Wyoming is experiencing a workforce exodus that will set the state on a long-term economic decline unless it grapples with how to enable communities to attract quality, knowledge-based jobs to compete with surrounding states, the Wyoming Business Council’s top officials say.

“What we’re finding is that, by and large, the [job] opportunities in Wyoming are not good enough, and there aren’t enough of them to retain our youth,” the council’s CEO, Josh Dorrell, told WyoFile. “It’s actually not just the youth. We noticed that our out-migration was twice that of the national average, where we have more out-migration than any other state.”

“They want places that have a vibrant workforce,” Dorrell said. “They don’t want a lot of the things that we think are important, like low taxes. Very rarely, if ever, do we hear a company say, ‘We like you because of your low taxes.’ It just doesn’t happen.”