Gillette, Wyo. – Two families who squeezed into an apartment here waited months for permanent housing. Day-care centers are so packed that expectant mothers must put their names on waiting lists for their unborn child. A Quiznos sandwich shop can’t keep workers at $9.50 an hour because of a labor shortage that sometimes shuts down the store.
Ed Lambert couldn’t be happier. He watched his homebuilding business in Flint, Mich., die as downsizing in the auto industry sucked the life from the local economy.
Lambert and three of his employees drove 1,300 miles west in June, trading Michigan’s shimmering lakes and dismal prospects for Wyoming’s dry plains and sizzling economy.
“We got in on a Sunday, and we were framing a house on Monday. It has been nonstop,” said Lambert, 33, his sandy hair topped by a dusty Detroit Tigers baseball cap. “This building boom won’t stop here for a good five years.”
With energy demand soaring, resource-rich Wyoming is struggling to find employees to work its mines and natural-gas and oil fields – and to staff a service industry scrambling to keep up with a booming population.
In the employee parking lot of the Black Hills Power & Light generation plant, at least a third of the license plates are from outside the state, including Michigan, Texas, Mississippi and Arizona.
The Bureau of Land Management estimates that by 2020, as many as 15,000 new jobs will be created in the coal-rich Powder River Basin that includes Campbell County and Gillette. The city’s population last year of 22,685 is expected to reach nearly 30,000 by 2010.
Mutually beneficial
On a raw and overcast Thursday this month, more than 1,200 job seekers, many with families in tow, attended a Wyoming job fair in Flint. A billboard on nearby Interstate 75 invites motorists to “Live and Work in Wyoming.”
Michigan’s high unemployment rate and skilled workforce have made it a prime recruiting target for Wyoming’s economic development officials and employers.
“Michigan was an opportunity. The weather, the taxes and the culture are similar, the people have a strong work ethic. It is a culture that enjoys a lot of outdoor winter recreation, so they like the idea of snow,” said Patricia Robbins, director of the Sweetwater Economic Development Association. Sweetwater County is in southwestern Wyoming.
David Selbmann, 41, arrived at the Flint job fair in a crisp white shirt sporting gold cuff links. A welder at Ivan Doverspike, a company that rebuilds screw machines, Selbmann has seen its workforce drop from 100 to 75. He sees little future in Michigan.
“I have a 17-year-old that can’t even find a job at Mickey D’s,” he said. “When you have a family to take care of, you have to go where you can take care of them.”
Michigan’s unemployment rate is 7.1 percent, compared with 3.3 percent in Wyoming. In Wyoming’s Campbell County, it’s a minuscule 1.7 percent. Companies are hungry for machinists, welders, plumbers, electricians and other skilled laborers.
Wyoming officials and employers estimate that several hundred Michiganders have moved to the state.
The auto industry, Michigan’s largest economic driver, is bleeding. General Motors, which posted a $10 billion loss last year, is in the midst of a restructuring that will cut 30,000 jobs. Ford says it will ax 25,000 of its workers. Auto parts-maker Delphi is in bankruptcy and planning 20,100 layoffs by the end of the year.
Ford worker Tyler Spencer, 39, qualifies for a $100,000 buyout and must decide whether to take it by Nov. 27. He and his wife, Teri, are leaning toward taking the money and running to Wyoming.
He once made almost $80,000 a year working on an assembly line making axles for light trucks. That was before Ford cut back on overtime. This year, he said, he will be lucky to make $50,000.
“From week to week, you don’t know if you are going to be laid off. I want a stable life,” said Spencer.
He lives with his wife and two children on a block of neat single-family homes in Mayville, about an hour outside Flint.
“We live in a blue-collar sea,” said Teri, 38, a chiropractor’s assistant with a quick laugh and shoulder-length hair. “Everybody is struggling.”
Tough transitions
Those who have made the move say it can be difficult. Many of them have never before been to Wyoming or the West.
Lambert’s wife, Kimberly, is pregnant and arrived in Gillette a few weeks after he did. With her was Ramona Nolan, wife of one of Lambert’s employees, Greg. Ramona and Greg have a 14-year-old son, Brad.
The two families crowded into a three-bedroom apartment in Gillette, along with two other Lambert employees, one of whom has returned to Michigan. He was homesick.
The Lamberts bought a home. The Nolans moved into a model home owned by Lang Homes, the building company for which Lambert does subcontracting work.
“If Tom (Lang) hadn’t offered us the model home, we would have had to go back home,” said Greg Nolan, 41.
Local companies are lodging out-of-state employees in hotels. Some employers lease apartments to house workers, said Ruth Benson, executive director of the Campbell County Economic Development Corp. Some newcomers spend six months in a hotel before finding a home. Others live in campers.
New homes are rising throughout Gillette. Antelope lounged in front of a new subdivision across from a strip of sagebrush- covered land where a 350-unit apartment complex is planned.
The average home price in Gillette is just shy of $200,000, said Traci J. Conklin, a real estate consultant in Gillette. Five years ago the average price was about $160,000, she said.
It’s causing hardship for the Michigan transplants. At least four of those interviewed said they had not been able to sell their Michigan homes, though all had been in Wyoming for months.
The Nolans’ house in Davison, near Flint, was appraised at $160,000 last year. They are asking $120,000 and making mortgage payments on the now- empty home.
“You always heard that housing is a guaranteed investment. Well, not in Michigan,” said Ramona.
Apartment rents in Wyoming are soaring, said Leann Carothers, southwest regional manager for the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services.
“As demand goes up, the cost goes up,” Carothers said. “Apartments that were renting for $300 to $400 five years ago are now over $1,000.”
Openings abound
In the past two years, Dan McKillop, owner of DRM Inc., a heavy-construction company, has raised wages 20 percent to keep and compete for labor. He pays between $12 and $22 an hour. A stack of résumés 2 inches thick sat at the edge of McKillop’s desk, evidence of his effort to add another 20 employees to the 120 who now toil for him at construction sites and mines.
Kameron Wiechert, a 19-year-old Michigander who drives a 40-ton dump truck at a DRM-operated mine, landed his job within a week of arriving in Wyoming. “Some of my friends thought I was crazy, but now they want to come out here.”
There are 13 coal mines in Campbell County, mostly open pits where workers in machines claw the dull black coal from the earth and load it onto trucks that can haul as much as 250 tons. The county provides 35 percent of the nation’s coal.
An expansion is underway at Black Hills Power & Light’s generation plant. Two more energy plants to help slake the thirst for electricity are in the final stages of the state’s permitting process.
When construction gets underway on all three plants in 2007 and 2008, a workforce of 1,550 will be needed. At the same time, mining employment will also be climbing, according to the BLM study.
On Oct. 9 Carothers’ agency had 693 help-wanted listings.
“That doesn’t include a lot of places like Wal-Mart that are running in the hundreds of positions short. You can’t hardly walk down the street without seeing every business with a help-wanted sign,” Carothers said.
Convenience stores in Sweetwater County pay $10 an hour and offer prospective employees a signing bonus.
In Gillette, a Quiznos is frequently closed for lunch – and sometimes all day – because employees leave for higher paying jobs, said Debbie Lacey, an employee at the shop. “They start people out at $9.50, and they still don’t come in,” Lacey said.
Two years ago the shop paid $7 an hour to start, she said.
“You have to stand in line to get anything,” said Melissa Mellentine, 38, a mother of two who moved from Michigan with her husband, Joe, a heavy-equipment operator. They live 20 miles outside Gillette.
Though some big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot have set up shop in Gillette, there are no malls, nor a Target.
Ramona Nolan plans to drive 350 miles to metro Denver with Kimberly Lambert in the next few weeks to shop for the Lamberts’ soon-to-arrive baby. They could shop on the Internet but “you want to hold it in your hands,” said Ramona.
And sagebrush country is full of surprises for those accustomed to an urban environment. Since moving onto their new property in July, the Mellentines have killed three rattlesnakes.
“Hit them with a shovel,” Melissa Mellentine said.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
