Cheyenne: Just up the road or another world away?

CHEYENNE — Driving north on Interstate 25 from Northern Colorado into Wyoming can feel like entering an entirely different world.

To the left, the familiar Front Range fades into the distance, and on the right, the outline of a giant bison statue peers down at you from a bluff. Otherworldly rock formations sprout from the ground, and soon you’re surrounded by billboards for off-track betting operations and fireworks stores.

But, while Wyoming, of course, is an entirely different state, it’s not a different world. Northern Colorado and southeast Wyoming — with its main population centers of Cheyenne and Laramie — are intimately connected. And despite some clear cultural and economic differences, the regions often prosper (or face challenges) in tandem.

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Connections to Colorado

Despite being separated by a few miles and a state border, the economies in Northern Colorado and southeast Wyoming “aren’t islands,” Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce CEO Dale Steenbergen said. “We’re all interconnected. We’re sharing people, sharing education facilities. We’re crossing that border everyday for work. If Greeley is doing poorly and Cheyenne is doing OK, that won’t last very long. We’re really a regional economy.”

Laramie County, which is home to the state capital Cheyenne, has “7,800 people that drive in from Weld and Larimer counties every day to work in Cheyenne,” Cheyenne LEADS CEO Betsey Hale said, with a smaller but still-significant group that commutes from Wyoming into Colorado. Cheyenne LEADS is the economic development corporation in Cheyenne and Laramie County. 

Because of the proximity, workers, particularly young people, “can live in Fort Collins and have that cool downtown life,” and still have less than an hour-long commute to work in southeast Wyoming, Hale said. 

Leaders with the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce work “very well with our (business community and economic-development) partners, especially in Fort Collins and Greeley,” Steenbergen said. Both of those cities have “very good, very strong chambers, and we’re proud to be allied with them.”

Transportation connectivity is an area where cross-border business groups frequently collaborate, he said. “We’re trying to make sure it’s easy to get back and forth up and down the Front Range all the way to Denver and beyond.”

Competing with Colorado

While Northern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming are neighbors, the regions differ significantly in terms of strategies for economic competitiveness.

Unlike some economic-development organizations south of the border, Cheyenne LEADS’ primary mission is retaining existing primary employers rather than attracting new ones. 

“Our top priority is to take care of the companies we have, and then attraction” as a secondary mission, Hale said. “So we do it a little bit different. We’re not all about going and getting (a lot of new companies to move to Cheyenne). We’re about once we get them here, keeping them here, and then we focus on additional attraction opportunities.”

While Wyoming’s friendly tax structure — the state does not collect personal or corporate income tax — is often cited as a competitive advantage, by not taking in as much tax revenue, the state has less to give back in the form of incentives.

“The one thing that is hard for us to compete with Colorado is, we don’t have a lot of incentives,” said Hale, who, as a previous director of the Loveland Department of Economic Development, has a unique insight into how Northern Colorado and southeast Wyoming compare.

“When companies come to us, they right away say, ‘Well, where are the incentives? What are you going to give us?’ Well, if we don’t take your tax dollars, if we don’t charge you corporate income tax, and we don’t charge you personal income tax. We don’t charge you tax on your equipment for manufacturing or data centers,” she said. “We don’t have to give you incentives because we’re already cheaper.”

Wyoming law prohibits state dollars from being funneled directly to companies, making groups such as Cheyenne LEADS, which can act as a sort of conduit from the state and local governments to industry, particularly useful.

“When I did incentives in Loveland, I could give Orthopedic Center of the Rockies $300,000 to pay their building-permit fees,” Hale said. “… Down in Loveland, I was able to do a lot of creative stuff” to incentivize business relocation and expansion, much of which is out of bounds across Colorado’s northern border. 

Wyoming’s population — at fewer than 600,000, smaller than the combined population of Weld and Larimer counties, and only about one-tenth of the population of the entirety of Colorado — creates inherent competitive challenges. Fewer total people means fewer economic-development professionals. 

“We don’t have a big” state office of economic development, Hale said. “Colorado has its big (Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade), and then you’ve got the Metro Denver (Economic Development Corp.) and all of these people working in the economic-development space” along the Colorado Front Range, including in the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado. “The Wyoming Business Council has 45 employees, and there are counties and communities in Wyoming that don’t have any economic development professionals.”

So economic-development professionals in Wyoming, outnumbered as they might be, “really focus on our strengths,” Hale said.

“There are a lot of economic numbers that look pretty good for us on the northern end of the Front Range,” Steenbergen said. “Life looks pretty good for us. You hear people talking about problems (related to) housing and workforce — so if you’re hearing that, it’s a pretty good sign that business is doing well. You’re not too worried about housing if people are leaving your area and (businesses are) not hiring.”

While Cheyenne’s housing stock has expanded little by little over the years, a relative lack of availability has resulted in Cheyenne LEADS focusing its efforts on attracting businesses that don’t need to move large numbers of new employees to the city.

“That’s one of the reasons you never see us compete for like 2,000 employees at a meatpacking plant,” Hale said. “We really like companies that are talking (about bringing) 20, 30, 50” new workers to town. “It’s easier to find places for 25 people to live than 500.”

Interest-rate increases “cooled the (housing) market a little bit” in recent years, “but that seems to be heating back up now,” leading state lawmakers to refocus on ways to combat rising tax burdens, Steenbergen said.

“There is a big drive to lower residential property taxes because properties have gone up in value quite a bit over the last few years, which has driven the property taxes higher,” he said. Similarly, “there’s a desire to reduce business property taxes.”

Business leaders in Wyoming are keeping a close eye on legislation “centered around the regulatory environment — trying to make this a more business-friendly state,” Steenbergen said, with particular interest in a proposal to require municipalities to more efficiently process building permits and development applications.

With President Donald Trump taking office in January, “I would definitely say there’s a sense of optimism in the business community” about the trends in the national regulatory environment, he said. 

Data-center success

Cheyenne has been a formative nationwide competitor in attracting massive data centers operated by some of the world’s largest technology companies.

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) operates several cloud-computing data centers in town, and Meta Platforms Inc. (Nasdaq: META) revealed last summer its plans to build an $800 million data center in Cheyenne’s High Plains Business Park that is expected to bring close to 1,100 jobs — mostly during construction of the facility — to the area.

Hale said that there are several factors that make southeast Wyoming attractive for data-center operators, with “speed to market” topping that list.

Cheyenne LEADS secured entitlements — rezoning, an annexation from unincorporated Laramie County into Cheyenne city limits, building permits — for a new Microsoft data center a few years ago in only about 90 days, Hale said. “That has to be the fastest entitlement process (Microsoft had) ever seen.”

“The other piece” of why Cheyenne is so attractive to data-center operators, Hale said, “is our tax structure — we have no corporate income tax, no personal income tax, we have no inventory tax” in Wyoming.

“Then there’s the wind,” she said. “The wind is the magic. Cooling is really critical when you have those structures,” and Cheyenne’s blustery climate is well-suited for that purpose. 

Beyond data centers, “we’re very focused on manufacturing right now,” Hale said. “We’re working on a major expansion for an existing employer that’s going to be spending $80 million” to boost manufacturing capacity.

Wyoming has proved to be a particularly welcoming place for firearms and weapons-components manufactures. “It’s a big focus for us as a state because we’re such a strong Second Amendment state,” Hale said. 

About a decade ago, Magpul Industries Corp. left Erie and set up a factory in Cheyenne in protest of Colorado gun-control laws. “Anytime any of our neighboring states, or California or New York or Connecticut or wherever, becomes unfriendly to firearms, we get a lot of interest,” Hale said.

Military money

Cheyenne is not only the seat of Wyoming’s state government, but also home to the state’s largest military installation, F.E. Warren Air Force Base. The base, one of Laramie County’s most-important economic drivers, employs, according to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet, more than 4,300 military and civilian workers. F.E. Warren is among the bases set to receive billions of dollars in Pentagon funding for upgrades as the military modernizes its missile-defense systems.

“Cheyenne is really a military and government town. The military (accounts for) 30% of the economy, and they have been rolling along and moving to a new missile system. A lot of construction — to the tune of $1.25 billion this year — is going on to prepare Cheyenne for the new missile system,” Steenbergen said. “You’re seeing contractors moving and starting work. So as long as government and military is spending, Cheyenne’s economy does pretty well.”

There is, of course, a flipside to this coin. Over-reliance on the government and military to stimulate the local economy can result in a lack of economic diversification.

Diversification and innovation

“Diversification is a big deal” for Wyoming economic-development and business leaders, Steenbergen said. “We rely on the same sorts of industries that we’ve relied on for a long time.” And while the state has done well to grow the overall economic pie, “the makeup (of the state’s industry mix) kind of looks the same” as it has for years. “That’s not a negative, necessarily, but it is a long-term concern.”

Finding innovative ways to spur entrepreneurship in southeast Wyoming is one way that the region can improve economic diversification, Steenbergen said. “Percentage-wise, we lag the nation” in homegrown entrepreneurs.

Education plays a role in this trend. While the Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne is actively involved in a number of workforce-development initiatives — in addition to serving as an economic driver in its own right, attracting students from a number of nearby states — the University of Wyoming in Laramie is the state’s only public, four-year institution. 

“The number of students we get (graduating) college with a bachelor’s degree lags behind some of the nationwide stats,” Steenbergen said, and “folks with higher degrees tend to become entrepreneurs at a higher percentage.”

Lack of access to local capital streams is part of the reason why relatively few startup companies are born in Wyoming. “Of all the states in the U.S., Wyoming has probably had the least venture-capital investment,” Hale said. And the parts of the state that have long been on the radar for deep-pocketed investors from the coasts are largely centered around resort areas — Jackson Hole, for example — that are nearly 500 miles away from Cheyenne. 

Business leaders and economic-development officials in Wyoming have begun to establish angel-investment funds and other initiatives aimed at sparking life into the statewide innovation ecosystem, but the Cowboy State is still “kind of catching up with what other states have been doing,” she said. 

Laramie County Community College recently launched an entrepreneurship program, and there are startup incubators beginning to sprout in Casper, the center of Wyoming’s energy industry; and Laramie, the state’s lone college town. “But that’s all really new. I mean, like embryonic new,” Hale said. 

Despite a friendly tax and regulatory environment, there are persistent challenges that make Cheyenne and large swaths of Wyoming less attractive for entrepreneurs. Some of those challenges — the remoteness of Wyoming’s geography, its long and frigid winters, its earned reputation for strident political conservatism, for example — are essentially baked in. But state and local leaders can help improve areas such as cultural amenities to help attract entrepreneurs and the energetic workforce that support them, Wyoming business leaders say.

The “Daddy of ’em All”

One type of cultural amenity that Cheyenne is certainly not lacking is the celebration of the Wild West lifestyle. “When you say the name Cheyenne around the world, people automatically think of cowboys and Western history,” said Jim Walter, Visit Cheyenne vice president and director of sales and marketing.

The city’s premier event, Cheyenne Frontier Days, nicknamed the “Daddy of ’em All,” brings more than 100,000 people to town each July for 10 days of rodeo, concerts, parades and pancake breakfasts.

“Tourism is the first date of economic development,” Walter said. “A lot of times, a business will move to a community after a C-suite executive has visited that community for some reason. There are businesses that have located in Cheyenne because their executives were at Cheyenne Frontier Days and they said, ‘You know, that’s a cool town.’”

Walter said that tourism accounted for about $420 million in economic activity throughout Laramie County in 2023, and about 10% of that activity occurred during CFD. 

“Frontier Days is going strong and continues to be a huge tourism event for our community,” Steenbergen said. “… We’re figuring out how we can be a year-round Western heritage spot rather than just 10 days in July.”

A few years ago, Cheyenne’s tourism professionals faced a challenge: The city’s Wild West image just wasn’t connecting with younger people, who didn’t grow up watching “Bonanza” and “The Wild Bunch.” Then “Yellowstone” premiered in 2018, and cowboys were suddenly cool again.

Yellowstone “rekindled that interest in the West and in this Western way of life” Walter said. “… I call it the ‘Yellowstone effect.’ People who 10 years ago would have said, ‘Why would I want to go to Wyoming?’ now want to come and experience it. It has really been a boon for us year round.”

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