Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to the Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on interesting people here in the Cowboy State. And today's person of Interest is a very interesting person who has devoted his life to serving not just the state of Wyoming, not just his community, but to his family.
This is going to be a really great conversation with Tom Lubnau. First though, I want to make sure that you know about another really great podcast, which is the Wyoming Business Alliance "Business From the Basement". It is a fantastic resource, really interesting conversations with people who get you where you need to go, and bring you the information you need if you are a serious business person here in the Cowboy State.
So don't miss out on the Wyoming Business Alliance "Business From the Basement" podcast. It's a fantastic program - but don't go away, because first we have to talk to Tom Lubnau, who is truly one of Wyoming's premier public servants. And I'm just so glad to be able to have Tom on the podcast today. Hello, Tom Lubnau, how are you this fine day?
Tom Lubnau:
I'm wonderful. Wendy, thank you for having me - maybe a little too gushing in the compliments, but, but I appreciate what you say.
Wendy Corr:
Well, Tom, you truly have devoted your life to serving people. You've been a member - how long have you been a member of the, and were you a member of, the Gillette Fire Department?
Tom Lubnau:
I was. I was on the fire department for 21 years. I retired in 2016 and that's a sport for young people, and I'm not so young anymore.
Wendy Corr:
But obviously it was important to you to volunteer for that, because all of our fire departments, with the exception I think, there's two fire divisions in the entire state that are not volunteer.
Tom Lubnau:
There's a few that are career based, but it's really important to our communities. And in some places, if you have an emergency, that's who's going to count, is somebody who's a volunteer. And so I just had a house fire in 1992 and had $50,000 damage to the structure, and about $7.50 to the contents.
The fire department here was so professional. I mean, I had my taxes laid out. I was working on my taxes, and it was laid out on a desk, and they put a towel over the top of it and rolled them up, and then took the taxes and put them in a clothes hamper in the garage.
And when I got back into the house, I took that towel and rolled my taxes out. This was back, of course, when you didn't have computer taxes, and all the stacks were exactly the way I left them. And I thought to myself, if I can do that for someone else, what those people did for me, then that would be a good thing to do.
I have had lots of really interesting, sometimes wild experiences fighting fire, and met some of the greatest friends in the whole world, where we've been to the gates of hell and back, and all came out on the good side.
Wendy Corr:
That's fantastic. Again, what a great compliment to the people who volunteer, who put themselves in danger, and to do that.
Tom Lubnau:
It's wonderful, great people, and have great respect for emergency responders. Wish I could physically keep up with the young folks and continue doing it.
Wendy Corr:
But you were able to do it for so long, and that's fantastic. You also have devoted so much of your life. You've been an attorney since the early 80s. So you've been an attorney, but you took that knowledge and that experience, and you said, I want to serve my community, my county here, and I want to go to the Wyoming Legislature.
So tell us about your decision to really, because it is a volunteer thing - you get a little bit of pay, but it really is a choice to take time out of your own business, out of your own career, away from your family, and go down to Cheyenne and make decisions on behalf of the people that elected you. Tell us about about your decisions to do that.
Tom Lubnau:
Well, the legislature wasn't starting at the top. I had had a lot of public service before that, serving on boards and committees. I actually served a stint on the Wyoming Republican State Central Committee as a young man in the 80s, and so it's very politically active.
And one of the things that we miss in Wyoming is that the Jaycees were a very active force. It was a great training ground where I met lots of people and learned how to do things that life just doesn't teach you. And so I'd been active, and we were active in political issues.
A friend of mine said, You attorneys have goofed this all up. You need to go to Cheyenne and fix it. And I said, All right, you S.O.B., that's a challenge I'm willing to take. And it was two weeks later that my state representative resigned. And so then it was time to put my time where my mouth was.
And so I applied for the vacancy. We had a runoff election between five candidates. I won by 30 some votes.
Wendy Corr:
Wow. But that was it. From then on, you're in.
Tom Lubnau:
And then I was in until I was Speaker of the House. And traditionally, the Speaker of the House either moves to the Senate, which I was uninterested in doing, or retire, which I was interested in doing.
Wendy Corr:
I'm curious. Why were you not interested in running for a Senate seat instead of continuing that aspect of your public service?
Tom Lubnau:
I guess my biggest curse in life, Wendy, is that I try not to do things halfway. And when I was Speaker of the House, it was taking between six and eight hours every day, plus I had a full time job of six or eight hours every day, and my family life, just in terms of the time available, was suffering. And so there were other priorities and other things in my life that I thought more important.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely.
Tom Lubnau:
And talking to a friend of mine that I served with, he figures it cost him $20 million over his career to serve in the legislature. Now, mine wasn't that much, but if you figure out my hourly rate, it's six to eight hours a day, times $300 an hour, all of a sudden, you do that math, that's a lot of money that I've foregone for public service.
Wendy Corr:
Yep, that's true. Oh my goodness, I haven't put the math to it before, but yes, that makes sense. Tell me about your family's support of you, though, during the time that you did serve in the Wyoming Legislature.
Tom Lubnau:
My wife, Rita, is just an amazing person and will support me in any adventure that I choose to undertake. And we have just a wonderful, full life. Our daughter Rachel, was out of the house at the time that I decided to run, in college, and when I first ran, my son was five years old.
And I'd come home on the weekends and he'd hug me and wouldn't let go when I'd leave to go back to Cheyenne for a week. It was pretty traumatic. But he played hockey, and all through my legislative term, I think I missed one hockey game, traveling.
Wendy Corr:
Wow, that's an impressive record there, Dad.
Tom Lubnau:
He was important, and that was important, and spending the weekends with my family was important. My best was in Billings. It's a long drive from Cheyenne to Billings on a Friday night to watch a hockey game.
Wendy Corr:
Well, I think that's fabulous, and I love the fact that your family was supportive, and yet you were very supportive of them during those years. But now, when was your last year in the Wyoming Legislature?
Tom Lubnau:
2014-2015
Wendy Corr:
So it's been 10 years now that you've been out of the Wyoming Legislature, but you are still very much a presence in Cheyenne. And we're fortunate at Cowboy State Daily that you write a regular column for us, which is very - some of them are very informative, and some of them are very entertaining. I mean, genuinely, I loved your column about Led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven. That was fabulous.
And there was one not too long ago that was about how everybody should go to sunrise Wyoming. Tell me about that. Why is it important for everyone to visit the tiny, little ghost town, mining town of Sunrise, Wyoming in southeast Wyoming,
Tom Lubnau:
Well, who was that said that if you don't know history, you're bound to repeat the mistakes of history? That's not the exact quote, but yeah, I'm a student of Wyoming history, and I enjoy learning about Wyoming and Wyoming history, and Sunrise is just one of the most interesting stories in Wyoming history and what had happened there.
There's an archeological site at Sunrise that is one of the oldest archeological sites in North America. It goes back 40,000 years. It was a red ochre mine where the red pigment from the iron was used not only for war paint, but as a primitive suntan lotion.
And then, in the 1880s, Sunrise started out as a copper mine. And after the copper got mined out, there's a huge iron ore deposit there, and so they opened up an iron ore mine and mined iron all the way until the 19 - Well, the mine went bankrupt in the 80s, but in the 1970s it couldn't compete with worldwide mining, and so went bankrupt.
But there's still huge iron ore mines there. The iron ore mine was a company - Sunrise was a company town, and then a while down the road was Hartville, not a company town, where the miners and Stockmans, which is the oldest continuously operating bar and restaurant in Wyoming, is.
And if you have a chance to go, go. I mean, the food's a little expensive, but what a great restaurant. Well worth it. Okay, and after the choke cherries have bloomed, they have a house drink called the Sweet Melissa. It's marvelous. I recommend only having one.
Wendy Corr:
I think our Renee Jean went and talked about the Sweet Melissa at the Hartville bar.
Tom Lubnau:
So Hartville was bars and brothels, and Sunrise was a dry company town, the Rockefellers owned Sunrise. And after a massacre in Colorado, they decided that maybe they needed to clean up their act a little bit and change company mining town conditions.
And so they built very, very nice company housing. They built the first YMCA in Wyoming, a YMCA with a dance floor and a movie theater and a three lane bowling alley in the basement, which is still there. And so then the mine went into bankruptcy. Somebody bought it for back taxes after the tax liens expired, and then it was going to be sold, and the Chinese were looking at it.
Wendy Corr:
And this is recent?
Tom Lubnau:
This is recent. He bought it - I'll think of his name. John Floyd bought it and so he owns the town. He bought it speculating on the iron ore and to keep the mine out of the hands of the Chinese when they were looking, so John owns it.
He's donated the YMCA to the Sunrise historical and archeological, they call it Preservation Society, and they conduct once a year, they have a great big tour there. You can pay and go if you want to tour Sunrise. Otherwise, it's private, so you have to contact the Historical Society or John Voigt to get a tour.
There were a lot of houses there, but in order to avoid paying property taxes, when they became abandoned, the mining company burned them down so there were no taxes on them. So there's a a great big, I don't know, it's like, and this is just a guess, it's like a 50 car garage. It's just this big garage in Sunrise, Wyoming, and they burned that down.
So there's a lot of history missing just to avoid property taxes. But I guess when you're about to go bankrupt or your economics don't go there, you do whatever you can to stay in business.
Wendy Corr:
Oh my goodness, so interesting. So now we're all inspired to go to Sunrise and get their annual tour and see just what it was about this town that represented so much of American history, as well as Wyoming history.
Tom Lubnau:
And the tour takes, I mean, it's a four or five hour tour, so it's, spend the day. You know, I just kind of scratched the surface. I recommend anybody go.
Wendy Corr:
That's so cool. You've got so many different interests that you touch on in your columns, Tom, I mean, the one that just came out just this week is about free market economy. And you talk about that, the economics of that. You talk about public lands, you talk about property taxes and why we don't want to cut too far into the property taxes.
I don't usually get too political on the Roundup, but tell me your view on property taxes and why that's something that is such a hot topic with Wyomingites right now?
Tom Lubnau:
Well, my old friend John Heinz used to say, nobody wants to pay taxes. You've gotta be crazy to pay taxes, but there has to be some element of responsibility, some skin in the game. When you receive government services that you pay for in Wyoming - we set up this. It's a brilliant property tax scheme.
I wish I'd figured it out myself, where the bulk of your property taxes are paid by people from out of state who consume our minerals. And so a third of the state's budget comes from the federal government, and about a third of the state's budget, or a little more, come from people who buy our minerals and pay property taxes for the minerals in our state.
And so, you know, a family of three gets, and I don't remember the exact figures, pays about $3,800 in taxes and receives about $27,000 in government services, okay, and so we don't bear the cost of our own government in our state, and we should. I mean, if we're receiving the services, it makes us a more responsible consumer if we do that now.
And I think that government services are necessary. I think that the fire department's necessary. I think that police are necessary. I think that schools and property taxes are, those taxes that pay for your local services.
Wendy Corr:
The roads we drive on, right?
Tom Lubnau:
Yeah. And so I kind of laugh when people say, wow, there's all this waste in government. Because if anybody knew my friends John Heinz and Frank Philip, who were chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the lead house when I was there, you would know how frugal they are.
My friend John Heinz, is it okay to tell you one John Heinz story?
Wendy Corr:
Tell me a John Heinz story!
Tom Lubnau:
Alright, John and I, my wife and I, we were traveling on a legislative trip. We were in Turkey and we got food poisoning at this restaurant, eating salad that - you only eat things that are cooked, but we had a salad, and so we all got food poisoning, and then we're all really, really, really sick.
And we were traveling with some people from Colorado, a legislator from Colorado, and her two children who happen to be physicians. And there's a whole group of us. There are 20 of us in this group, and John was just really, really sick - typically, a healthy, active individual who was just as white as a sheet.
And they these doctors pulled out these Ziploc bags, and they brought an assortment of all kinds of medication that they thought they might need in Turkey. And they said, Well, can we give you some medicine? And John said, No, I've already taken some medicine. And they said, What did you take?
And he reached through his shaving kit, and he pulled out and handed him a packet of Anacin from 1982, that he'd saved since 1982.
Wendy Corr:
Anacin? Oh, my word.
Tom Lubnau:
So you can't be any more frugal than my friend John. Scottish, and frugal as any human, so when I hear people say we're going to come in and be more frugal than the people ahead of us, I just kind of have to laugh.
Wendy Corr:
Because you were, you were in - they call it the machine. You were in the machine, but you saw how it worked, and so as a result, you know how responsible the legislature was.
Tom Lubnau:
But when you first run, when you try to take power, you run against the status quo, until you become the status quo, and then everybody criticizes you and runs against you. But sometimes without knowing that history, you can over promise.
And that's sort of been the subject of a lot of my columns lately, as you know - don't over promise. Understand things are the way they are for a reason. And before you seek to change those things, you should understand why those things are the way they are.
And that's sort of what got me started writing the column, was, I was hearing lots of things in public discussion that were wrong, and so I wrote a couple letters to the Cowboy State Daily that said, No, this is wrong. This is how Wyoming's budget worked.
And then I talked about the statistics and where the money came from and that you can't kick the federal government out of Wyoming, was one of them, and I was like, a third of our budget’s paid for by the federal government. It's going to be pretty hard to kick them out of Wyoming.
And just one fire without the federal money from last year would have bankrupted this state. So I'd write these letters, and then our employer conscripted me. Changed me from a letter to the editor to a columnist. And so all of a sudden, I turned from a blowhard into a pundit.
Wendy Corr:
But you have that experience, Tom, you have that experience. And there are pieces of legislation that you're passionate about, that you continue to - talk about that. Of course, you know, last week, we just had the big, you know, blow up about you not being able to be on the schedule, but then you ended up talking for a half an hour as a public commenter.
Tom Lubnau:
I wish I'd have made it shorter, but I had a lot to say.
Wendy Corr:
You had a lot to say, but that's just it, Tom, you've got a lot to say because you're coming from a position of - you're educated about all of these topics, and you're passionate about making sure that those views, not just views, but that information is made public and made known to the public.
And so those are things - you know, you talk about Chris Knapp and and you know, the fact that you grew up down the street from him, and he grew up down the street from you - it's not about the personalities. To you, it's about the information. Tell us about that.
Tom Lubnau:
If you read my column, most of the time, I'm just trying to explain why things are, why I perceive things are the way they are, and what I think we should do about it. And so there's always a bit of research. There's always something history based, and then what I think is wrong and where I think we should go.
And I try to look for the positive and things, and sometimes I try to mix it up. I had a column I wrote about Alison Kraus and Union Station that I saw at Red Rocks.
Wendy Corr:
I love them. They're great.
Tom Lubnau:
You know, I wrote about the Eagles in the Sphere, and that was the perfect group in the perfect venue. Allison Krauss at Red Rocks was the perfect group at the perfect venue, but there was so much going on politically at the time that I never could submit the Allison Krauss so but I try to mix it up with just things about life too.
I don't know if people read either one, but it's kind of fun for me, and our boss lets me write.
Wendy Corr:
Well, they're obviously reading them, and so that's something - that's really great. Now, what other things have you written? Have you written books, Tom?
Tom Lubnau:
I have had one book published, in 2005 Five. Randy Okray, who's a friend of mine, and I, in 2004 we published a book on human factors in the fire service. After I got hurt in a fire and tried to figure out why it was that I got hurt, we, Randy and I received the Fire Training Officer of the Year Award for the United States in 2005 for that book.
Wendy Corr:
So is that book then being used by other fire departments?
Tom Lubnau:
It’s in the promotional exam still. I mean, there are other books out there now that probably are better - but what we did is, right at that time, Storm King mountain had just, the 14 firefighters had died at Storm King mountain, Colorado, and the report had just come out. And typically when they do a fire investigation report, they look at the Standard Fire Orders and figure out tactically, what they did wrong.
But there's a guy by the name of Ted Putnam who wrote a rebuttal to that report, and he said, Look, we're looking at the wrong things. We're killing firefighters, and it's not because of not following orders. It's something else. It's something in the human being. And we need to start looking at that.
And Randy and I began to look at that, along with a lot of other guys in our fire department, and studying that, and trying to figure out what happened at Storm King mountain and why they made the decisions they made.
Well, at about the same- well, in the late 70s and early 80s, the aviation industry had the same sort of revelation. Their planes were mechanically reliable, but they were still crashing, and so they developed a body of science called Crew Resource Management, which is, how do you manage the resources in a crisis situation where you don't have all the information to affect a positive outcome? And how do you make decisions? How do you become situationally aware? How do you communicate?
And so Randy and I studied that, and I gotta tell you, trying to sell to your fire board that you're going to an aviation psychology symposium in Ohio to do a training program for your local fire department was a tough sell, but we got it done.
Wendy Corr:
You made it happen.
Tom Lubnau:
Okay, so we went a couple of times to the aviation psychology symposium, studied that, and then wrote a book called Crew Resource Management For the Fire Service. It's internationally trained now, because it's a soft kind of science dealing with human beings. For a hard bunch of firefighters, we joke about the fire service being 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.
Wendy Corr:
Well, okay…
Tom Lubnau:
And you can see that I mean, statistically - plastic football helmets. Fire helmets are safer than leather fire helmets, but you see a whole bunch of guys, because it's traditional, wanting to fight fire with a leather helmet on their head.
Chicago, if you watch the movie Backdraft, they wear waistcoats and hip boots when statistically, bunker gear is much safer. But you know, the tradition was that you wore waistcoats. They wear bunker gear now, so I can say that, but the fire protection rating for those hip boots is less than zero, because they catch on fire.
Wendy Corr:
Seriously? Wow.
Tom Lubnau:
So fighting against that tradition was a hard thing, but it's, you see it now, and now it's part of the fire culture. I mean, you have to, as a wildland firefighter, take human factors on the fire line, which we wrote, and it led to some interesting things. If you read the 9/11 report, Randy and I are cited in one of the footnotes.
Wendy Corr:
No kidding. Oh my goodness. Wow.
Tom Lubnau:
So I mean, like I said, I’ve led an interesting, full life before and after the legislature.
Wendy Corr:
Yes, you most certainly have, oh my goodness. So when you are getting ready to write your columns, what are you looking at? Are you looking at the news stories? Are you looking at pop culture? When you sit down to write your weekly column, where are you getting your inspirations from?
Tom Lubnau:
Whatever interests me, and I try to write what I know, Wendy. If I don't know about it, and I'm just, there's a - Can I tell you a story? These two, three farmers sitting on a park bench, and a nuclear physicist walks by. And the three farmers say, Mr. Nuclear Physicist, is it the neutron or the proton that causes the nuclear explosion?
And the nuclear physicist smiles, and he says, you know, I'll answer that question, but you have to answer a question about farming first. And they said, fair enough. He said, you take a cow and you put it in a pasture and it eats grass, and when it's done with the grass, it blotches all over the ground.
You take a horse, put it in that very same pasture, it eats that very same grass, and when it's done with it, it comes out like charcoal briquettes. You take a sheep, you put it in that very same pasture, it eats that very same grass, and when it's done with it, it comes out like machine gun pellets. How come is that?
And the three farmers debate amongst themselves, and finally they said, Mr. Nuclear Physicist, we don't know. And the nuclear physicist says, Why in the world do you want to know about nuclear physics when you don't know crap?
Wendy Corr:
So, okay, all right, that's good.
Tom Lubnau:
That is my guiding principle on what to write in my column. If I don't know something about whatever I'm writing about, or I can't find an expert to guide me on what I want to write about, then I don't write about it.
So I look at current events. I look at what interests me. My column this week was about the free market, because I'm seeing and I'm concerned about it, that in Wyoming, we're shipping two thirds of our kids out of state for jobs.
Wendy Corr:
It's a long standing argument. I mean, that was happening when I was in high school.
Tom Lubnau:
Our population is aging. I think I wrote a column one time that said, if I were investing in the future of Wyoming, I'd invest in nursing homes and pickleball courts, because we seem unwilling to do something different than what we've already done. And had we had that attitude in Campbell County in the 1960s and 70s, Wyoming wouldn't have the oil and coal revenues that it had, the tax structure that it has, the money in the bank it has.
And so I'm concerned that we're painting ourselves into being the blacksmiths of the early 1900s where, you know, they still had sort of a job, but not the kind that - they weren't the fixture in society that they were in the 1800s.
Wendy Corr:
So what are your thoughts on how Wyoming can avoid that? Because you still are, you're a big believer in the coal industry, and I think that that's something that that is the obviously, to quote a pun, I mean a bedrock of Wyoming's economy and those minerals that people pay for.
What are your thoughts about, what can we do differently? What can we do better as a state to invest in the future?
Tom Lubnau:
I think we need to embrace change, but plan for it. And Wyoming drafted - they were the first state in the union that drafted the Surface Mine Reclamation Act, and then the federal SMA patterned itself after Wyoming's mine Reclamation Act.
And so our forefathers, in the 70s, the Ed Herschlers and Al Simpsons and Stan Hathaways of the world, saw what was coming and put in place the mechanisms to protect the state, but still allow for business development.
We tried to do that with the carbon sequestration legislation in the early 2000s and actually it had an interesting side effect of protecting all of Wyoming's aquifers that the Obama administration was going to condemn and take away because we placed - it's a long, complicated story.
But we placed a value on the deep aquifers that weren't being used. And the Obama administration had looked at a bunch of precedent from the Federal Aviation Administration, where they said the airspace above so many feet above the ground isn't being used and has no value, so we're just going to condemn it.
Because it used to be, you owned from the center of the earth to the top of the sky. But now, over a certain number of feet, the federal government owns the air space and can regulate it, which is how the Federal Aviation Administration came into being.
Well, so since the deep saline aquifers weren't being used, they didn't have a value, and if they didn't have a value, the federal government could just take them without paying for them, and that was their plan.
But because we did the carbon sequestration legislation and placed a value on the pore space, then the federal government, if they took those aquifers, would have to pay for them. And so we prevented the federal government, through placing value on the pore space, from taking our water.
Wendy Corr:
So interesting. Oh, my goodness.
Tom Lubnau:
As my friend Sue Wallace used to say, in Wyoming, whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting over.
Wendy Corr:
That's very sadly true, but yes, oh my goodness. So that's just one of the ways that the previous administrations in Wyoming, the previous legislatures, have allowed for the future in that way. What are some ways that you see that this current legislative body can allow for the future of Wyoming and to keep the kids here?
I mean, WyoTech has been a great, great resource for keeping Wyoming kids here and bringing other kids to Wyoming. What are some other ways that you think that we can look ahead?
Tom Lubnau:
Well, North Carolina and Colorado both embrace technology and set up technology triangles. North Carolina saw the tobacco industry was fading, and so technology is going to be the wave of the future. Well, we don't have the population base to do the same kind of things that those places did, although Colorado was a pretty small place when they embraced technology, which is why, part of the reason why they're a pretty big place right now.
I think that we need to assess trends. And artificial intelligence data centers are not going to go away. They're going to be huge consumers of power.
Wendy Corr:
They already are, from some of the statistics that we've seen.
Tom Lubnau:
Yeah, Wyoming can be that place that supplies the power, but I don't agree that it just has to be one source of power. I agree with the governor's point of view, that it can be all of the above. But to do that means that the ‘not in my backyard’ people are going to have to accept wind and solar.
And you know, if you own the property and you don't want to lease it to wind and solar, that's fine, but if somebody else owns the property, go buy the property and then not lease it to wind and solar, or let somebody do with what they want with their property, as long as it isn't damaging you.
Wendy Corr:
It comes down to the idea that, you know, live and let live, which used to really be a big deal, and really kind of the mantra of people here in Wyoming. And I've seen a lot and read a lot about people saying, well, that's not necessarily the way it is anymore.
Tom Lubnau:
Well, and that's what I'm afraid of. I mean, Casper had two huge refineries, the Amoco refinery and the Texaco refinery there, and that was why Casper became the number one city in Wyoming, was the oil business.
And there was a lot of pollution as a result of those refineries. But even in the 50s and 60s, the people in Casper started thinking about, how can we protect the Platte River from pollution from these refineries? And even at that time, before it was even the kind of the thing that's trendy now, it became trendy in the 70s.
In the 50s the people in Wyoming were thinking ahead, trying to preserve an economy, but also trying to preserve the environment. And so it's a function of becoming educated on the issues. I see a lot of farmers pretending to be nuclear physicists around Wyoming right now.
And I think instead of fomenting people and getting torn feathers out for political gain, maybe we should get some of the world's foremost experts in the state and learn and plan in advance for whether this is going to happen.
And if you drive by the Pumpkin Buttes, or you drive by Shirley Basin or Jeffrey City, those are huge uranium deposits, and they paid a lot of bills in Wyoming in the 70s, and were a big part of the state. I mean, Shirley Basin, which is now a whole bunch of old dust-over prairie, was a town.
Wendy Corr:
It’s so crazy. I mean, I drive through there. My daughter's in Laramie, so I'm driving through Shirley Basin, you know, regularly, she and I, to see each other. So it is a big wasteland, from our perspective, from the perspective of your driving down the road.
Tom Lubnau:
But you know, it used to be huge uranium mines, back before they developed the in situ processes where they put chemicals underground, leached out the uranium and don't have to disturb the grounds. I mean, they were huge uranium processing facilities at both of those places, in Jeffrey City and Shirley Basin.
It's part of the heritage of Wyoming, and it still is. I mean, we still have, I mean, the Uranium One stuff that dogged Hillary Clinton during her secretary of state times was, I don't know, 20 miles as the crow flies from Teapot Dome. That was five or six generations before, you know, then.
So you know, Wyoming's been a place of mineral scandals for a long time, but uranium was a big part of Wyoming, and so I think we need to look and position ourselves, figure out how we want our state to look and then position ourselves so that we have the regulatory infrastructure to allow, which is what I wrote this week, allow for advancement and innovation and changing our economy.
If you read T.A. Larson's history of Wyoming, and I can't remember which years, I think the 1890s, the three biggest problems in Wyoming were, tourism was down, prices of cattle were low, and they had labor unrest in the coal mines.
Wendy Corr:
That's about right.
Tom Lubnau:
So here we are, what, 130 years later, and if you were to look at the headlines, you see a lot of people losing their jobs in the coal mines, although I hear today that coal production is way up, just because the Trump administration has allowed for restarting of some coal plants, and the data centers and artificial intelligence are consuming so much power that we have to either generate power or have early brownouts.
Wendy Corr:
yeah, so we and so Wyoming is, in that case, you know, we're the number one location for exactly that. So we're looking at maybe a resurgence in that industry.
Tom Lubnau:
I'd like to see resurgence in that industry. I mean, those are, the coal miners and oil field workers are my friends and neighbors. But I'd also like to see some other opportunities for kids to come back and work in health care or nuclear, if it's possible, or wind or solar or technology.
We just have to assess the trends and figure out what we want our state to look like, and then move forward. Saying no to everything just guarantees us that we're going to, you know, be the last person not shut off the lights.
Wendy Corr:
That's great way to put that. Tom, this has been such an interesting conversation. We've covered so many different topics. What's next for you in your life? Besides just being, you know, a columnist for Cowboy State Daily, you're not the kind of guy to just sit aside. You've been active and involved in your entire career. What are you and Rita looking at doing?
Tom Lubnau:
Oh, I think we'd like to travel a little bit. A few years ago, my wife told me I needed a hobby. That was before I had writing for the Cowboy State Daily, and so she bought me a paint set. And I'm not very good, but I like to paint.
So one of these days, when I don't know or don't feel like I know something that I can share, that I can write about, I'll just retire from writing and fade into oblivion.
Wendy Corr:
We hope that you don't do that. We hope that you don't fade into oblivion, Tom, because your voice is one that is resonating with so many people, and we're very, very glad that we've got you on board as a columnist here at Cowboy State Daily.
Tom Lubnau:
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Wendy Corr:
Well, it's very true. Tom, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for being a guest on the Roundup this week. Folks, thank you for tuning in. Don't neglect to go to our archives at Cowboy State Daily. Check out Tom's columns and see the varied topics that he writes on - again, if he doesn't know about it, he doesn't write it. And so he's coming from a position of education and information.
So I highly recommend that you check out what Tom's been bringing us, and check out our previous episodes of The Roundup and all of the really interesting people that make up this fantastic state that is Wyoming.
Tom, thank you for your time today - folks, thank you for tuning in. Have a great week.
