Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I returned to Crook County to my grandfather’s place on Rifle Pit Road in 1975. At that time there wasn’t a single light in the night sky visible from my home. I could make out trucks and cars on Interstate 90 during the day, but at night there was almost no traffic.

Now, there are clusters of light to my north, east and west and the freeway is a constant stream of vehicles. Surely, I liked it better 49 years ago, but with global population on its way to nine billion, and the worsening effects of the damage eight billion people have done to the ecosystem, people are looking for better places to live, and Crook County certainly meets that standard.

With increased population in the county comes increased demand for services. Yes, we could each construct our own infrastructure, but humans have known at least for several centuries the advantages of pooling resources and creating public infrastructure.

In Wyoming and in Crook County, most of the cost of our exemplary infrastructure has been paid by the minerals industry and the federal government, keeping the personal taxes we pay to the county low. I pay only a tiny fraction of the actual cost of construction and maintenance of my use of the schools, fire, police and legal protection, roads, bridges and public buildings and parks.

This has created an impossible bind for the people who have stepped up to take on the task of county commissioners. There is an ever-growing demand for public services and infrastructure, but there seems to be limited availability of funding.

This is made so much more difficult by the Wyoming statute that grants huge discounts to the tax bill of anyone who produces the smallest imaginable income from agriculture (myself included).

Solutions will be hard to find, especially in the current atmosphere of anti-tax mania. Continuing to say “no” to expansion of public infrastructure is, I believe, short sighted.

For those of us who enjoy well-maintained county roads to insist that there be no new roads to meet the needs of the growing population is hypocritical. I have ideas for how I would like to see the county move forward, but I have no idea whether my ideas could be implemented.

But this I do know: continuing to cling to our own opinions and see those with other opinions as foolish or self-serving will get us nowhere. Everything, whether harmony or infrastructure, improves when we see each other as allies and face our situation as it is, rather than how we would like it to be.

Ernie Reinhold