Wyoming’s budget session could have been a bucking bull that threw the Cowboy State's PRCA dreams to the ground.
But by the time the Legislature had submitted its $9.9 billion budget to Gov. Mark Gordon on Monday, the $15 million appropriation to help bring the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association headquarters to Cheyenne was still intact.
Wyoming lawmakers kept every penny of the $15 million Gordon had requested, even as they cut millions of the governor’s proposed budget elsewhere, threatening to dismantle the Wyoming Business Council and cut $40 million from the University of Wyoming.
The $15 million in funding could have posed a major hurdle to efforts to bring the PRCA to Wyoming in a budget session where a significant faction had announced determined intentions to cut millions.
While the PRCA has voted to “seriously consider” moving to Wyoming, moving forward on the deal is contingent on having a suitable location that will not cost the association anything.
“It’s all 100% done,” Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, told Cowboy State Daily, on Monday afternoon. “It’s just waiting on the governor’s signature at this point.
“Assuming he doesn’t veto something that causes problems, it should be off and going. Then we’re down to the PRCA Board of Directors deciding if it matches what they want to do.”
Although the House Appropriations Committee had voted down a separate bill that sought to assure the PRCA’s funding would be intact regardless of whether a budget was passed, there were no more hiccups along the way after that.
“We laid out, kind of found out, where it fell,” said Driskill, a major supporter of the allocation. “It’s really one of the best economic development tools I’ve seen, hands down.
"It’s probably had deeper support statewide than anything I’ve seen and probably has the ability to make more impact than most anything we do that’s non-energy.”
Professional Rodeo And Wyoming Just Go Together
Cheyenne LEADS CEO Betsey Hale was happy to hear that the $15 million appropriation is headed to Gordon for his signature.
“Cheyenne LEADS is excited that the Legislature has approved the funding,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “We look forward to having the PRCA serve as a cornerstone project in the Hitching Post district.”
Hale has told Cowboy State Daily that one reason the PRCA was interested in moving is that it’s outgrown its current location in Colorado Springs, which it has called home for the past 46 years.
There’s also a sense that Wyoming’s culture is much closer to the organization’s original rodeo roots.
“They can come here, and they can be the big deal,” Hale said in a previous interview. “So, I think that’s where they find Wyoming attractive. They can be the big deal, like our Olympics, so to speak.”
Wyoming has long had an unusual level of commitment to rodeo, and is home to the world’s largest outdoor rodeo in Cheyenne Frontier Days — dubbed the Daddy of 'Em All — which traces its history back to 1897.
It is also the only state in the nation with a state-sponsored professional rodeo team, and the only state where every motorist sports a bucking horse on their license plate — by state law.
PRCA Hall of Famer Bobby Harris is among the Wyoming rodeo cowboys who sees the move as bringing two things together that should have always been together anyway.
“We’re the Cowboy State,” he has told Cowboy State Daily. “It doesn’t fit anywhere any better than (here). It’s really important to be part of it, to get this done. If they’re going somewhere we want them here.”
More Than Just A Museum
The PRCA move will do more than just bring in a museum and some office jobs, Driskill said.
It’s also tied into the creation of the Hitching Post Business District in Cheyenne, located between Little America Hotel & Resort and the Horse Palace Swan Ranch at the busy intersection of Interstates 80 and 25.
The business district is being developed as a year-round cultural destination, with the PRCA as an anchor entity.
“This has a real chance of turning Cheyenne into a year-round driver on tourism and lots of visitation, lots of retail things happening, and protects part of the view shed coming into Cheyenne,” Driskill said. “Ironically, we’ve got a lot of industry coming in and this is going to leave a kind of ag-centric area right there at the intersections, which is a really nice thing for the state of Wyoming.”
The PRCA will mean a lot for Wyoming’s rodeo events, which happen across the state, Driskill added.
“We’re just scratching the surface,” Driskill said. “It can get wildly successful, and I think it’s going to be really good. For Wyoming, it totally cements Wyoming as the one and only Cowboy State.
"Texas would love to claim a whole bunch of stuff, and so would Oklahoma and other states. But this really says it all. It says Wyoming is the Cowboy State.”
The other thing Driskill likes about it all is that this wasn’t something that came from out of the blue and landed on Wyoming.
It was a group of Wyoming people thoughtfully deciding that they wanted to bring something to their state and then figuring out how to get that done.
“It’s a forerunner for innovation in Wyoming,” Driskill said. “People actually finding business that they think fit with their locale, in their area, and they go help, get the state to go recruit them.
"Recruiting existing businesses is really much different than spending money on somebody that you don’t know anything about.”
Ripple Effects Already Starting
Potential ripple effects from the PRCA move are already starting to appear, state Sen. Mike Gierau, D-Jackson, told Cowboy State Daily.
Gierau invited some representatives from United Airlines to Wyoming last week and said the PRCA move was among the topics of discussion.
“We talked a lot about the PRCA,” he said. “We talked about Frontier Days. We talked a lot about events in Cheyenne and about bringing in more flights, and they were very receptive.
“So, it’s already paying dividends,” Gierau continued. “It’s already crystalizing in their minds that, boy, Cheyenne is a place that’s on the come, and that’s good for Wyoming in general.”
United officials didn’t promise anything, Gierau stressed, but they were attentive and had a lot of questions.
“In our airline meetings, we had Domenic Bravo, we had Chris Brown from the Wyoming Hospitality Coalition, we had representatives of hoteliers in town and stuff, and they’re all really excited about this project and all the things that are happening here,” Gierau said.
Moving To Cheyenne
There are still quite a few steps to go before the actual move is final, Cheyenne Frontier Days CEO Tom Hirsig told Cowboy State Daily, but it’s an exciting moment to him. And it's one step closer to history being made.
“I never thought we’d get anything with this sort of consequence,” he said. “You know, to the state of Wyoming it’s a huge deal. I mean, this isn’t just a regional type of move. This is a national move that people are talking about across the country.”
If the PRCA move is realized, Hirsig expects there will be many positive ripple effects coming in its wake.
“We don’t even know what those things might be,” he said. “But I know this has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the possibility of things coming to Wyoming. And this is the kind of business we want, you know, core foundations. This thing was built by the cowboys, so that is Wyoming.”
Hirsig added he was recently in San Antonio, where the subject of the PRCA’s potential move to Cheyenne came up.
“I ran into this rodeo announcer, and he’s been around a long time, and he said, ‘Shoot, I might move to Cheyenne. It seems like that’s the place where people want to be with the way we think,’” Hirsig said.
That’s just one small example of the kind of unexpected ripple effects a PRCA move could set off, a move that Hirsig believes will be just as good for the PRCA as it will be for Wyoming.
“I think it’s just going to open a lot of eyes, and I think it’s awesome that every pro rodeo they have talked about the PRCA in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and now it’s going to be every pro rodeo — which there are 750 pro rodeos across the United States — and now they’re going to be talking about the PRCA headquarters in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” he said. “That’s pretty good exposure every year.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
