Gas bonanza shakes dust from Western towns

It has spurred calls from community leaders like Mr. Wise, a third-generation Pinedalean, to slow down the pace so that planners can catch their breath.

"The BLM should have helped us to better prepare," Wise says. "It's mind-boggling that the people who have permitted the gas drilling drilling claimed there would be no significant impacts. And now they're getting ready to turn it up another notch."

BLM officials, in the agency's defense, have said they are only empowered to weigh and try to mitigate impacts on the tracts they oversee, even though their activities have spillover effects. They have no authority or expertise to tell communities how to handle a boom.

Draft findings of a socio- economic task force report being delivered to the BLM and provided to the Monitor indicate that:

• Wyoming counties with population surges because of energy development are reporting an increase in domestic violence and drug use.

• Since 1997, traffic has increased sixfold on scenic US Highway 189.

• Fire department calls have tripled in three years and ambulance calls rose 50 percent.

• Skyrocketing property values and lack of affordable housing are making it extremely difficult to retain sheriff's deputies and public school teachers.

• Recreational tourists, who have been important to the economy, often can't find hotel rooms because they're all taken by gas field workers.

• Planners estimate that 1,000 new homes will be built (this in a county of only 6,400 inhabitants) in the coming years, marring the beauty of the Upper Green River Valley and fragmenting wildlife habitat.

"I'm not opposed to energy development, but it needs to be managed in a smart, common - sense way," Wise says. "So far, that hasn't happened and the problems it is causing are huge."

"Some people feel very strongly about trying to protect the intangible elements that shape a high quality of life in Sublette County and others are passionately invested in doing everything they can to promote the economy," says Carmel Kail, an archaeologist and the chairwoman of the socioeconomic task force.

Ms. Kail says that although citizen discussion has been emotional and heated, people are reflecting on what kind of community they want to have in ways they never did before.

Painted across a weathered brick building in downtown Pinedale is a mural depicting a line of cattle. The artwork is a fixture of local identity.

Yet despite the enormous energy profits being pulled out of the ground, the scene itself is falling into disrepair.

Seeing irony in that, Randy Carpenter a community planner with the Sonoran Institute says that Sublette County holds the potential to redefine what boomtime prosperity means while escaping the legacy of previous boom and busts Wyoming has suffered over the past century.

"With all the wealth that's being generated here, Pinedale in 40 years should be the coolest, most desirable small town to live in the West," Carpenter says. "The only question is whether the opportunity will be seized or if it gets frittered away, leaving Sublette County more impoverished than it was when this all began."

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