LANDER - While the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is boosting its staff to help deal with booming energy development in Wyoming, the agency's other functions will likely be handled by fewer people in coming years.

"We're going to have to do more with less," said Rubel Vigil, acting field manager for the BLM's Lander office.

During an open house meeting last week with ranchers who graze livestock on the Green Mountain Common Allotment, Vigil said the BLM in Wyoming is looking at a 10 percent cut in staffing over the next two years. Vigil said it might take a while before he could replace a range conservationist who's leaving the Lander Field Office.

Yet in the Rawlins and Buffalo field offices, staffing levels have grown by 22 and six positions, respectively, in response to the rapidly growing workload involved with the energy boom in those districts. Those additional positions are funded separately, via provisions in the National Energy Act.

U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., helped create the pilot project to improve federal permit coordination.

"The pilot project will provide for the coordination of the lead and cooperating agencies through the permit process," said Cameron Hardy, Thomas's press secretary. "This will provide better coordination and improved use of resources for both the Rawlins and Buffalo offices and the related agencies…"

The BLM in Wyoming has a total of 742 employees, said Cindy Wertz, a BLM spokeswoman in the agency's Cheyenne headquarters. She confirmed Vigil's staffing assessment. She cautioned that the agency is not cutting positions, so no jobs are at risk.

Virtually all of the cuts will be by attrition n not filling positions left vacant by promotions, retirement, transfer or quitting, she said.

Steven Hall, spokesman for the BLM in Wyoming, said managers are anticipating that empty positions will take longer to fill, depending on state and field office priorities. There's no policy statement or press release, he said - just the awareness that money is getting tighter and job demands are changing. The 10 percent figure is simply an informed guesstimate, acknowledging that budget and staffing projections are more an art than a science.

"We have a personnel committee that looks at each vacancy," Hall said. Some get filled as quickly as possible, such as the field manager opening in Pinedale, he said. Hall cautioned that these decisions will be made with field office and state office input.

Bev Gorny, another BLM spokeswoman in Cheyenne, said that over the past three years, the overall Wyoming BLM budget has gone down while salaries have gone up.

Gorny explained that money is tight in the federal budget overall, and salaries reflect an aging, highly experienced work force, "like me." Gorny has 18 years with the BLM, but knows of one employee with 47 years.

"People care about their work and stay for a long time," she said.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the federal, non-military work force has 1.7 million civilians, the largest in the country. Some 85 percent of federal employees live and work outside Washington, D.C., and roughly half will be eligible to retire before 2009. That means almost 70 percent of the institutional memory of federal agencies including the BLM could be headed for the ol' fishing hole or lucrative careers in private industry.

"The BLM is at a turning point," said Celia Boddington, a national headquarters spokeswoman. "Like many federal agencies, the BLM work force is aging and over the next five years, we estimate that more than 140 of the agency's 260 senior managers will be eligible for retirement."

She said the BLM has launched a program to identify and groom the agency's future leaders. At the same time, the BLM is "aggressively recruiting students from colleges and universities to bring critical skills to the agency identified through our work force planning effort."

With regard to the BLM budget, Boddington said "the BLM believes that future budgets will challenge the agency to serve its customers more efficiently and effectively than ever before." New communications capabilities will enable the agency to reduce travel costs, while a younger work force will introduce new ways of doing business, she said.