What’s the rush on the Wyoming land deal? Even carpenters know to measure twice before cutting once

            Editor’s note: This opinion piece was first published in the Casper Star-Tribune on Feb. 23. It is reprinted here with the permission of the writer.

BY ROD MILLER

A good carpenter will always say, “Measure twice, cut once.” Doing so avoids mistakes due to haste and lack of information. 

Wyoming’s political leadership, both executive and legislative, should listen to a good carpenter when it comes to the proposed purchase of Occidental Petroleum’s property.

Here’s some background: Occidental acquired another energy company, Anadarko, which had a significant amount

Gov. Mark Gordon pitches the land deal to legislators.

of surface and subsurface property in Wyoming. The figure being tossed around is 1 million surface acres and 4 million subsurface – all in the checkerboard along the Union Pacific main line in southern Wyoming. Occidental paid a reported $37 billion for the deal, and its shareholders are now a little nervous that they won’t get a dividend any time soon. 

So, Occidental decided to sell its Wyoming holdings to improve its balance sheet.

Enter Wyoming’s governor and legislative leadership. Either they approached Occidental, or Occidental approached them, or an intermediary trying to broker a huge land deal acted as matchmaker and set the wheels in motion (the sequence of events seems to be shrouded in secrecy). The result is state government being positioned as a potential buyer for Occidental’s Wyoming assets.

The Governor’s Office has been working on this deal for six months. Again, in secrecy because it is unknown who has been at the table. The product of that effort (the first half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s first year in office) is a bundle of legislation authorizing Wyoming’s State Land and Investment Board to begin negotiating the purchase of Occidental’s property, and using the state’s savings accounts to fund the deal.

These pieces of legislation, Senate File 138 and House Bill 249, are being fast-tracked during a short, hectic budget session that is trying to deal with declining income to the state’s coffers. A companion bill, House Bill 222 would exempt the the land board from Wyoming’s open meetings law so that aspects of the purchase negotiations can be kept secret from Wyoming’s citizens.

So it appears that the governor and Legislature are not going to measure twice, cut once. Instead, they are in a big hurry.

How much is the Occidental property worth? Nobody knows.

How much will it cost Wyoming? Nobody knows.

How will this purchase affect Wyoming’s bottom line? Nobody knows. 

How will it be managed?

Who will be able to use it and how? 

Who, if anyone, will buy it if we don’t? 

Nobody knows.

The only thing we have been told is that this opportunity is too big to pass up and we have to act now!

Don’t get me wrong, this deal could be the best thing for the Cowboy State since the jackalope, or it could be a disaster of Teapot Dome proportions. We just don’t know ... yet. And we need to know before we crack open our Permanent Mineral Trust Fund and our other piggy banks to do the deal. 

A million surface acres and 4 million subsurface, how much will that cost? Nobody’s saying, but my ballpark guess is that we’re talking about close to $1 billion.

I would suggest to the governor and the Legislature that they slow down. Don’t start pulling on a thread that could unravel Wyoming’s carefully crafted savings plan for something that only appears too good to pass up. 

Why not defer a decision on whether to raid our rainy-day accounts until we know more – a lot more – about what we’re buying?

Since we’re all giving lip service to transparency in government these days, let’s really practice it. Let’s give an interim committee a few months or a year to answer some of the many, many questions about this deal, and let’s invite our political leaders to bring those answers out into the fresh air and bright sunshine of day through hearings across the state. 

Without citizen buy-in, and plenty of transparency, the governor and Legislature run the very real risk of making this transaction look and smell like a backroom handshake deal among poker-playing buddies. That can only lead to valid conjecture about what is motivating this move. That’s how conspiracy theories are born.

If Wyoming taking its time to measure twice before cutting results in upsetting Occidental’s time-frame, then that’s really no skin off our noses. If another company steps in and buys what Occidental is offering, then I guess we all tip our hat and say, “That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.”

            Rod Miller is a citizen, father and grandfather and a proud former Rawlins Outlaw living in Cheyenne.