JACKSON - Gov. Dave Freudenthal told members of the Wyoming Contractors Association Friday there are a lot of opportunities for development in the state, but people are more sensitive to balancing that development with environmental considerations.

Speaking of the oil and gas industry, Freudenthal told about 30 representatives from Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and South Dakota the challenge is how to extract resources and have a good economy but "not look like the energy Appalachia of America."

"I expect them to clean up their mess," Freudenthal said. "At these prices, they can."

Freudenthal said many companies today are reclaiming areas to make them more productive for wildlife and cattle than before development.

Still, Freudenthal said, the opportunities for contractors in Wyoming is huge.

There are a lot of dollars for building highways, allocated from the federal government and state, and there are a lot of opportunities for building schools, he said. Bids for school construction have been higher than estimated budgets, in part because of high demand for labor and increase in materials costs.

"There's a fair amount of activity fueled by the private sector, and we expect to see more," Freudenthal said.

And the governor said second-home development is estimated to make up about 40 percent of new home construction in Wyoming.

"They're not usually modest, single-family dwellings," he said.

Looking toward the future, Freudenthal noted that Wyoming and Utah have been discussing building an electrical transmission line to Nevada and California. He also hopes to see more power plants in the state.

"For us to have a kind of economy we want in Wyoming, we need to have some plants here" and tap into the California market, he said. There are other opportunities to bring power to the Front Range of Colorado and portions of Idaho, he said.

That energy will likely include wind energy, but "a lot of it is going to be coal-fired," he said, using new lower-emission technology.

Freudenthal said his goal is to "do the best I can and make sure we have it all," including development jobs and clean air.

Curt Hovet, president of the Wyoming Contractors Association, said the contractor business is "really feeling the crunch" from lack of employees. He said every sector, from road building to truck drivers, is suffering.

"Our answer is train, train, train," he said. The McMurry Regional Training Center in Casper is a great benefit to the state, both Hovet and Freudenthal said.

He also said there is a boon to calling a tri-state meeting, such as Friday's, as the area can address the worker shortage as a region. Wyoming, however, still suffers from being at the bottom of the wage structures, he said.

"We feel if you don't pay those kind of wages to attract people, we're educating all those people in Wyoming and training those people in Wyoming and they're leaving to go to the south and west," Hovet said.

Reporter Whitney Royster can be reached at (307) 734-0260 or at royster@trib.com.

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'We're all nut cases'

Gov. Dave Freudenthal side-stepped a question from a Colorado contractor about how industry can do more to build a reputation as environmental stewards.

"Do you have any thoughts on how we could be perceived as being the responsible environmentalists, and the extremists seen for what they are, a little more left-field?" Kim Haarberg of Colorado asked the governor Friday in Jackson.

"I've tried to avoid getting into this business of who's extreme and who's not," Freudenthal said. "For every human being there's an issue or two for which we're all nut cases."

Freudenthal said in Wyoming there's not a perception that contractors and developers are not respectful of the environment. But, he said, "Where contractors get in trouble here is in gravel pits."

He said often those are near subdivisions or harm air quality.

"Contractors here have a pretty good reputation," Freudenthal said. There aren't a lot of spills that don't get reported, and sometimes people may find buried oil drums, "but usually it's frankly some rogue operator going into bankruptcy and on his way out of the state anyway."

Freudenthal said there are always going to be people who don't like certain businesses, as some people will never like him because he's a Democrat.

"If I walked on water," he said, "they'd say I'm too lazy to swim."

- Whitney Royster