Most Wyoming residents surveyed said they’re optimistic about the future for themselves, their children and their grandchildren despite the economic gloom that has reached the state.
The survey was done ahead of a conference that will examine the challenges and opportunities presented by growth in Wyoming. The second annual Building the Wyoming We Want conference will take place Tuesday and Wednesday at Casper College.
More than twice as many people — 45 percent to 22 percent — said their local economies are getting worse rather than getting better. Even so, 51 percent said their communities are on the right track.
And 68 percent said they envision a better life in Wyoming for their children and grandchildren.
Moreover, Wyoming residents said their lives have been getting better over the past few years — a trend they expect to continue. Asked to look back five years and rate the quality of their lives on a 1-10 scale, 52 percent ranked their lives as an eight, nine or 10.
Sixty-four percent ranked their current lives in that range. Looking ahead, 75 percent said they foresaw their quality of life scoring in that range in five years.
Pollsters with Virginia-based Heart and Mind Strategies questioned nearly 900 Wyoming adults by phone and online April 10-26. The poll had a margin of error of 3.3 percent.
Gov. Dave Freudenthal hosted last year’s inaugural Building the Wyoming We Want conference. A new nonprofit is hosting this year’s conference.
The survey results will be a starting point for much of this year’s discussion, said Terry Cleveland, a former Wyoming Game and Fish Department director who’s chairman of the Building the Wyoming We Want advisory committee.
“What we were really trying to find out was to determine what the core values are of the people that live in Wyoming — what they hold dear and what they hope to retain in the Wyoming of the future for their children and grandchildren,” Cleveland said Monday.
What Wyoming residents hold dear more than anything else, according to the survey, is the state’s great outdoors and open spaces. Shown a list of 10 attributes of life in Wyoming, more people — 27 percent — picked the outdoors and nature as Wyoming’s best attribute than any other.
The state’s lack of crime, picked by 26 percent, was a close second.
The pollsters told people that the population in the West is projected to more than double over the next 25 years. Forty-nine percent said that would be a bad thing. Fifteen percent said that would be good, while 37 percent said that much population growth would be both good and bad.
Asked whether challenges and problems in the region were related to growth, 42 percent said they were somewhat growth-related, while 34 percent said they were very growth-related. Ten percent said those problems weren’t very related and just 3 percent said they had nothing to do with one another.
“The challenge will be to grow Wyoming on the terms that the people of Wyoming want it to grow — not only in terms of having economic development, but making sure that we can retain those things that make Wyoming so unique and make it so dear to the people that live here,” Cleveland said.
The pollsters also asked Wyoming residents to:
_ Compare the importance of protecting Wyoming’s environment now compared to five years ago. Fifty-four percent said it’s a higher priority now, 21 percent said it’s less important and 22 percent said protecting the environment has about the same importance now as it did then.
_ Compare the importance of economic growth in Wyoming compared to five years ago. Fifty-seven percent said economic growth has become more important, 10 percent said it’s less important and 26 percent said economic growth is neither more nor less important.
_ Gauge how Wyoming’s boom and bust economic cycles affect their lives. Thirty-eight percent said the state’s boom-and-bust cycles affect them somewhat, 32 percent said not much, 27 percent said a great deal and 4 percent said the boom-and-bust economy didn’t affect them at all.
