Wyoming Business: Cheyenne still ‘the great unknown’ to some

Randy Bruns of Cheyenne LEADS enjoys “tweaking” his colleagues along the Northern Front Range about their lack of first-hand knowledge of Cheyenne, their sister city to the north.

As vice president of Cheyenne and Laramie County’s corporation for economic development and a member of the Rocky Mountain Regional Export Council, Bruns says it’s not unusual for colleagues to ask him if he flew down to Denver for a meeting.

“There just isn’t much awareness of what’s here, and I think the image still is that there isn’t anything here,” he observed recently. “I think if a lot of my colleagues would draw a map, they would put some sort of a dashed line at about Wellington, and beyond that they’d draw a sea monster. We’re sort of the great unknown.”

Bruns hopes that perception is changing with several recent business expansions to Cheyenne, including Grobet File Co. and the huge Lowe’s Cos. Inc. regional distribution center under construction now in the Cheyenne Business Parkway.

“We have a very nice lifestyle here, and Denver is a part of it,” Bruns said. “What the good folks down there don’t realize is that there really is something here. It’s always fun to bring site selectors in and show them around. They’re always surprised by what we have here and the lack of hassle.

“And yet we know that Denver is just an hour and a half away,” he added. “We go to Broncos games and Avs games and Rockies games, to the theater and dinner, and so when we feel compelled to get a fix of car exhaust and bumper-to-bumper traffic, we know where to go.”

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Cheyenne is moving ahead with plans to finish renovating the historic Union Pacific Depot and create a Cheyenne Depot Square as a means of revitalizing downtown.

The latest proposal was developed by Civitas Inc., a team of urban planners that has successfully tackled historic-renovation projects in Old Town Fort Collins and LoDo in Denver.

It envisions developing the depot as both a transportation museum and a community-gathering place. In addition to the museum, the depot would include a gift shop, tourism booth and restaurant and house the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Development Authority, Convention and Visitors Bureau and Cheyenne LEADS.

Cheyenne and Laramie County, joint owners of the building for the last 11 years, have already spent more than $4 million restoring and renovating the building’s foundation and exterior. The current proposal calls for using up to $3.25 million in city funds, plus a $1 million loan to finish the interior and create Depot Square in front of the depot.

Although the proposal has its critics, most city, civic and community leaders are supporting it, arguing that if the community doesn’t move forward now, it will lose valuable momentum and be stuck with an empty historic building.

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Cheyenne and Casper are listed among 50 “Five Star Communities” in Expansion Management magazine’s annual Quality of Life Quotient), which compares quality-of-life indicators among the nation’s 329 metropolitan areas.

The magazine ranked best places from a livability and affordability standpoint for manufacturing companies to grow and prosper, looking at such things as affordable housing, low crime rates, low taxes, good schools and the overall cost of living, as well as average wages, work-force availability and adult educational levels.

“Our goal is to provide small- to mid-sized company executives with a basis for comparing the type of living and working environment they are likely to encounter in various communities around the country,” the magazine said.

Expansion Management is a monthly publication that circulates to more than 45,000 CEO’s and senior managers of actively expanding companies.

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When you gotta go, you gotta go. But finding a public restroom in downtown Cheyenne has been a feat.

Until now, that is. Thanks to a spirited public-private partnership, relief is at hand with a brand new public restroom facility in the City Center Parking Lot.

The project took off in earnest last year, when downtown merchants, the chamber, the Downtown Development Authority, the Cheyenne Kiwanis Club and Cheyenne Frontier Days raised more than $100,000 as seed money for the project.

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