CHEYENNE — Wyoming legislative leaders will have a truck-full of recommended interim studies when they meet next month.
Since you can only overwork legislative committees so far, the Management Council will prune the list down to something reasonable.
The Wyoming Business Council probably will be the most watched study of them all.
At least the Council still is alive after a near-death experience during the budget session.
The House Appropriations Committee, dominated by hard-right Freedom Caucus members, voted to strip the Council of all funding.
The full Legislature disagreed and voted for the interim study instead.
The Business Council, which is the state’s economic engine, had its beginning decades ago.
For years Wyoming leaders bemoaned the state’s failure to “diversify the economy.”
They stressed the need to find revenue outside of the mineral industry.
It grew into a recurrent and loud drum of support for economic development, however small and lame.
Gov. Stan Hathaway, faced with the prospect of an empty General Fund, pushed for the “Wyoming Ambassadors,” a group of legislators and business people who toured the nation, including big cities like Chicago, to promote Wyoming as a business-friendly state.
It was not very successful.
“Toyota never came,” the skeptics pointed out.
The Ambassadors movement died in the 1970s, when coal mining in the Powder River Basin exploded and filled the state’s coffers with lots off mineral money.
The cycle spun around again in the 1980s when oil prices dropped. Gov. Mike Sullivan inherited the bust of that period.
That included the new Amendment 4 loans and grant program the Legislature had endorsed. Voters in the 1986 general election, hoping it would mean more jobs, passed it by a vote of 111,590 to 41,420.
That was the seed that grew into the Wyoming Business Council. It was the state’s first major attempt to broaden the tax base and to reduce the state's reliance on the mineral industry.
The program hangs on Article 16, Section 12 in the Wyoming Constitution, that allows an exemption from the ban against spending public funds for private projects.
Unfortunately, the original Amendment 4 program was not a financial success, although it probably gave a lot of people some hope.
In 1992, a legislative management audit recommended the program be drastically changed, or dumped altogether.
The state was forced to write off as a loss more than 40 percent of the $18 million in loans.
State officials caused the loss, because early in the program they had approved loans that offered too little collateral, or none at all, the audit reported.
This was the same grim period when farmers and ranchers with state loans lined up outside the door to the governor’s conference room, waiting to ask for some reprieve on their payments.
The negative report on Amendment 4 loans resulted in state officials putting it and other economic development ideas aside.
In 1998 Gov. Jim Geringer revived the program, which inherited the administration’s remaining Amendment 4 loans. It also collected economic development programs scattered in various state agencies under one roof.
The Business Council has had problems from he beginning.
The Legislature de-funded it early on when it was discovered the new director lived in Colorado. There may be have been other reasons that were not disclosed.
At any rate, it has not been an easy road for the Council and economic development.
Opponents in this legislative session claimed the agency lacked accountability. They wanted its responsibilities re-assigned to other agencies such as the Office of Tourism or Workforce Services.
Council opponents also argued that:
- Its business incentives interfered with free-market principles by selecting specific companies for state support.
- The agency was too fat, with more than $5 million in annual salaries, and was failing to meaningfully connect with local communities and businesses.
- Some House members claimed the Council’s Business Ready Community Grant process was unfair in it's treatment of conservative communities that did not endorse higher local taxes.
What the Freedom Caucus and its supporters want would set the state back decades by putting the program into scattered agencies, as it was before the Council was established.
Wyoming still needs a sturdy, well-funded economic engine to “diversify the economy.”
Even though we know now that Toyota will never come.
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Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan.net.
