Thousands of Rocky Mountain Power residential customers will see their monthly electric bills jump by about $14 beginning in June. 

The Wyoming Public Service Commission approved the rate hike Tuesday, the latest in a series of increases by a company that has pointed to fossil fuel market volatility, skyrocketing insurance for wildfire liability and major investments in renewable energy for the rising costs.

The three-member commission voted unanimously to accept a settlement agreement struck between Rocky Mountain Power, its largest industrial customers in the state and the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate. The deal reduced the utility’s original request for a $123.5 million increase, or 14.7%, to an increase of about $85.5 million, or 10.2%.

Those figures could change slightly, based on a handful of minor stipulations to the agreement. The commission’s final order will be issued in a few weeks, potentially changing some calculations.

Commissioners acknowledged that, although they don’t like to see continuing rate hikes, the company is essentially responding to rapidly changing market forces, as well as diverging federal and regional policies that drive up the utility’s costs and ultimately impact customer rates.

Affordability, Commissioner Mary Throne said, “is a challenge — and it’s a challenge across the [electric utility] sector. I think it’s time we have sort of a global discussion about affordability and bring in the relevant stakeholders.”

Because Rocky Mountain Power is part of PacifiCorp’s larger, six-state service region, the utility must comply with renewable energy requirements that many in Wyoming regard as “unwise,” according to Commission Deputy Chairman Chris Petrie.

“I think many of those [Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp] decisions represent the utility’s best effort to continue to provide the required service and to control their costs, as best they can, while complying with other pressures exerted on them,” Petrie said. “We certainly have to acknowledge that there have been significant rate increases that are welcomed by nobody.”

The utility’s customers also experienced a 5.5% general rate increase in January 2024, as well as a pair of temporary upward fuel cost adjustments over the past two years. 

Unresolved issues

Commissioners agreed that the approved rate hike settlement, even with their added stipulations, likely won’t forestall the utility asking for yet another rate increase in the near future.

Before the company makes another request, however, the panel encouraged it to make good on a promise to “workshop” those issues with stakeholders, including the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate and the Wyoming Industrial Energy Consumers group — the intervening parties that hashed out the settlement agreement with Rocky Mountain Power.

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For example, Rocky Mountain Power and its parent company PacifiCorp have relied for years on a “multi-state protocol” group of stakeholders to hash out how to divide systemwide expenses and infrastructure investments among the six states where PacifiCorp operates. But under pressure from some states, PacifiCorp has signaled its intent to possibly dump the multi-state protocol process and replace it with a more piecemeal approach.

In fact, PacifiCorp has contemplated a “corporate realignment,” or breakup, in an effort to better respond to pro-fossil fuel policies favored in states like Wyoming and Utah and cleaner energy policy demands in states like California, Oregon and Washington.

Another matter to “workshop” is increasingly expensive wildfire liability insurance and litigation costs and how to fairly plan for those expenses, according to the commission.

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HULETT—Jim Neiman says that the best-case scenario for his family’s timber mill at the base of the Bear Lodge Mountains is that it doesn’t shutter. 

The Crook County sawmill in 2022 shrunk to one shift to survive hard economic times and a dearth of available timber. Three years later, there are what appear to be major industry tailwinds: a pro-logging presidential order, prospective tariff hikes on Canadian timber and now a U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary’s order declaring an “emergency” to stimulate logging on 112.6 million acres of national forest. The order covers nearly 60% of all national forest lands.  

Collectively, it stands to help, Neiman said. The timber sale approval process, which is run through the National Environmental Policy Act, is likely to go much faster. 

“The old process with NEPA could sometimes take a year and a half to five years,” he said. “This will speed that up to a few months.”

Yet, the businessman and cousin of the Wyoming Legislature’s speaker of the House is not optimistic that he’ll be returning to two shifts at his Wyoming mill anytime within the foreseeable future.   

“I would hope to maintain one shift in Hulett and two shifts at our Spearfish operation,” Neiman told WyoFile. 

That’s the optimistic outlook. The alternative is he has to close. 

“Something’s got to happen fast,” he said, “and it can’t wait three years.” 

Hulett, which houses one of the Equality State’s few remaining large commercial sawmills, is in as good a position as any Wyoming community to benefit from what proponents hope will be a Trump-driven revival of a dying timber industry. Yet, industry insiders, watchdog groups and foresters all say that it’s questionable whether another golden era of timber cutting will return to the Black Hills region, or any reach of Wyoming, soon. The infrastructure that would enable such a boom has faded into history, and in its absence prospective large-scale cuts don’t pencil out for large swaths of the state. And there’s likely too much regulatory uncertainty, or not enough accessible timber, to stimulate new mills in the old logging towns, like Afton and Dubois, that lost them long ago.  

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is attempting to stimulate commercial cutting on national forests all around the country. 

Federal directive

The latest effort comes from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. An April 3 secretarial order from the Texas attorney eliminates the “objection” process and requirements to provide a range of options under the National Environmental Policy Act when reviewing different timber cutting projects. The regulatory streamlining applies to the majority of the federal forestland nationwide and in Wyoming. Forestland that got bunched in includes those rated at “very high” or “high” wildfire risk, and areas at risk of “substantially increased tree mortality” in the next 15 years. 

A map accompanies the order. By some measures, it’s crude. The map shows that Rollins’ emergency declaration extends to areas that are unlikely to ever be logged because of other federal laws and designations. Encompassed by the emergency declaration are large swaths of designated wilderness areas and inventoried roadless areas, the map shows.

“Wyoming’s got about two-thirds of its forested lands in roadless and wilderness [areas], and so only a third of the Forest Service lands are probably even accessible to manage,” Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris told WyoFile. “But there are still a lot of lands to manage.” 

From Norris’ perspective, Rollins’ order is the latest in a succession of “positive changes” in trying to “make timber more accessible.” Via that order, the agriculture secretary also directed the Forest Service to update its guidance to speed up timber sales, “increase certainty in future timber supply” and boost cutting. 

Forest Service Acting Associate Chief Chris French announced he was acting on that guidance in tandem on April 3, writing in a memo that he’d be completing a national strategy within 30 days. His memo tasks regional foresters with developing five-year strategies aimed at achieving a 25% increase in timber production within two months of the national strategy’s completion. 

Only time will tell whether that’s an achievable goal within the eight national forests that are partially or fully within Wyoming. But it’ll be “tough,” at least in the view of Bridger-Teton National Forest retiree Andy Norman, a wildfire specialist who has a background in forestry. 

“It’s economics,” Norman said. “You can say as much as you want, but it’s still going to be tough.”

‘Timber mining’

Part of the issue is that Wyoming is a substandard state to grow trees. It often takes so long for trees to mature — a century even — that it’s effectively “timber mining.”

“You harvest them,” Norman said, “you’re not going to come back.”

The other part of the equation is the scarcity of large commercial sawmills that can enable timber sales to pencil out. Only a few remain, including Neiman Enterprises’ operation in Hulett, a Saratoga mill that relies on standing dead timber and the South and Jones Timber Company mill in Evanston. 

Because cut trees have to be shipped to one of those spots or out of state, the cost of diesel and gasoline can have a lot of bearing on the viability of a logging project, Norris said. 

There are subsidized logging efforts underway in parts of Wyoming a long way from a sawmill. 

Norris pointed to the Dunoir watershed in the Shoshone National Forest, which was designated as a “critical fireshed” during the Biden administration. 

“Funding was given to do the work,” the state forester said. The National Forest Foundation and Mule Deer Foundation, she said, have also assisted in the project by paying for a “Good Neighbor Authority” forester position. 

U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Troy Heithecker said in early March that the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act could speed up the work in the Dunoir area. The act, which has passed the U.S. House, has been introduced in the Senate and has support even from Democratic lawmakers like California Sen. Alex Padilla.

“We’re ready,” Heithecker told state lawmakers at the Legislature’s annual “forest health briefing.” “We have projects lined up as soon as that bill passes.”

In Hulett, Neiman operates out of a region that’s one of the most favorable for modern-day Wyoming logging. The dominant conifer in the Black Hills is the ponderosa, which is faster growing. And there are still mills in close proximity, unlike many of Wyoming’s other national forests.  

“We’ve got the sawmill capacity, but we don’t have the supply of trees,” said Dave Mertz, a retired Black Hills National Forest staffer who’s now a member of a South Dakota public lands stewardship group, the Norbeck Society. “I would say that the Black Hills National Forest is an outlier because of that.” 

‘Been through a lot’

The Black Hills region’s forests, he said, have “been through a lot,” including the mountain pine beetle epidemic and large wildfires around the turn of the century. Overcutting what’s left, he said, is a concern — and partly for the industry’s sake. 

“The Norbeck Society, and pretty much everybody, wants to see a sawmill industry here for the long term,” Mertz said. “We absolutely realize the value of having that, but we think that the surest way to lose them would be overcutting the forest.”

“Eventually,” he added, “there won’t be enough left there to support them.”

But Neiman simultaneously feels pressure to bring in more timber from the Black Hills National Forest to keep the lights on and his remaining staff employed. Across all his mills, he’s already laid off 200 people in the last five years. At the current rate of timber sales, he’s not going to be able to keep going, he said. 

“They’ve only put 400,000 board feet up,” Neiman said of the current fiscal year. “That won’t run us a week. That’s unacceptable.” 

Neiman spoke from a family restaurant, the 77 Steakhouse and Saloon, located in the clubhouse of a golf course that he built to help diversify the northeastern Wyoming community’s economy. He brought golf to Crook County, along with an airport, after seeing firsthand what happened to Pacific Northwest timber towns when the floor fell out during the spotted owl wars late last century. 

“Unemployment went to 70%, divorce rates went up, all the social issues just skyrocketed,” Neiman said. 

Hulett’s in a relatively better position if its mill someday becomes a relic. There’s a tourism economy from Devil’s Tower National Monument and an active real estate industry capitalizing on ranchland that’s being subdivided. That, however, is yet another challenging dynamic for commercial timber cutting in the Bear Lodge Mountains. 

Some of the newcomers don’t allow logging, said Doug Mills, who runs Bearlodge Forest Products, a business that includes a pallet-cutting mill in Hulett. Even when it’s available for cutting, subdivided ranchland doesn’t always make financial sense to log, he said.

“You can’t just roll in there and take care of a guy’s 40 acres,” Mills said. “It costs so much to mobilize equipment.” 

Challenges aside, Mills, like Neiman, is hopeful that the storm of federal policy changes “lifts some of the pressure” and provides some momentum to keep going. 

“A lot of the mills are tapering down, or selling off,” Mills said. “Once a business like that … goes away, they don’t come back very soon.”

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The Trump administration will forgo an environmental review for thousands of federal oil and natural gas leases, including some in Wyoming, at the center of a 10-year legal and political battle.

The Interior Department announced Thursday it will rescind a last-minute Biden-era notification to conduct a full environmental impact statement review for 3,244 oil and gas leases issued between 2015 and 2020 in seven western states. There are other review processes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to legally satisfy the cumulative court orders and settlement agreements stemming from the years-long battle.

BLM published its official notice to ditch the review in the Federal Register on Friday. The BLM “is evaluating options for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act for these oil and gas leasing decisions,” according to the agency. 

One group involved in the decade-long legal battle questioned that approach. 

“We don’t know what that’s going to look like or, honestly, if it will even happen,” WildEarth Guardians Climate and Health Advocate Melissa Troutman told WyoFile on Thursday.

WildEarth Guardians initially sued the BLM in 2016, pressuring the agency to more fully analyze the cumulative climate and health implications of its oil and gas leasing actions. The conservation group is particularly “dialed into” BLM’s environmental role in the prolific Permian Basin oil and gas field that spans New Mexico and western Texas — one of the most intense drilling plays in the nation, Troutman said. But WildEarth Guardians and other groups have condemned the federal agency for what they see as its capitulation — via piecemeal environmental reviews — to the industry’s larger pollution from activities on federal lands throughout the West.

As multiple lawsuits and differing court rulings ensued over the years, the BLM has been whipsawed by changing presidential administrations with vastly differing directives over the issues.

“Meanwhile, more climate pollution, more families in these frontline communities [face health implications], more spills contaminating land and water are occurring every day,” Troutman said. “This is not the time to delay a further assessment of what’s already happening.”

She added: “This whole plan to ‘unleash American energy’ is really just unleashing even more oil and gas pollution on top of it.”

Industry officials contend the leases in question, and their environmental impacts, have been analyzed ad nauseam. 

“The court[s], in these cases, are requiring some level of review. The BLM must follow the law,” Petroleum Association of Wyoming President Pete Obermueller told WyoFile via email. 

But he stressed, the Biden administration’s approach wasn’t the best route.

“A multi-state [environmental impact statement] is not the only way to undertake environmental analysis,” he wrote 

The Interior Department, which oversees the BLM, noted the action to rescind the Biden administration’s promise for a full environmental review — which would have included cumulative climate and health impacts — is in line with President Donald Trump’s January executive order, “Unleashing American Energy.” The order directs the Interior and other federal agencies to, among other things, reduce “regulatory barriers for oil and gas companies and [expedite] domestic energy development.”

Meantime, the BLM is moving forward with quarterly oil and gas lease sales. The agency this month initiated a 30-day “public scoping period” seeking input on 99 oil and gas lease parcels in Wyoming that it may include in a December lease sale. The comment period ends May 9. 

For information, maps and instructions for how to comment, go to this BLM webpage.

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A dismayed Chris Servheen is raising the alarm about what’s become of federal scientists who have kept watch over the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzly bear population for the last 55 years. 

The group of research biologists and technicians, known as the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, are being hamstrung at best and arguably dismantled, he told WyoFile. For decades, until his retirement in 2016, Sevheen worked closely with the study team while coordinating grizzly bear recovery for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

“It’s functionally destroying the organization,” Servheen said Thursday. “The study team has been in place since 1970 — over 50 years of work and experience and knowledge. It’s going to just disappear and die.” 

Servheen’s perplexed about what the Trump administration has to gain. 

“How could anybody be so negligent and vile that they’re trying to destroy something that has brought grizzly bears back from the edge of extinction?” he said. “Why would you do that? It’s just so destructive.”

Led by Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling started with a hiring freeze. Longtime supervisory wildlife biologist Mark Haroldson retired, and his position is not being filled, according to Servheen. Then, the team’s longtime leader, Frank van Manen, announced an earlier-than-desired retirement. 

“He didn’t want to leave,” Servheen said of van Manen, who declined to comment. 

According to Servheen, van Manen’s departure was related to the federal government’s ongoing upheaval.  

“They’re putting fear into people,” Servheen said. “That’s basically evil, to do that to hard-working people who have been civil servants for decades.” 

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team is part of the U.S. Geological Survey, and its website lists four other employees. Three are technicians, which are often seasonal, entry-level employees. The remaining staff biologist has been in the job about three years.

If any of the study team’s employees opt to stick it out amid a second wave of buyouts, they’re likely to be out of an office space come fall. The Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, described by its director as “one of the nation’s key laboratories to study the ecosystems and species of the Northern Rockies,” is one of hundreds of federal facilities being shuttered by DOGE. 

Although located in Bozeman, many of the federal facility’s researchers do work in Wyoming. 

“They do all kinds of other stuff: brucellosis and chronic wasting disease and aquatic species,” Servheen said. “It’s a huge science center.” 

The planned closure has elicited protests. According to Yellowstonian.org, 42 retired or active biologists petitioned Montana’s congressional delegation to use their influence to “protect [the science center] and its employees from these unwarranted attacks by DOGE.”

Federal offices located in Wyoming have not escaped the closures. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s tribal-focused Lander conservation office and a USGS Cheyenne water science station are among those that have been marked for the chopping block. 

WyoFile could not officially confirm impacts to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. Federal agencies under the Trump administration have declined or not responded to WyoFile’s requests for more information on downsizing and office closures. An inquiry to a USGS public affairs officer on Thursday yielded no information about the matter. 

The Center for Biological Diversity has been pressing the federal agency for details as well. On Thursday, the environmental advocacy organization publicized a Freedom of Information Act request to gain more insight into the future of the federal grizzly team. 

Both recently departed veteran study team members — van Manen and Haroldson — are staying engaged in grizzly science in pro-bono emeritus roles, according to a source familiar with the situation. 

Nevertheless, Servheen worries that the hit to the science team could trickle down to the grizzly population — estimated at 1,000 or so bears in the Greater Yellowstone — that it’s charged with studying.

Over the decades, federal researchers have played a pivotal role in improving understanding of the region’s bruins, including completing studies that have helped make the case that grizzly bears are fully recovered and no longer require Endangered Species Act protection. They’ve also amassed mortality and other demographic datasets and compiled an annual report. 

“The foundation of Yellowstone grizzly bear recovery has been built on science,” Servheen said. “Removing that science eliminates our ability to maintain Yellowstone grizzly bears.”

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To the delight of Wyoming’s top elected officials, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders Tuesday to “reinvigorate” U.S. coal, but whether deregulation can change the tide of market forces remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term in office, the coal industry continued to lose most of its electric utility market share to natural gas and spiraled into a series of bankruptcies.

The orders will restore “beautiful, clean coal,” according to the White House, by “removing federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production, encouraging the utilization of coal to meet growing domestic energy demands, increasing American coal exports, and ensuring that federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.”

At Trump’s invitation, Gov. Mark Gordon was on hand at the White House to celebrate the signing. 

“This is a great day for Wyoming coal,” Gordon said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “We produce more coal than any other state in the nation. These executive orders will be impactful for our state’s coal industry and will help ensure Wyoming coal is available to help meet our nation’s growing energy demand.”

Likewise, Sen. Cynthia Lummis attended the event and lauded the president’s embrace of coal.

“Wyoming stands ready and able to support President Trump’s initiative,” Lummis said in a prepared statement. “The previous administration’s anti-science, anti-energy, anti-Wyoming policies cost good paying jobs, increased energy costs and played into the hands of America’s adversaries.”

The orders direct federal agencies to lift perceived regulatory barriers to coal mining and direct the Bureau of Land Management to “prioritize coal leasing and related activities, consistent with applicable law, as the primary land use for the public lands with coal resources.” Trump will also use his presidential emergency authority to allow utilities to continue operating coal-burning electric generation facilities previously scheduled for retirement. The president’s orders also exempt, for two years, coal plants from previous federal requirements to reduce toxic emissions, including for arsenic, mercury and benzene.

The actions, according to the Trump administration, are necessary to assert “American energy independence” and to ensure U.S. coal will help meet “the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

How quickly the sweeping actions might slow or reverse more than 15 years of policy and market shifts away from coal and toward natural gas, wind and solar energy remains to be seen, according to some industry analysts. Regardless, many coal-reliant utilities have already delayed or erased coal plant retirement dates in recent months, including PacifiCorp, which operates several coal-fired units in Wyoming.

Conservation groups were quick to condemn Trump’s actions.

“Like his recent tariffs, the executive order that President Trump signed [Tuesday] presumes Americans are living in the distant past,” Western Organization of Resource Councils Board Chair Barbara Vasquez said. “It makes no economic, financial, or market sense and is simply a gift to corporate polluters that rural communities will have to pay for through higher electric bills, worsened air quality and toxic pollution of public lands and waters.”

Conservation groups also note that last year was the hottest on human record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that Trump’s actions threaten to throw a wrench into efforts to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“Donald Trump is hell-bent on dragging the United States back to the 19th century, complete with robber barons, smokestacks, crippling tariffs and measles,” Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby said. “The free market has already made it clear that renewable energy sources are a cheaper and healthier path to meet America’s energy needs.”

Climbing out of the pit

The Interior Department responded immediately, directing its Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday to resume leasing federal coal in the Powder River Basin — the nation’s largest coal-producing region overlying northeast Wyoming and parts of Montana.

“The Golden Age is here, and we are starting to ‘Mine, Baby, Mine’ for clean American coal,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “Interior is unlocking America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation.” 

The BLM, under the Biden administration in 2024, issued its final supplemental environmental impact statement and proposed amendment to land use plans directing its Buffalo and Miles City, Montana, field offices, to select a “no future coal leasing alternative.” It justified the move, in part, by noting that coal companies had not nominated a major new federal coal lease in the region in more than 10 years and that existing leases would allow mining to continue through 2041.

Wyoming and Montana sued the BLM in December, seeking to overturn the leasing ban. Now that the agency appears to be rolling back the ban under Trump’s directive — while the matter is still before the courts — it remains unclear whether mining companies in the region will produce more coal or nominate federal coal for new leases.

For now, U.S. coal remains in decline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The production decline, at least for the next year or so, will remain most prominent in the Powder River Basin, according to industry analyst group McCloskey. 

At the same time, however, forecasts for skyrocketing electricity demand in the U.S. provide hope for Powder River Basin producers, who rely almost entirely on the nation’s fleet of coal plants.

“The electricity demand that these data centers require — right now it represents roughly about 4% of the electricity produced in the United States,” McCloskey Data Analytics Director Andrew Blumenfeld said during a webinar in March. “That is expected to grow to 12% of the electricity demand in the United States by 2028 — a mere three years from now.”

In a recent quarterly report call with investors, Peabody Energy — Wyoming’s largest coal producer — said that it is being approached by data center developers to explore deals for coal contracts, in some cases, to potentially build their own dedicated coal-fired power generation.

Is coal the future of American energy?

Gordon has long touted using coal as a stepping stone to prove carbon capture technologies at commercial scale — an essential strategy, he says, to keep Wyoming coal in the nation’s energy mix while minimizing the coal-fired electric utility industry’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“While the [executive orders] are a great first step, the real focus must not only be extending the life of coal-fired generating plants nearing retirement, but to actually pave the way to building new power plants,” Gordon said. “These are essential to our future. Wyoming is ready to lead the way and be a partner in that process.

“I encourage all Wyoming utility companies to carefully examine the possibilities provided in these [executive orders],” Gordon added, “in order to increase the use of coal and other sources of electricity to see that Wyomingites and other consumers have affordable, reliable and dependable energy.”

Meanwhile, conservation groups argue that fast-tracking fossil fuel production and consumption by eliminating regulatory checks is unnecessary in light of continually more efficient and affordable renewable energy. 

“We can meet that [increasing electricity] demand through a combination of renewable energy and [power] storage resources — that’s where we should be making our investments,” Earthjustice Managing Attorney for the Northern Rockies Regional Office Jenny Harbine told WyoFile. “This false narrative that coal is the fuel of the future is as deceitful as it is harmful.”

The U.S. coal industry’s decline, Harbine added, is not due to federal policies. “It’s because it’s dirty, increasingly unreliable, and it cannot compete on a level playing field with renewable energy resources.”

If coal is indeed “clean,” as Trump asserts, then why do his executive orders include an allowance for coal plant operators to forego reductions of mercury, arsenic and benzene, she added. In fact, the U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants is aging, with many plants that are beyond 50 and 60 years old. Utilities continually cite aging coal plants as a significant factor in rising costs, Harbine said.

Trump’s approach, according to Harbine, lacks evidence of actual, proven health and economic benefits.

“At some point, communities are going to say, ‘No. We deserve clean air. We deserve clean water. We deserve a future that is brighter and that invests in the new technologies that are available to us,'” Harbine said.

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In a battle over taxes and access to Wyoming’s wide open spaces, U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis voted against a measure that would have blocked the government from selling public land to help fund the federal budget.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators voted Friday evening against a budget amendment brought by Colorado’s Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper that would “prevent[…] the use of proceeds from public land sales to reduce the Federal deficit.”

Democrats and conservationists have decried the GOP’s openness to sell federal land to fund the budget, saying such a divestiture of beloved public assets would be used to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

“Republicans are saying that they need to sell off your public lands to solve the housing crisis,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who co-sponsored the failed budget amendment. “But we already have laws that allow for targeted land transfers for things like housing,” he said in an Instagram post.

Instead, Heinrich said, selling public land under budget reconciliation “means their goal isn’t housing — it’s selling your public land to pay for a tax cut for people like Elon Musk.”

Wyoming public land users should take note of their senators’ votes, said Jordan Schreiber, an Equality State native and director of government relations with The Wilderness Society.

“I think it’s a signal to Wyoming [that Barrasso and Lummis] are OK with selling off public lands for the benefit of America’s wealthiest people,” she said.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council also criticized the Wyoming senators, saying their “disappointing” votes “leave our public lands vulnerable in this budget reconciliation process.”

Their vote “completely ignores the vast benefits that our public lands in Wyoming provide for rural communities and our quality of life,” Alec Underwood, Outdoor Council program director, said in a statement.

Neither Lummis nor Barrasso responded to a request for comment Monday.

False hype?

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the anti-sales budget amendment “false hype” that would only restrict use of land-sales funds. “It doesn’t stop land sales,” he said, promoting the effort.

Opposition to federal land sales “restricts our ability to do anything, everything, develop, plan, build houses, which we desperately need, even to fund our schools, our search-and-rescue, our police services,” Lee said. “This is disgraceful,” he said of the amendment just before it failed Friday.

While Republicans say sales will resolve affordable housing problems in expensive real estate markets near national parks and other desirable locations, Democrats and conservationists see the move as more insidious.

That’s because Republicans have put federal land sales on a menu of items Congress could use to pay for the budget, according to a document obtained by Politico. The menu catalogues as a “savings” any action that “increases sale of federal land.” The value of such sales to the budget is “to be determined,” the document states.

“This vote [on the amendment] is a wake-up call and part of a concerning, larger campaign being waged against public lands at every level of government,” said Wilderness Society President Tracy Stone-Manning, who served as director of the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden. In a statement, she ticked off other anti-conservation actions by the Trump administration, “including mass firings of land managers and executive orders that demand more drilling and mining.

“It appears,” she said, “their ultimate goal is to destroy our conservation heritage, totally contrary to what Americans actually value.”

That conservation heritage underpins Wyoming’s outdoor recreation and tourism economies, both of which are centered around the Yellowstone ecosystem. Tourism is Wyoming’s second-largest industry and generated $4.8 billion in 2023, employing 33,000 people, according to a University of Wyoming study.

Wyoming residents and lawmakers have supported the industry and public lands in a number of ways. This year, the Legislature defeated a resolution calling on Congress to begin the process of turning over all federal land in the state, except Yellowstone, to Wyoming.

In 2024, Wyoming lawmakers also authorized the sale of the square-mile Kelly Parcel of state school trust land in Grand Teton National Park for conservation, not for development or affordable housing.

The state itself, through Gov. Mark Gordon and Attorney General Bridget Hill, also refused to back the grossest claims in a fast-track Utah petition to the Supreme Court that sought to give the Beehive State 18.5 million of federal land. Wyoming’s official filing tepidly supported Utah but stopped short of demanding federal property.

The Supreme Court rejected Utah’s effort, dismissing strong Utah backers like Wyoming’s lone U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman and Wyoming Freedom Caucus members. Critics of Western states’ efforts to take over ownership of federal property say the states could never afford to manage the land and would end up selling it to private interests, destroying the public access to public lands enjoyed by all Americans.

Colorado’s Sen. Hickenlooper, who sponsored the anti-sale budget amendment that died Friday, said his measure would have “prevent[ed] this reckless fire sale of our campgrounds, our forests, our national treasures.”

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Soda ash giant WE Soda has cut 48 jobs from its southwest Wyoming trona operations, including 32 salaried management positions and 16 contract positions, the company said Monday. The move follows the trona operator’s purchase of competitor Genesis Alkali on Feb. 28.

“Post-acquisition, consolidations were needed for some salaried management positions to achieve efficiency, reduce redundancy and to strengthen the existing hourly workforce,” WE Soda Vice President of Human Relations JoAnna DeWald told WyoFile via email.

The layoffs do not include hourly union workers, a company spokesman said.

The terminations follow 30 layoffs by the previous owner late last year — a move that irked union representatives because Genesis Alkali pink-slipped several new hires, including some who had just relocated to Wyoming to build careers. Reached Monday by WyoFile, United Steel Workers Local 13214 President Marshal Cummings said he didn’t know all the details about the recent layoffs, but said he was happy the cuts did not include union workers.

In fact, according to Cummings, WE Soda has been hiring back some of the union workers that were laid off last year. The union’s relationship with WE Soda, Cummings said, “has been extremely positive.

“They want to fix the things that are broken: management, projects, our relationship, the equipment,” he continued. “All those times I said, ‘We want to be the safest, most efficient, most productive mine in the world,’ is going to come true with this management team, it sounds like.”

WE Soda now employs about 900 workers in the region, according to Cummings.

The job cuts come only weeks after another southwest Wyoming mining company laid off 28 workers in nearby Kemmerer.

World’s largest soda ash producer

London-based WE Soda paid $1.4 billion to acquire Genesis Alkali and its operations, which include the Westvaco underground trona mine and related processing facilities, as well as the Granger solution mining facility — both located in western Sweetwater County.

“We are now the largest producer of soda ash globally and the only producer that is 100% natural, further underscoring our sustainability leadership,” WE Soda CEO Alasdair Warren said in a prepared statement on March 3. “As we welcome our new Alkali colleagues into the WE Soda family, we will bring together an extraordinary combination of experience and expertise that will create a truly world class industrial minerals company focussed on maintaining the highest standards of safety, operational excellence and sustainability.”

Integrated into the former Genesis operations is WE Soda’s Project West, a multi-billion dollar trona solution-mine expansion project now under construction near Granger.

“By integrating the [Genesis] Alkali facilities with our own Project West development, we plan to utilise the combined engineering expertise of Alkali and WE Soda, and to access existing Alkali infrastructure to significantly reduce the cost and development risk of Project West,” according to WE Soda.

Southwest Wyoming holds the world’s largest known deposit of trona, which is processed into “natural” soda ash — a key commodity in the production of glass, baking soda and myriad other products. Wyoming’s trona and soda ash industries — which employ more than 2,000 workers compared to about 4,100 direct jobs in Wyoming coal mining, according to the Wyoming Mining Association — have been in “expansion” mode in recent years.

In 2022, Genesis Alkali received $665,000 from the state — via the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services — to help train more than 300 workers as part of its efforts to revive the Granger production facility, ultimately adding about 100 workers, according to the state.

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Wyoming’s largest electric utility has thrown a temporary lifeline to the Dave Johnston coal-fired power plant near Glenrock while solidifying plans to stop burning coal at the Naughton power plant near Kemmerer by the end of this year.

The move is welcomed news in Converse County, according to Commission Chairman Jim Willox, noting the Dave Johnston plant employs hundreds of locals. It’s a “scary” proposition in Kemmerer, where the fate of the Naughton plant may foreshadow the viability of the Naughton coal mine, which employs nearly 200 people.

Overall, PacifiCorp, parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, has made a dramatic shift from previous plans to vastly dial back its reliance on coal while fast-tracking investments in renewable energy, according to its final 2025 Integrated Resource Plan — an expansive two-volume document — published earlier this week. The changes, according to PacifiCorp and many observers, come as a response to President Donald Trump’s sweeping rollbacks of fossil fuel regulations and Biden-era climate and renewable energy initiatives.

PacifiCorp, which operates in six western states, including Wyoming, admits that its revised plans will increase reliance on natural gas — a commodity prone to volatile price swings — and more emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. 

Ultimately, the plan reflects the Trump administration shifting say over industrial emissions from the federal government to the states, according to some utility industry analysts. In fact, one major change with the plan — which is a nonbinding “roadmap” for how it will generate and acquire electrical power for the next 20 years and is updated every two years — is PacifiCorp’s move to dedicate specific power sources to specific states.

For example, the company is directing more renewable power sources to its Washington and Oregon service territories because those states have enforceable renewable energy portfolios.

In fact, PacifiCorp — prompted by Utah lawmakers — has mulled a breakup to serve individual states in its service territory specific to their preferred sources of power generation.

It’s a move that Wyoming leaders have championed for years, though many conservation and ratepayer advocacy groups warn it will lead to higher electric bills here, and a dirtier environment beyond. PacifiCorp, part of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, operates some of the dirtiest coal plants in America, according to a recent Reuters analysis.

“Instead of prioritizing cost-effective, job-creating renewable energy, the utility is doubling down on expensive fossil fuels, speculative carbon capture technology and a nuclear plant — all while ratepayers foot the bill,” Sierra Club of Wyoming Energy Organizer Emma Jones said.

What’s in the plan for Wyoming

Rather than fully retiring two of four coal-burning units at the Dave Johnston power plant in 2028, the utility now plans to convert those units to natural gas in 2029 and continue their operation. A third coal unit at Dave Johnston will be shut down in 2027, as previously planned, and the fourth, which had no retirement date, will now be converted to natural gas in 2030.

The company’s plans for the Jim Bridger power plant east of Rock Springs and the Naughton plant near Kemmerer didn’t change. 

Two of four coal units at Jim Bridger were converted to natural gas last year, and the company still plans to retrofit the other two units there with carbon capture technology by 2030 or 2032, to comply with a Wyoming mandate.

At Naughton, the first of three coal units was converted to natural gas in 2020. PacifiCorp confirmed this week it still plans to take the two remaining coal units offline by the end of this year and resume operating them on natural gas in 2026 — a commitment also reflected in a November filing with the Wyoming Public Service Commission.

The switch away from coal there, according to PacifiCorp, is due to a determination that “natural gas conversion of Naughton units 1 and 2 was the least-cost, least-risk option for the company and its customers” and worth the estimated $12.1 million cost to do it, according to previous planning documents.

The future of the Wyodak plant outside Gillette is less clear. The company previously planned to retire the coal plant in 2039. Now, there’s no official retirement date for the plant, PacifiCorp told WyoFile. However, if previous iterations of the Clean Air Act under the Biden administration remain, it would be retired in 2032. 

Local officials welcomed the news of a reprieve for some coal plants in the state, even though many will eventually be converted to natural gas. The power plant is responsible for hundreds of jobs, directly and indirectly, according to local officials.

In Converse County, the Dave Johnston power plant has been critical to the local economy, Commission Chairman Jim Willox told WyoFile. “It provides regular, good-paying employment and, even more importantly, baseline power for the western United States,” Wilcox said.

Shifting coal markets

Before Trump’s tariff initiatives this week, there was growing optimism among coal proponents that the U.S. coal market might rebound from recent declines.

Although U.S. coal production is still projected to decline again this year, particularly in the Powder River Basin, the rate of decline is slowing due to increasing electrical demand. Six months ago, the U.S. utility industry planned to retire some 15,600 megawatts of coal-fired power within the next year, according to the coal industry analyst company McCloskey. By March, however, planned coal plant retirements shrank to 12,300 megawatts.

One megawatt is enough electricity to power about 750 homes.

“This is driven by the huge requirements for cloud computing, AI computing, bitcoin mining, cryptocurrency and the ongoing movement to e-commerce and online sales,” McCloskey Associate Director and Research Analyst Dianna Ridgway said in March. “All of this is driving an increase in future [electrical] load growth. As a result, power generators are turning back their previous decisions to retire coal plants.”

However, McCloskey analysts noted, the extension of coal plants is likely to be short-lived simply because the U.S. fleet is already beyond its life expectancy and there are no new coal plants in queue for construction.

“I do believe we’ll see some of these [coal plant] retirements get delayed further,” McCloskey Data Analytics Director Andrew Blumefeld told attendees of a March webinar. “But, ultimately, time is not on the side of the coal units.”

Although PacifiCorp is pushing back coal plant retirement dates, it noted that due to the increasing cost to operate the facilities — many of which are more than 50 years old — it will continue the practice of operating coal plants at less than their rated capacity.

PacifiCorp also still plans to finalize an agreement — perhaps this year, it said — to buy electricity from TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer. The utility, however, still has not disclosed the potential cost, which would be passed on to ratepayers across multiple states. Natrium’s anticipated construction cost is $4 billion.

Renewable energy

Although PacifiCorp will use slightly more solar energy than called for in its 2023 plan, that power is mostly dedicated to its customers in Oregon and Washington, according to the company.

“Wind is way down across the board,” Sierra Club staff attorney Rose Monahan told WyoFile. 

Though the latest plan calls for more than 3,700 megawatts of new wind power generation throughout its six-state service region by 2045, that’s a 59% reduction compared to the company’s previous plan. 

PacifiCorp is still moving forward with construction of its $8 billion Gateway interstate electric transmission lines — touted as key to providing “long-term affordability and reliability and helping build a more resilient grid,” according to the company, and essential to meet “significant new data center loads.” That means Wyoming is likely to see the continued expansion of wind energy construction in Wyoming, Monahan said, without reaping all the benefits of that energy.

“This means that Wyoming’s electric rates are still going to be closely tied to fossil fuels,” Monahan said.

She noted that in recent rate hike requests in Wyoming — both for permanent increases and annual fuel cost adjustments — the company has pointed to the increasing costs of operating coal-fired facilities and the volatility of coal and natural gas commodity markets. “Wyoming’s electric rates are still going to be closely tied to fossil fuels, which PacifiCorp acknowledged in the last rate case were far and away the biggest driver of rate increases,” Monahan said.

PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power recently agreed to trim its most recent Wyoming rate hike request from 14.7% to 10.2%. The Wyoming Public Service Commission is expected to rule on the settlement agreement on April 15.

Why the changes?

Observers, and even PacifiCorp, have noted that the company’s 2025 planning document represents a significant departure from past plans. 

“These changes are in response to variables in future customer demand, technology developments, state and federal policy changes and projections of future economics,” PacifiCorp spokesman David Eskelsen told WyoFile via email.

He noted that the planning documents, looking 20 years into the future, continually change and are updated every two years. “Each IRP is a roadmap for the future, based on the most current information we have for modeling and projection.”

In the opening of PacifiCorp’s 2025 plan, it states, “The preferred portfolio is responsive to the rapidly expanding arena of new state and federal regulatory requirements.”

Though prudent to account for those continual changes — or at least try to account for them — Monahan said she believes PacifiCorp’s updated long-term plan relies too heavily on the Trump administration’s influence over the utility industry.

“This administration will not last forever,” Monahan said. “This is a 20-year portfolio. To just assume no changes in environmental policy — it’s just building risk into the portfolio, unnecessarily.”

Further complicating the outlook for electrical utilities — and just about every sector of the nation’s economy — are Trump’s tariffs and global responses to them, which include retaliatory tariffs.

Willox, of Converse County, said industrial businesses in his region — PacifiCorp as well as manufacturers and the oil and natural gas industry — purchase a lot of steel, aluminum and other industrial supplies from “all over.”

“[Tariffs] will have an impact on the energy industry in Converse County,” Willox said. “What that impact is, we don’t know yet.”

Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Converse County Commission Chairman Jim Willox’s name.

The post PacifiCorp throws lifeline to one Wyoming power plant, confirms end of coal at another appeared first on WyoFile .

KEMMERER—Linda Slovernick’s husband works at the Kemmerer coal mine that recently laid off 28 workers. Though he survived the cut, her husband is “the breadwinner of the household,” Slovernick told WyoFile, leaving her worried about the possibility of more layoffs.

After living in Kemmerer for decades, the couple’s home is almost paid off — a luxury in a skyrocketing housing market — and they don’t want to have to move. Kemmerer is their home. It’s where they plan to retire. If her husband does get laid off, it’s doubtful he will find another job that pays as well as the mine, said Slovernick, who manages the JCPenney store in downtown Kemmerer.

“You always worry about it,” she said on a sunny day as customers trickled in asking about special deals. “When there’s one round of layoffs, you worry there’s going to be another.

“This coal mine has been the life of this town for decades,” Slovernick continued, adding that it has helped sustain the local economy even when oil and gas go bust. “It would be a devastating blow. The power plant and coal mine provide steady work.”

Nobody knows the fate of the Kemmerer coal mine, which has shed 92 jobs since the fourth quarter of 2017, according to federal data, and nearly half its annual coal production. The company, Kemmerer Operations LLC, isn’t offering details, and local officials say management has kept them in the dark.

One thing is certain, however. The mine’s biggest customer — the nearby Naughton power plant, which accounts for about 42% of the mine’s coal production, according to federal documents — will stop burning coal by the end of the year as its owner, PacifiCorp, converts the plant to natural gas fuel. One Kemmerer coal miner who spoke with WyoFile indicated the mine might also lose a coal contract with a power plant in Utah. Unless the mine can secure sizable new contracts, and soon, the mine’s future may be in jeopardy. 

“Those layoffs are scary,” Kemmerer Mayor Robert Bowen said. “I don’t know how much [Kemmerer coal miners] make, but say they make $50,000 a year — that’s a $1.4 million loss to our local economy. That’s huge for a town this size.”

These are strange times for the 3,000 residents of Kemmerer and neighboring Diamondville — beyond the dread over recent layoffs and uncertainty around the mine.

Five years ago, after talk of closing the Naughton plant first emerged, many locals were resigned to the impending economic disaster without two major economic engines — the power plant and the mine that fuels it.

That all changed — sort of — when, in the fall of 2021, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and the nuclear power company he co-founded, TerraPower, announced it would build the $4 billion Natrium nuclear power plant here. The company chose the community for the demonstration project because Naughton’s owner, PacifiCorp, tentatively planned to close the power plant. Natrium, a beacon of a new age of nuclear power generation, according to its promoters, will “plug into” Naughton’s existing electric utility infrastructure as well as the workforce at the power plant and coal mine.

“It’s given us all hope. A lot of hope,” Rosie’s Pizzeria and Sports Bar owner Phillip Viviano said. “You saw the community go from yellow lawns to green lawns, to people painting houses and putting new roofs on. It meant everything to us, because we love it here. We’re invested here.”

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil embarked on a $400 million “carbon capture” expansion at its Shute Creek natural gas plant 50 miles north near the tiny town of LaBarge. There’s talk of new commercial wind and solar energy projects, a major electric transmission construction project and, in recent years, two different companies have pitched coal-to-products proposals that would make up for the Kemmerer coal mine’s pending contract loss with PacifiCorp’s Naughton power plant.

Yet, for all the promises and a sense of economic jubilation, doubts linger alongside a thick veneer of skepticism that, perhaps, is part of a boom-and-bust town’s DNA. 

The coal-to-products projects, for example, do not appear to be on track to consume coal from the mine before PacifiCorp shuts down the two remaining coal-burning units at Naughton later this year.

Construction jobs related to Natrium and other industrial developments are temporary, many locals note, while others worry that coal miners’ earth-moving skills won’t qualify them to land a permanent job at the nuclear power plant, which is slated to begin operating in 2030.

“They’re going to bring their own people — I mean, it’s a nuclear plant,” said a Kemmerer coal miner while enjoying dinner at Rosie’s Pizzeria. “You don’t just go from running [earth-moving] machinery to running a nuclear plant.”

The miner, who survived the recent round of layoffs, asked WyoFile not to use his name to avoid jeopardizing what already feels like tenuous employment at the mine.

Now in his 50’s, he has worked at natural gas processing plants and says he’s no longer interested in that type of work. “It’s more of a young man’s game,” he said. 

Like others at the mine who see retirement within reach, he’s determined to ride it out at the mine where the pay and benefits promise a decent retirement — if only the mine’s owners can replace the Naughton contract.

To shutter coal-fired power plants — Naughton or otherwise — is a fool’s errand, he said, that will not only make electricity more expensive but snuff out good-paying coal mining jobs that have supported communities for decades. There’s no reason, the miner said, why electric power brokers shouldn’t maintain the coal-fired power plant, the Kemmerer coal mine and the Natrium nuclear plant.

“I don’t see why you can’t have more than one power source,” he said. “We’re living in a time when our government says we want to be energy independent. Well, how are you going to be energy independent if you’re going to start shutting down coal plants and coal mines?”

Tempered optimism

As the coal miner enjoyed his meal, a pair of other miners talked shop over beers, while other men jawed about guns and favorite hunting spots while a group of construction workers huddled around a table chatting in Spanish.

“On Friday and Saturday night, this place will be shoulder-to-shoulder because people come out,” said Viviano, Rosie’s owner. “As soon as this boom really starts, it will be every night.”

Originally from southern California, Viviano first made his way to western Wyoming working rigs on the Pinedale Anticline. He fell in love with the wide-open spaces and small, neighborly communities. A jack-of-all-trades, Viviano is a small business entrepreneur at heart who regards empty storefronts and vacant homes as opportunity.

When he first stepped into Rosie’s, he was immediately overcome with its charm. The union watering hole — long a “second home” to workers from the power plant and coal mine — was in disrepair. Locals lamented to him that it was only open for one hour a day. Somebody, perhaps Viviano, the previous owners suggested, should revive the place. 

Even while many in the community seemed to accept the fate of another bust — coal mine bankruptcies were ravaging rural communities across the nation during President Donald Trump’s first term — Viviano believed Kemmerer “couldn’t fail.” He spiffied up the place, decorated it with baseball memorabilia, installed pinball machines and classic arcade games, and built a kitchen.

“I brought it back online seven days a week to let people enjoy it,” Viviano said. “People come in here and they go, ‘This was always a union bar. We weren’t allowed in here.’ Now it’s open for everybody. ‘We’re still a union bar,’ I tell the boys out there. We support them boys.”

Viviano’s leap of faith on Rosie’s, and the community itself, has paid off — particularly since 2021 when TerraPower announced it had chosen Kemmerer as the location for its Natrium power plant. In fact, the Natrium project — which garnered national attention — has brought a sort of “heat” to the region, attracting businesses and entrepreneurs of all stripes and ambitions.

Beating the rush — in fact, arriving in town just one month before the Natrium announcement — was Seth Snyder, who grew up in the Bighorn Basin. Also an entrepreneur, Snyder, 27, owns a car wash/laundry mat, does freelance management for several businesses in town, and manages Airbnbs and flips homes.

“When I got here, it was a pretty big worry that we were going into a big bust,” Snyder told WyoFile. “This town had to make some changes or else we were going to see, you know, that ghost-town ideology start to come in.”

Even after the Natrium announcement — which comes with promises to offset job losses at the coal plant and coal mine while revitalizing the local economy — probably half the town remained skeptical, he said. Now that construction is underway, many wonder if the growing pains that come with an industrial construction boom will be worth it.

“If it does happen, it’s going to be a great economy-booster,” Snyder said. “But then we go, ‘What happens to the coal plant?'”

Boomtown pains

Growing pains in Kemmerer and Diamondville are already evident, even though Natrium’s estimated “peak” construction workforce of about 1,600 isn’t expected until 2028. Homes and storefronts have been snatched up by outside buyers sight-unseen, Snyder said, and housing prices have skyrocketed. 

“Even bringing 1,000 people in, we can’t handle that. Not in our current situation,” he said. “How do we deal with housing? Do we do temporary housing?”

Snyder says he has faith in local leadership, but an industrial boom brings challenges — a phenomenon that can overwhelm small communities.

“We know we’re going to see a large amount of people come in,” he said. “We have to hire more cops — you have to be able to patrol your streets. Then we’re going to plateau and people are going to leave once the [construction is] done. Now we have to fire cops. So it’s a really difficult situation to be in.”

Kemmerer Mayor Bowen confirmed Snyder’s suspicions. 

Local leaders are scouring for grant dollars to make long overdue road improvements — the pothole situation is so bad in parts of town that entire streets will have to be reconstructed. Though the freshwater system has plenty of capacity to serve a large influx of people, the sewer system is failing. The entire system needs to be replaced, according to Bowen, and the town still owes money on the failing system.

“We’re already at a point where we’re turning away industry, turning away business, because we don’t have the sewer capacity for them,” Bowen told WyoFile. “We don’t want to be turning businesses anyway. We want to invite everybody in. We want to grow. We need more permanent jobs.”

Making matters worse, according to Bowen, is the Wyoming Legislature’s recent 25% property tax cut. That saps desperately needed revenue for just about every public service in the community.

Back at Rosie’s, Viviano admits that for all of his optimism and hope for a new, flourishing economy, the boom presents a lot of hardships and challenges, especially for senior citizens and young families on limited incomes.

“It’s amazing. It’s exciting. It’s good to see what’s happening,” Viviano said. “I feel like we’re on the front lines of getting America back on its feet.

“At the same time, I think we’re all a little fearful,” he continued. “The crime rate is going to trickle up. We’re going to have some guys here that are away from their families, their hearts are bleeding because they have to live on the road. They might come in here and get drunk one night and we might get a hole in the wall.”

Still, Viviano is an eternal optimist. For all the challenges facing the community, he sees opportunity.

“Kemmerer is a beautiful place. It’s got a river running through it. Does anybody know it’s got a river running through it!?” Viviano said. “When there’s a bike path down that river, you watch how the community will flourish — just like the flowers along the river banks. That’s what’s going to happen.”

After decades putting down roots in Kemmerer, Slovernick hopes her husband keeps his job in the coal mine long enough for her family to see that happen.

The post Coal layoffs leave Wyoming community grappling with good, bad of energy transition appeared first on WyoFile .

Like plenty of other Wyoming stockgrowers, Luke Lancaster is an outdoorsman who appreciates seeing wildlife on his Star Valley ranch.

There’ve been exceptions. A hefty herbivore that runs in big herds, elk, are notoriously hard to live with for cattle ranchers whose bottom line depends on the volume of grass growing on their rangeland and having enough hay stacked up to get through the winter. On top of that, the native ungulates can transmit the disease brucellosis to cattle, and vice versa. 

So, until recently, elk were more of a headache for the fourth-generation cattleman who runs Lincoln County’s Spring Creek Ranch. His reaction upon seeing them: “Oh, shit.” 

“This winter was the first time I’d seen them where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” Lancaster told WyoFile. 

What changed? 

Ahead of this winter, Lancaster struck a voluntary, incentive-based deal with a conservation group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, to allow elk on his property southwest of Afton. Paying landowners to benefit wildlife isn’t new: Providing habitat is a big part of the very concept of conservation easements. Take, for example, compensation programs for California rice farmers to keep fields flooded for waterfowl. 

But there’s a novelty and timeliness to what the Bozeman-based nonprofit has dubbed “elk-occupancy agreements.” As the chronic wasting disease epidemic ramps up in a corner of Wyoming where it’s expected to have especially devastating effects, pressure is building for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to abandon a vector for infection, the century-old system of feeding elk. 

“The real goal is to facilitate closing feedgrounds and to create a model to show ranchers who have properties: Here’s an option where you can get paid,” said Steve Sharkey, director of the Knoblach Family Foundation, which funded the Spring Creek Ranch elk-occupancy agreement. 

The situation in southwestern Star Valley is in a way a trial run at the broader initiative. Over the next three or so years, Game and Fish will be reviewing all of its 21 feedgrounds and exploring opportunities to change or even do away with them. 

There was never a permanent feedground on or immediately adjacent to Lancaster’s Spring Creek Ranch, but it was an on-again, off-again feeding site in emergencies. The last time Game and Fish threw hay there, during the cold, long winter of 2022-’23, some 250 elk were holed up on the property. 

Even when the feeding stopped last winter, he said, they had to “fight” 50 to 100 head of wapiti that returned to his land. A lot of that fight was left to Game and Fish, whose staff go to great lengths — even using drones — to haze and even kill elk deemed a nuisance. 

Wyoming Game and Fish personnel weren’t available for an interview on Friday, but the state agency’s staff has been critical to making the Lincoln County deal happen. A warden, James Hobbs, put Lancaster in touch with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. The agency’s Jackson Region wildlife management coordinator, Cheyenne Stewart, also played a big role.  

“I was skeptical, but Cheyenne talked me into it,” said Sharkey, the funder. 

How it works

Going into the winter of 2024-’25, Lancaster was already thinking of trucking his 250 cow-calf pairs to Utah pastureland to spend the winter. “[I]t looked a lot better than having them here in this -40 degree hellhole,” he said.

The deal cut with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition reimbursed him for about half of the transport costs, a roughly $10,000 savings. On top of that, the organization vowed to chip in on the cost of feeding his herd over the winter. 

“It costs about $56,000 to winter the cows,” Lancaster said, “and it cut our feeding bill in half.” 

The agreement also covered some modifications to Spring Creek Ranch, both its infrastructure and management. 

There was also a cost-share around retrofitting about a mile of fencing with “let down” features — a modification used for terrestrial wildlife and also avian species like sage grouse. 

“It can be removed and put down during the winter months, so elk can move through,” said Teddy Collins, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition staffer who worked most closely with Lancaster. “And then the fence can be put back up during the summer months to keep cattle down in the irrigated pastures.” 

The final component of the deal is being called a “standing forage incentive.” Essentially, Collins said, Lancaster is being compensated to not graze cattle on high ground that Game and Fish has identified as “crucial winter range” on the ranch during any part of the year. Elk, in turn, have that vegetation to browse and graze on during the winter. 

Collectively, it’s a good chunk of change for Lancaster, who has a keen interest in keeping his ranch going in an agricultural community that’s losing its longtime identity to real estate development. Star Valley “has a clock,” said Lancaster, but on his own land he wants to slow down the hands.

“Every field’s getting developed, it’s kind of turning into Jackson,” he said. “This has helped us financially to be able to grow the herd to a [size] where we can actually live off of it and support the ranch. Hopefully, my kids will want to take over, and continue on with them.” 

Scaling up? 

Spring Creek Ranch’s elk-occupancy agreement isn’t the first of its kind. In northwestern Wyoming, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and LegacyWorksGroup first put the concept into action back in 2018.

The first couple of agreements were struck with some of Jackson Hole’s few remaining ranchers. Sharkey has been involved since the early days. He learned of the concept while out hunting with now-colleague Steve Kallin, who was then managing the National Elk Refuge, which had been trying, with difficulties, to scale back its feeding program.

“It was kind of like a short-term easement,” Sharkey recalled. “They were just being basically paid to allow elk presence in the spring.” 

The first deals were with a ranch in Spring Gulch, which is a valley adjacent to the federal refuge where elk consistently have been considered too numerous. Another was with a small ranch on the Snake River’s west bank that’s also struggled with elk. Unrelated to feedgrounds, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Property and Environment Research Center have also brokered elk-occupancy agreements in Montana’s Paradise Valley. 

But to date, it’s still a pretty niche endeavor in terms of the broader landscape and elk management in the feedground region.  

“It’s a nothingburger, at this point,” Sharkey said. 

Although the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is famously public land-dominated, there’s still a lot of private ground — many millions of acres — that elk herds rely on to survive, especially in the winter. There’s even been research quantifying how much unprotected private land each of the Yellowstone region’s 26 elk herds depend on to survive. (The Afton elk herd, which dwells on Lancaster’s Spring Creek Ranch, is actually one of the least private land-reliant herds.)

“There’s definitely a scalability challenge,” said Arthur Middleton, a University of California-Berkeley ecology professor. “If it’s going to be a broader-scale solution, it needs a lot more resources.” (Disclosure: Middleton is married to WyoFile board member Anna Sale.)

That could come from philanthropy, which is how it’s working so far. Alternatively, state and federal agencies could take a wildlife management tool that began as a niche, donor-funded program and scale and fund it themselves, Middleton said. 

There’s a blueprint for that in the Yellowstone region. 

“In the early days of wolf recovery, there was a time when [livestock damage] compensation was novel — an innovation that Defenders of Wildlife was doing with private money,” Middleton said. “Now we think of it as standard practice.” 

Sharkey’s brain is in the same place. 

“If this could be scaled up, we would hope that Game and Fish would take it over,” he said. “Instead of buying hay to feed elk, they could reallocate those dollars to paying ranchers to allow those elk onto their properties.” 

If Wyoming hypothetically diverted all of its elk-feeding funds, it’d be a good chunk of change. Game and Fish’s elk feeding program had a $3.1 million budget as of 2022, according to its feedgrounds management plan. 

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