Back on April 3 I wrote an article about the current not so rosey economic picture for Wyoming in a post called
Lex Anteinternet: Pulling out the legs of the stool.
Now one of those legs has become a bit wobblier yet.
Cheyenne became the first Wyoming city, or at least the first I'm aware of, to announce layoffs. Seventeen of its staff are being let go.
Cheyenne's economy has always been different from the rest of Wyoming's. The city got started as a Union Pacific town and then became the seat of the territorial government as it was the only really significant municipality in the state at the time the territory was established. It naturally went on from there to become the state capitol, even though there have been occasional efforts to move it to a more central location, something that's not going to occur. It is one of only two Wyoming towns with a military presence, the other being Guernsey where the National Guard's Camp Guernsey is located. That camp has become a very significant military base over the years but it pales in comparison to Warren Air Force Base. Added to that, Cheyenne also has the Air National Guard's principal air strip at the town's airport.
Oil has only come to Cheyenne's Laramie County in the last decade but it has come north of town, so it's economy has joined Wyoming's a bit in that fashion, but unlike other counties that are heavily dominated by petroleum and/or coal and which also have an agricultural base, the economy of Laramie County has never been dominated by them. In modern times Cheyenne often sat out economic slumps in the state due to its strong governmental employee base.
Well, apparently not this time. The drastic decline is state revenues is clearly going to hit state funding and in fact already has. Governor Gordon has been indicating that state agencies should be prepared to cut back further. The Coronavirus has slowed down everything on I80 and I25, which meet in Cheyenne, and that no doubt has had an impact on the local economy. I don't know what, if anything, the Union Pacific has been experiencing, but it's probably experiencing something, and while Cheyenne's airport is hardly a regional hub, a direct flight there which had gone from the city to Dallas is, or has been, eliminated on at least a temporary basis.
Moreover, according to Cheyenne's mayor, Cheyenne has lost a lot of retail sales due to the shelter in place order in Colorado. That wouldn't have occured to me, but there are a fair number of people who live in Colorado and work in Cheyenne. I know two people who do just that and one of them is making a bare minimum commute and the other isn't commuting at all.
So the town's revenues are down and its laying people off.
How this changes once the COVID 19 restrictions are lifted isn't apparent, but it will change things for Cheyenne. Oil will still be in the $20s for the foreseeable future, but some traveling will pick back up. So these layoffs, or at least the full extent of them, may be temporary. Still, this is yet another scary development for the state's economy.
