mentioned by the author during a visit to the NBC Today Show and ABC's Good Morning America show.

What was remarkable about this was that just seven years earlier, the town was mired in the worst depression suffered by any county seat town in Wyoming's history.

What civic leaders accomplished in Lander could be used as a model for other Wyoming cities and towns as they work toward developing communities that aren't totally reliant on mineral companies for jobs and tax base.

Lander a mining center?

In today's Wyoming where Gillette's coal country is on everybody's mind, it is hard to imagine that back in the 1970s, Lander had as big a mining presence as any city or town in the state.

Let's set the scene.

The big player was a U. S. Steel iron ore mine tucked in the mountains on South Pass outside of Lander. More than 550 miners worked there and most were members of the United Steelworkers Union. A few years earlier, those union members participated in what was hailed as the most generous labor contract ever written. Those 550 families enjoyed incredibly high wages, courtesy of the union contract, while enjoying the low-cost, outdoorsy Wyoming lifestyle of Fremont County.

Not long after, the contract was viewed as a fiasco at U. S. Steel headquarters in Pittsburgh. Their company, along with other American steel companies, was getting clobbered in the marketplace by cheap, high-quality steel imported from Japan and Great Britain. In the face of this, the company wanted out of their contract with the union. To do this, they had to start getting the union to agree with big concessions. Where could they start with such a plan?

Why not little Lander, Wyoming, where a state-wide union presence wasn't as big as some eastern states. The workers could perhaps be persuaded to give in? As editor-publisher of the local Lander newspaper, I knew the iron mine wouldn't last forever. But we knew more than ten years of high quality taconite ore was still available when the company started making noises about shutting down.

Despite desperate efforts by local officials, the union people wouldn't budge. Why would they? The union had treated them in a wonderful manner all these years. Soon the mine cut back to half its employees. Still, the union wouldn't budge. Finally, the company announced the mine was closed and almost immediately sold off all buildings and materials to a salvage company from Ohio.

It happened so quickly. The mine was closed. The workers were out of their jobs.

Uranium was booming in 1980s

In the early 1980s, Fremont County enjoyed a tremendous boom when processed uranium ore called Yellowcake soared to record prices, almost $50 per pound. Mines were created almost overnight in the Jeffrey City area east of Lander and the Gas Hills area, east of Riverton. Soon, more than 2,000 men and women were working those mines and hundreds of other people were working for support companies in Fremont County.

If you were in business, life was good. Property tax valuations soared in the county. Home values went up in price one and half percent per month for over three years - you couldn't go wrong buying real estate. Life was good.

But it all came crashing down pretty fast. Once Yellowcake prices soared so high, the utility companies that owned the nuclear reactors went to Congress and asked for restrictions to be removed on the importation of uranium from other countries. Like we have seen so often in other industries, America immediately exported all those uranium jobs to Australia and Canada. Soon, Yellowcake was a glut on the world market and prices dropped lower than $10 per pound.

Towns like Jeffrey City, which had grown to 4,000 people with its own high school plus its own Chamber of Commerce, Fire Department and even its own Lions Club, started to lose people. I even started a newspaper in Jeffrey City, which lasted from 1978 to 1987.

Today, the population of Jeffrey City is measured in the dozens. But that's another story. Lander business leaders had been pretty smug, including its local newspaper editor-publisher -- me. I had predicted in print that Lander was bullet-proof when it came to the vagaries of the boom-bust mineral cycles that had plagued other parts of the state over the decades.

Boy was I wrong.

The chance to leave this dying town of Lander was almost once-in-a-lifetime. I admit that I considered it, but I just couldn't. Lander (and Wyoming) had been good to me. Why would I abandon all my friends, neighbors and customers at a time when they needed all the support they could get? I re-joined the local newspaper as editor-publisher, even though it was owned by an out of state company at the time.

Philosophically, I had always subscribed to the journalistic philosophy that we editors shouldn't get involved in local community activities, that our editor-role was that as an observer.

But Lander was in too much trouble and it appeared to me that we needed all the local leadership we could get to pull ourselves out of this mess. Everybody would have to pitch in. Years later, impartial observers like the late Gov. Ed Herschler would point at Lander as probably the "worst hit" town in Wyoming during the 1980s depression. To those of us who lived through it, we certainly agreed with him, although that dubious title brought us no solace.

There was work to do. Our progressive and brilliant Mayor Del McOmie appointed me to the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the early 1980s. That involved some interesting work, but it was also frustrating. One of our most aggressive banks had been closed by the FDIC and its president sent to prison. It never reopened. Our other banks were running very tight, themselves, and didn't have money to lend to entrepreneurs.

Our local EDC talked to lots of entrepreneurs, but it was obvious, that without money, few of these folks could make a go of it. I went to the mayor and suggested we form a for-profit corporation with a goal of providing start-up money for new business opportunities.

We called it LEADER Corporation and we found 100 people who invested $1,000 apiece. With this $100,000 nest egg, we launched an effort that over the past 16 years accomplished a lot.

According to our Treasurer, Rick Fagnant, a CPA, LEADER has leveraged $4.5 million over the past 15 years, created or saved 200 jobs and helped more than 35 businesses, besides working on every other type of economic development activity imaginable. We were major players in development of the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail and a new 18-hole golf course.

There were many, many wonderful people who worked together to create the Lander Renaissance. Much of this story is about my role, only because I am a candidate for governor in 2002. I think people have a right to know the kinds of projects I have been involved in during my time in Lander.

Lander's Main Street project

I also served on a committee that was developed by our skilled Chamber of Commerce Manager, the late Linda Hewitt. She had heard Bill Schilling talk about his Main Street beautification efforts when he was chamber manager in Cody and wanted to duplicate it in Lander. She also knew the highway commission was planning to rebuild the federal highway through Lander.

Armed with this information and with her leadership, a committee was formed that developed a plan to give Lander "a new look" based on the premise that such a new image would cause businesses to reopen in Lander.

Just a few years earlier, the Denver Rocky Mountain News sent a reporter-photographer team to Lander to report on how the business district had been decimated. There were broken windows in stores on the 300 block, formerly the most expensive real estate in town. Now, just about all the stores were closed.
It was ghostly (like in "ghost town.") Lander was mentioned in that article as a modern town that was drying up right before your eyes.

We weren't ready to give up yet.

Our board of directors of LEADER met every week at 7 a.m. on Wednesdays. I was the president for the first three years. To my amazement, it really became a support group for the folks who hadn't left.
More than 600 homes were empty in town, our Main Street was devoid of most of its operating businesses, our main industries had been shut down for over five years by then, and future didn't look much better than the present.

I called those weekly support group meetings "Workaholics Anonymous." Because just about everyone there was desperately trying to keep their doors open.

Go with your strengths

However, there were at least four large bright spots on our horizon. Let me tell you about them:

• Government - Because of Lander's location, it appeared that large federal offices like Bureau of Land Management, U. S. Forest Service. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and state offices like Game and Fish, and the Wyoming State training School not only would be staying, but might even be expanding. All did, by the way.
  
  
• Outdoor education - Lander was home to the National Outdoor Leadership School. It was turning into a terrific employer and a great civic-minded organization. Today, they employ nearly 300 people and more growth is coming. They just finished construction of a $9 million international headquarters under the guidance of their brilliant CEO John Gans.
  
  
• Medicine - By 1993, there were over 90 medical doctors on the staff of the local hospital. We had a new 107-bed medical center and medicine continued to be a huge money-generator to the local economy. Also, lots of our local doctors invested in other businesses and participated in civic affairs. Today that continues under the leadership of State Rep. Dr. Harry Tipton. He was one of the visionaries who years ago anticipated the growth of the Lander medical community.
  
  Art - One of the more interesting loans made in its early days of LEADER was to Monte and Bev Paddleford who founded Eagle Foundry. Today it's the largest art foundry west of the Mississippi with more than 50 employees. Because of its presence in town, Lander now has more major bronze artworks that any town in America, per-capita on its Main Street.

The bottom of Lander's depression probably hit in 1987, when we had to launch a Vigorous Retiree Recruitment program as a way to find people to buy all those 600 homes.

It was my idea and it worked well. The Welcome Wagon said at the end of the first year, more than 99 new people had bought homes in our town.

The hard-working people of Lander pitched in and made a dream become a reality. Just five years later, the author Norman Crampton selected Lander as the number-five best small town in the nation.

His book was published the following year and Lander was on its way. The local Chamber of Commerce had more than 400 inquiries from people all over America wanting to know about our little town. Soon, more houses were sold and Main Street filled up with thriving new businesses.

In Lander, the mines, had, indeed, closed forever. But the good people in key positions were able to visualize a bright future that could be created without having to rely on those minerals. That goal has been accomplished.

This is being written on New Year's Day, 2002. In the past 18 months, Lander has seen construction of a new bank (over $1 million cost), a new motel addition (50 rooms), the huge NOLS international headquarters, construction of three wonderful new restaurants plus installation of a $200,000 bronze roundup statue to celebrate the millennium (the largest such statue in Wyoming.)

Ground has also been broken for a new museum complex, a new park, a new $26 million dollar high school and a high-quality medical clinic operation. Lander's economy is doing very well, indeed.

Meanwhile, the LEADER economic development group continues to meet every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. You can find me there when I am not on the campaign trail.

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Authorized by William C. Sniffin
Contributions or gifts to Bill Sniffin for Governor 2002 are not tax-deductible.
Bill Sniffin for Governor - P.O. Box 900 ­ Lander, WY 82520 (307) 332-3111, ext. 17