It’s too early to panic, but
there’s a rumor that Wyoming, with a population that’s only a
quarter of metropolitan Portland, Ore., might buy Portland’s
basketball team, the Trail Blazers, using the $2 million that daily
aggregates into the Cowboy State’s swelling reserves.
Portland should cringe at the outrageous notion of losing the
Blazers because of the financial woes of the team’s owner —
one of the richest men on earth — yet there’s far more to
cringe about. While Oregonians still can’t figure out their state’s
unintelligible budget process or come close to funding its schools,
Wyoming residents sit pretty on wealth accumulating from natural
gas and mineral royalties. The rate of return is a whopping $65
million per month over what it costs Wyoming to deliver state
services.
It doesn’t seem fair. But what happens with
geography and geology has little to do with fairness. It’s all
about location and timing. And historically, timing has been tough
for Wyoming, many of whose residents are descendants of real trail
blazers, pioneers who stopped short of their Oregon dream of
fertile soil and enormous forests. Traveling West, some pioneers
stopped in Wyoming to raise families in godforsaken prairie-sod
houses on the wind-worn plains.
Today, however, Wyoming’s
economic focus is on eliminating the last of its taxes — the
sales tax — which signals just how rich the state is. Here
are a few of Wyoming’s options:
Give the temporary excess
money back to residents. This is the Alaska model and a version of
Oregon’s “kicker” except that Wyoming’s money is all new money into
the economy. The upside is the quick boost to local businesses. The
downside is that, like a gas well, once turned on, such flows
become a dependency and such entitlements are nearly impossible to
turn off.
A second option is to focus on the future
through funding education at all levels. Just as the University of
Texas once did with its resource wealth, Wyoming could promote
innovation by investing in and promoting new technologies. Wyoming
already plans to pay whatever it takes to induce the best
professors to move to its University of Wyoming at Laramie, and
will also guarantee free tuition through college in perpetuity for
all residents.
Wyoming’s third option (my suggestion
because it’s so dramatic) should inspire rural people everywhere:
Buy the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team.
The
trails to Oregon passed through Wyoming; therefore, Wyoming could
keep the Trailblazer name to show respect for Western history. But
the state could lease the team back to Portland under a mutually
understood lease agreement. Wyoming would retain the basketball
team in Wyoming just long enough for a small-town tour of a few
games a year, and here’s a real kicker: The Cowboy State could
require the Trail Blazers to tour rural Oregon, too.
For
pioneers buried in Wyoming soil, it must be hard not to laugh from
the grave at the irony of Oregon’s present woes. With superb and
diverse resources from fish, fertile farmland, forests and cheap
energy, Oregonians seem to simultaneously swagger and stumble,
usually over themselves. But while Oregonians wring their hands and
search state, county and city pockets to find cash for basketball,
schools and further tax cuts, they shouldn’t turn on Wyoming for
its dumb luck, and Wyomingites ought not to gloat.
At the
same time Wyoming rakes in the money, the state watches the health
of the landscape decline, with waterways polluted and migratory
corridors fractured by thousands of drilling rigs. Ranchers who
have no control over subsurface resource rights see roads and gas
wells and pumping stations crisscrossing their land. The conflict
between the oil and gas industry and ranchers may take a lifetime
to resolve.
Yet the prospect of navigating the future by
funding innovation and education unifies people in Wyoming.
Education is the one investment not worth fighting over. Residents
seem to like to fight in Wyoming over water or one thing or
another, but the battles are not about children and rarely about
education.
Like Wyoming, it is Oregon’s time to invest in
the only avenue it can rely upon for the future. Coal and natural
gas once gone, are gone forever, while education pays dividends
into the future. Maybe that’s why the latest word from the Cowboy
State is that the Trail Blazers are safe at home after all. Wyoming
residents seem to have sharpened their pencils and concluded that
some investments just aren’t worth the cost.
John Haines is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is the director
of Mercy Corps Northwest, a disaster relief
service.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
