Competing visions for the state’s economic future clashed Thursday as the Wyoming Business Council presented its budget proposal to the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee in Cheyenne. 

While the council has functioned as Wyoming’s statewide economic development agency since its creation in 1998, some lawmakers argue that government shouldn’t be involved. Meanwhile, the business council is warning that stagnant job and wage growth, as well as low workforce availability, are fueling long-term economic decline in Wyoming. 

“The markers of GDP, the markers of wages, the markers of [the] number of job opportunities, the outmigration of our youth and the widening gap between our population and our workforce all spell that our economy is not where we want it to be,” Business Council CEO Josh Dorrell told lawmakers Thursday. 

The Appropriations Committee met in Cheyenne last week for the first round of budget hearings ahead of the 2026 legislative session. After one lawmaker expressed interest in eliminating the business council, Thursday’s hearing put the agency squarely in the hot seat.  

“The business council today is a place where we understand the problem that we have better than ever,” Dorrell told lawmakers. “We understand the resources that we have or don’t have better than ever. And we understand that we’ve built a foundation that can be utilized as a way to change the economy.”

Part of advancing Wyoming’s economy, Dorrell said, will require policy changes, including reforming the agency’s Business Ready Community grant and loan program. It’s also going to require more funding, he said. 

The council is asking lawmakers for about $112 million, while Gov. Mark Gordon’s recommendation for the agency is about half of that amount at nearly $55 million. However, Dorrell said, both of those figures would ultimately come up short, particularly when it comes to helping communities meet infrastructure needs, like extending water and sewer to business parks. 

“I thank you for giving us the courtesy of truth,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, said. “For you to be successful, you believe your budget should be somewhere over a billion, correct?”

“Mr. Chairman, yes,” Dorrell said. 

Gordon’s recommendation

House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Bear, R-Gillette, asked Dorrell about the discrepancy between the agency’s request and the governor’s recommendation. 

“I don’t see any other agencies where he’s denying half of the requests,” Bear said. “So that’s a pretty significant difference from your view and his.”

Dorrell confirmed that he told the governor neither budget was sufficient, but he also told Bear that Gordon has an entire state budget to consider and balance in his recommendations.

Lawmakers did not ask Gordon last Monday when he testified about the discrepancy, but in a Friday press release, the governor’s office reiterated that his budget recommendations are just that, because lawmakers are statutorily the state’s appropriators. 

“The Joint Appropriations Committee and the Legislature have often restored cuts to agency requests when they felt the increases were needed,” the press release said. “Governor Gordon’s budget has close to half a billion dollars on the table for the Legislature to make such decisions, including putting more into savings to benefit future generations.” 

Gordon also pointed to his budget message, where he called for “maintaining low tax burdens and pursuing legal frameworks that attract new investment to broaden Wyoming’s economic base.” 

Council’s request

Ahead of last week’s hearings, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus — a group of Republicans who control the House — pledged to cut the budget, citing “pre-pandemic spending levels” as a general target. 

Dorrell told the committee Thursday that his agency’s budget request of almost $112 million “is actually less than the one that was submitted in 2019.”

Even so, several members of the committee expressed skepticism about funding the agency at all. Bear, for example, said he sees numerous issues with governments like Wyoming intervening to compete with other states in attracting private businesses.

“I understand that’s your responsibility … to try to compete with other states, make us competitive in that arena. But prior to that, you know, we’re 250 years old this next year. And prior to that, we went 150 years without government intervening in private sector business,” Bear said. 

“Don’t you agree that we have a great history in this country of private sector production?” Bear asked Dorrell. 

“Of course, I would agree with that,” Dorrell said. “And I might add that, you know, one of the things that we’re working to do is solve the problem that we have in front of us.” 

“I don’t get to go back 100 years to when states didn’t compete,” Dorrell said. “I get to solve the problem I have today. And the problem that we have today is that our outmigration of our youth and people who are born in this state is greater than any other state in the nation.”

Between 60% to 70% of Wyoming-born residents permanently leave the state by the time they are 30, according to a 2024 analysis prepared for the business council by Harvard Kennedy School researchers. 

Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, however, said he did “some research” and “found a couple of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau that dispute” the outmigration findings that he hears from the business council “and others.”

“I just say that because I’m really interested in the truth,” Pendergraft said. 

Dorrell said while he hoped to be wrong about Wyoming’s outmigration, “our population and the demographics of our population would say that we’re probably right on.” 

Philosophical differences 

Pendergraft also said one of the criticisms he hears of the business council is “picking winners and losers,” and pointed to a metal fabricator in Sheridan County that was awarded a grant by the council, while there are other entities in the community that do the same work. 

The council only considers awarding grants to those who apply, Dorrell said, asking that Pendergraft provide him with “the names of those organizations that might be interested in this.”

Pendergraft also said he disputed the results of a statewide poll the business council completed earlier this year.

In September, the Tarrance Group, a Virginia-based Republican strategic research and polling firm, surveyed 514 registered voters in Wyoming about economic conditions, development priorities and community growth. 

“The results reveal a strong mandate for proactive, community-led growth and a clear consensus on the urgent need to retain our young people to build resilient communities,” according to an October press release from the council.

“I reject those results personally,” Pendergraft said, adding that “there were problems with how it was phrased.” 

Pendergraft also pushed back on the need for a business council at all. “How do you answer those that say it is not the role of government to build infrastructure?” he asked. “Leave that to the free market. Leave that to the businesses to develop that. Leave that to the consumers that want those things. How do you respond?”

It goes back to the problem of economic decline, Dorrell said, and there are plenty of examples across the state that indicate that the state’s minimal “investment in infrastructure” is working against Wyoming. 

“The idea that the state or that the community shouldn’t pay for infrastructure, that experiment is sort of running right now, and what it’s saying is that people are leaving and what it’s saying is our economy is in decline,” Dorrell said. 

Budget hearings will continue through this week before resuming Jan. 5. The committee is not expected to take any formal action on the budget bill until the week of Jan. 12. 

Wyoming loves to pick on California for its many perceived (or real) flaws, but there’s something the Cowboy State has in common with the Golden State of late, and it’s not a good thing.

That something is what a Harvard economist calls an “inelastic,” or rigid, housing market.

The similarity between California and Wyoming’s housing market was glaringly apparent on a map created by Harvard Growth Lab economist Eric Protzer, which he shared at a recent meeting with Albany County community leaders who are grappling with unaffordable housing in the Laramie region.

“Elasticity is a fancy word or whatever, but what it really means is, if you’re looking at a period of price growth when prices go up 100%, for example, how much does housing supply go up?” he said. “So, there are some places where prices will go up, but then the supply of housing will also rise, which helps to mitigate that growth of prices.”

Then there are other places where prices go up, and supply doesn’t budge.

“Probably the most notorious example is like San Francisco, where housing prices will go up a lot and supply won’t budge at all,” Protzer said. “And that’s a really bad situation to be in, because it means that supply, for some reason, is not responding to demand.”

When supply stops responding to demand, it creates an inflation escalator that will keep driving costs up and up.

If the situation continues, housing prices become disconnected from area salaries. That in turn makes it difficult for businesses in that economy to attract new workers if it wants to grow and expand.

That’s long been the situation for places like Jackson Hole in Wyoming. But now it’s happening in many communities across Wyoming, too. 

Based on Protzer’s map, there are really no unaffected areas in Wyoming anymore. Every county in the state shows at least some degree of inelasticity in their markets, based on his calculations.

“Statistically, if you take things into account like the population, the income level, and the remoteness, almost every county in Wyoming, including here’s, Albany County,” he said, gesturing at his map. “The prices (in Albany County) are above what you would expect it to be for a town that is like Laramie, given that it’s a small remote place with a certain income level.”

House Hunting In Laramie Was Harder Than Expected

That inelasticity in the marketplace is something both Vinicius Bueno and Connor Christensen experienced, when they went looking for a place to live in Laramie.

The two policy and economic analysts work for the Wyoming Business Council and had settled on Laramie as the place where they wanted to reside. 

Bueno chose Laramie because of the university, which he felt made the population younger and closer to his own age. Plus, its population is more international, which, as someone from Brazil, interested him. 

“I think it seems to be like a prettier city,” he added. “It’s nicer to have mountains in the background.”

The town has lived up to those expectations, but Bueno hasn’t been able to find what he was looking for in Laramie in terms of apartments.

“Most of the apartments that exist here are for students,” he said. “So, it was difficult to find apartments close to downtown for people who already graduated and are a little older.”

Bueno prefers not to own a car and to walk everywhere instead. Because of that he was hoping to live close to downtown.

“So, I now live in the Point, which is student housing, but without a car,” he said. “So, it’s difficult for me to go downtown. I had to kind of make a tradeoff between living close to the supermarket and rec center or downtown. I would love to be downtown to enjoy all of the shops and restaurants that exist there, but I wasn’t able to do that.”

That was despite searching for something more suitable for a few months.

Likewise, Christensen, who now rooms with Bueno, chose Laramie because he felt the university atmosphere would better suit his wife than other places in Wyoming. 

He wanted to find a starter home in Laramie but soon found they were all out of reach for his salary. 

“My wife is still in Chicago, where I moved from, so I’m waiting for her to get a job out here,” he said. “Once that happens, we’ll be more open to buying a house in Laramie.”

Even then, he believes the couple will probably be getting less house for the price than they had expected, based on prices back home. 

“I think there’s stuff out there for like $275K, $300K, which is probably where we’re at,” he said. “I thought housing would be a lot cheaper here than it is.”

Christensen has continued to watch the real estate market in Laramie, just to keep tabs on what’s out there. He’s noticing a lot of competition. Places in the price range he’s after tend to go fast, which means a rapid response is going to be necessary. It also suggests to him that he could be rapidly outbid by other buyers. 

“There’s a lot of room for improvement here for housing,” he said. “But once (my wife) is here, then we can assess how much she’s earning with the job she gets over here and figure out where we’re going to be.”

Housing Outpacing Economic Fundamentals

Protzer agreed with Christensen’s sense that prices in Laramie are surprising, though Laramie’s not the only Wyoming community where he sees that trend.

“Housing prices are above what you would statistically expect, given the economic fundamentals of what you observe in Wyoming,” he said. “If you take into account things like population, the income levels, and the remoteness, (prices in) almost every county in Wyoming, including Albany County, are above what you would expect. And prices are above what you would expect them to be for a town that’s like Laramie, given it’s a small remote place with a certain income level.”

What that comes down to, Protzer said, is a shortage of supply that’s no longer being addressed by the marketplace.

“This is something that sometimes there’s public skepticism of in the housing market,” Protzer said. “People, for some reason, don’t believe that supply shortages lead to high prices (in housing), which economists find very baffling. You know, you can think of other issues. You might have seen in the news recently how beef prices are increasing in the U.S. and the reason for that is because head of cattle have been decreasing. You’ve got a supply shortage and so price has been rising. There’s a lot of research that says this is also true about housing.”

With five, six, seven people competing to buy the same place, that quickly ratchets up prices, Protzer said. 

“Poor supply is linked to price growth,” he said. “And an increase in supply mitigates that.”

Letting The Market Decide Lot Sizes

While it may seem like an intractable problem, Protzer said some communities are having much better success when it comes to meeting housing demands in their communities, and those successes have been linked to getting rid of regulations that are choking off housing development and making it too expensive.

One of the economist papers done on the topic recently found that a “one standard deviation increase in regulatory supply constraints led to 10% faster house price growth,” Protzer said. 

Chief among the growth-inhibiting regulations are rules that set minimum lot sizes, Protzer said. 

“There’s a couple of really striking findings in the economic research on this … in Massachusetts,” Protzer said. “And they found that the imposition of minimum lot sizes increases housing prices from 20% to 40%.”

Communities that do get rid of minimum lot sizes and let the housing market set lot sizes instead see an almost immediate increase in the housing market’s response to demand, Protzer said. 

Success In Cheyenne

Often times the concern with elimination of minimum lot sizes is that it will result in inappropriately small lot sizes. 

But that’s not what happens, Protzer said.

People in the marketplace will still demand a reasonable amount of land come with their new homes. An artificial requirement, meanwhile, cannot adjust with what the marketplace wants and can afford. 

That’s playing out now in Cheyenne, which has eliminated minimum lot sizes, as well as several other regulations that were just making houses too costly to build. 

“That’s led to a bit of a surge in housing supply over there,” Protzer said. 

Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins confirmed that and said his city is seeing almost double the number of permits year to date as compared to the same period last year. 

“I think we are going to see the largest number of building permits for housing since the UDC was established,” Collins told Cowboy State Daily. 

Cheyenne’s Uniform Development Code set standards for how big a house could be, what percentage of an apartment building could cover the land, how big lot sizes had to be, how much stone had to be included, as well as several other factors that were adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of housing developments.

Cheyenne’s minimum lot size used to be 7,000 square feet.

“We now have no minimum lot size,” Collins said. “And we have a developer now planning to build on 2,750-square-foot lots. We also reduced our parking requirements to hopefully see one-bedroom and efficiency apartments being built.”

That’s already attracted a project that will build 46 one-bedroom apartments in a new building, Collins said. 

“It’s just incredible,” he said. “A lot of the work we did we are starting to see developers taking advantage of it.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.