The Voice of the Community Since 1909, Serving Moorcroft and Pine Haven, Wyoming

Community dev group forms

At Tuesday night’s meeting of the newly formed and as-yet-informal Moorcroft Community Development, Ron and Linda Calor hosted a gathering of around a dozen individuals and business owners from the “main street” area along Big Horn Avenue.

Linda opened the discussion with a difficult, but apparent truth: “Our little town’s dying. Our property values are going down and if we don’t do something, we’re going to be a truck stop.”

This observation has been proven repeatedly by the inability of most new small businesses that open in Moorcroft to hold on more than a year. In an effort to find answers to this problem, the group had welcomed the Wyoming Community, Main Street and Small Business Development to a previous meeting.

Linda explained that she was candid in her request for their help: “We said, ‘Come help us and point us in a direction.” She came to Tuesday’s meeting to share those ideas.

The first step discussed was the need to organize, possibly applying for a 501 non-profit recognition and create a plan with an initial evaluation of the town to ascertain the available assets. “We’ve got a fantastic little downtown,” Calor advocated.

Sharon Materi expressed her concern over the lack of maintenance she observes at a few of the businesses along the street: “Who’s going to want to stop in our town if we look so bad? For me, that is my personal goal, to start cleaning things up; to try to get people to look at the town and say, ‘Oh, what a quaint place, let’s stop there.”

She and Ron Calor plan to utilize weed whackers and blowers to clean up the south end of Big Horn Avenue. “We’ve got to be clean before we can do anything, in my opinion,” she said.

Many of those gathered discussed the windows and floor in the post office. While the fact that the staff maintains their own building was noted, the cleanliness of the fellow facility at Upton was brought up in comparison with the question of whether they take care of their windows, door handles and floors.

Linda admitted, “I’m to the point where I want to get off work here and take a mop bucket up there and wash the windows and mop the floor.”

Materi expressed her hope that watching those business owners who take pride in their store front and maintain a clean sidewalk and façade will make people want to clean theirs in turn.”It will become kind of like a disease and flow over the town. I don’t know that it will, but I’m hoping it will,” she said.

Another point was to create short and long term goals and the group wanted to become involved in the Homecoming celebration by painting school slogans on business windows as one of the short term efforts.

They are also planning to ask main street businesses to commit to some type of kid friendly activities for main street during the day before the Moorcroft Area Chamber of Commerce (MACC) sponsored Harvest Feastival on November 9. Dewey’s Place owner Rachel Kimsey is already preparing for a corn pit and hay pile for their entertainment.

Local businesses are also having a scarecrow contest that will be judged on November 8. Ron stated that there are no actual prizes this year for the contest except recognition.

The VFW building, Linda suggested, is the perfect long term goal. The VFW administration in Cheyenne is currently working with the town to obtain the release of the title to the property from a lien holder apparently not formerly realized by the state level VFW so that they can turn it over to the town as agreed. The development committee wants to remove the fence and make a green space maintained by the group.

The group has also spoken with Andrea Wood about getting her Secret Squirrel Brigade involved as leaders in community service, helping kids to understand that such service is not a punishment, but an endeavor from which they can take pride.

When Linda was researching ways to help small towns like Moorcroft, she found that, 11 years ago, under the mayoral auspices of Barb Jeffries, a study was conducted by the Wyoming Rural Development Council to ascertain the challenges and possible solutions to further develop the town.

A “resource team” toured Moorcroft and interviewed over 100 people in the spring of 2008, interviewing representatives from local business, city, law enforcement and the general public. These people were asked three questions to create a basis for developing a plan of action.

The three questions were: What do you think are the major problems and challenges in Moorcroft? What do you think are the major strengths and assets in Moorcroft? What projects would you like to see implemented in 2, 5, 10 or 20 years in Moorcroft?

After discussing the answers, the team came up with elements on which Moorcroft must work to stay viable in the future. These include growth, solving challenges such as the need for more jobs and the lack of support for businesses; and planning for the future, such as creating a long-term vision and taking care of existing assets.

Linda shared a few first steps with the group and, through the efforts of subsequent councils, a few of the issues the town has faced including infrastructure, water and parks have been answered. To see the study for yourselves, go to https://www.communityreview.org/sites/default/files/assessment_reports/Moorcroft_CR_Report_Mar_2008.pdf

Moorcroft Mayor Dick Claar, while not yet able to attend one of the meetings, later expressed his appreciation for anyone willing to help “promote the town”.

MACC President Neal Gray, after attending a previous meeting of the Moorcroft Community Development group, shared his thoughts about their advent into the community.

“The chamber takes a whole community outlook – the health of the community, community gatherings, community celebrations. I believe the community development concentrates pretty much on main street improvement and business promotion,” he said.

“We think it’s a good thing. We would love to cooperate with anybody who wants to do whatever it takes to make Moorcroft a better place to live. If it takes having a separate organization, we’re happy with that.”

“The town of Moorcroft and the people,” Gray advises his fellow citizens, “need to work as hard as they can on being positive about each other’s activities and helping each other out as much as possible rather than making negative comments about what other people do.”