The recreation center in Hanna, Wyo. is struggling financially. The small town, located about 40 miles east of Rawlins near Interstate 80, is grappling with population loss and increasing expenses. For local residents, it’s an inflection point in the boom and bust economic cycle.
Inside the sprawling, one-story recreation center is an empty pool. The town closed it indefinitely last year due to a pump failure, and reopening it would be a massive expense. The walls have chipped paint. The slide and diving board lead to faded black and white tiles pasted on the concrete pool bottom. Below the deck is water damage from leaks, an electric panel with fraying wires and an outdated heating system.
For local mayor Jon Ostling, it’s time for damage control.
“Right now, we're scraping to get ready to paint it,” he said. “Even though we may not use it, it's not necessary for us to make it look in disrepair. So our intent is always to make the facility look as good as it can look.”
The long-term future of the aquatic center is uncertain due to the high cost of new equipment, maintenance and chemicals. Lifeguards are also a challenge to hire and retain. Ostling said that reopening the pool would cost tens of thousands of dollars, which could be a drain on community funds.
“Inevitably, over the years, you can try to save,” Ostling said. “[But] when something breaks here, it's not like five or 10 bucks.”
In fact, the entire recreation center costs nearly $300,000 per year to maintain, according to town financial records. There are saunas, multiple weight and exercise rooms, a racquetball court, climbing walls and a gigantic multi-sport court that doubles as an event space. The facility rivals recreation centers in much larger Wyoming cities.
And all of this is in service of a town that, as of the last census, has fewer than 700 people. Its shrinking population, coupled with a decline in revenues from state sales and use taxes, has made a huge impact on municipal funds. Recently, Hanna has looked into cutting hours – including closing on the weekends – to save money, but that hasn’t been much of a help.
“What the town has done over the years to maintain this is, actually, we haven't put money in streets. We haven't put money on other services so we could maintain this,” Ostling said. “We have reached a point where the burden of things that have been put off for a little while has grown.”
Ostling said that the town hall is leaking, for instance. A water main also broke earlier this year, which luckily did not cost more than six figures to repair. If a major disaster were to happen, Hanna may need to look into any methods necessary to cut costs – including sacrificing the recreation center.
In early April, Ostling outlined these struggles at a meeting of a few dozen local residents. He also solicited ideas from the crowd to save the recreation center money. Thus far, the town has looked into state and federal grants, merging the space with the local library, putting solar panels on the roof to cut energy costs, partnering with local nonprofits and more. No solutions have been fruitful yet.
Those in attendance expressed frustration upon hearing this challenging reality. Many of them said the recreation center is vital for their personal health and wellbeing. Suggestions included renting out space in the facility to area businesses, appealing to the state to support recreation centers throughout Wyoming or sending flyers to nearby communities – like Elk Mountain and Medicine Bow – to try and drum up more interest.
One resident sarcastically yelled, “Give Bill Gates a call!”
“With all these windmills and stuff that we all got to look at, is there any way to try talking them into donating electricity to us?” said multi-year resident Jim Noah. “It’d be good PR for them.”
The underlying issue, though, is that none of these solutions would make up for a lack of interest. Currently, the center has fewer than 40 members, which officials say is down from about 100 from before the pool was closed. Revenues didn’t even cover a third of the cost to heat the building last fiscal year.
Recreation Center Director Kim Connolly said she’s been offering membership discounts on Facebook and promoting events through flyers and digital advertisements. One of the first things she’d like to see is more buy-in from community members.
“A lot of the people that cry about it do not even use the rec center,” Connolly said.
Part of the anguish for the local community is the fact that the town once had the capacity to support the center and much more.
Hanna started off as a company town in the late 1800s. Hundreds of millions of tons of coal have been pulled out of the ground here, according to local historians, and the area has played an important role in Wyoming’s history. The state’s deadliest mining disaster occurred here in the early 1900s. The town has seen a lot of racial, ethnic and economic diversity throughout the 20th century.
In the early late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Hanna experienced a massive boom. Longtime rancher Val Korkow-Black remembers the school adding temporary modular classrooms to accommodate the influx of students. There was a bowling alley, soda fountain and movie theater.
“There were people everywhere. People were spending money everywhere. Every bar in town was open,” she said. “There were several places even to stop and eat. And everything was busy all the time.”
The recreation center was built in 1982 when Hanna likely had more than 2,500 people. Coal companies and overflowing local government funds paid for a building with all the modern bells and whistles of the time. Korkow-Black remembers basketball and softball tournaments and other community events at the facility.
“They'd have the pool open for the kids all day long, and you were there from 10:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night,” she said.
But almost as quickly as things went well, things went bust. By the mid-1990s, there were fewer than 1,000 people in Hanna as cheaper energy production moved to the Powder River Basin, Southwest or elsewhere. Pam Paulson, president of the board of the Hanna Basin Museum, said most mining activity was finished by the late 2000s. Many businesses and nonprofit organizations left. For several years, there wasn’t even a grocery store in town.
“When the mines started shutting down, a lot of the homes were just lifted off the basement and moved to the new location. Some [owners], they just left their keys on the counter and walked out the door,” Paulson said.
Hanna is now mostly a bedroom community or a place to retire cheaply. Paulson doesn’t mind that. In fact, she likes the peace and quiet – even if it’s inconvenient to have to drive to Rawlins or Laramie for many supplies.
“And then I think the burden gets put on the citizens of the town to make up for the rec center [maybe] having to close, in that they come together and be creative and come up with things for the kids to do,” Paulson said.
Rancher Val Korkow-Black agrees but would love to see more families in Hanna. She also recognizes that the town is riding the boom-bust roller coaster like many other parts of Wyoming.
“Life goes forward. We just have to go with it,” Korkow-Black said. “People who want to stay will stay. And the work’s out there if you want to work.”
For Mayor Jon Ostling, he has to think proactively about what happens to Hanna. How does he keep a town with an infrastructure built for thousands of people afloat with declining revenues? But a full shutdown of the recreation center is not on the table yet. At the public forum, the Hanna Town Council postponed any major decision-making about the facility’s future.
“I think it's the hope. The hope that there will be something that will occur,” Ostling said. “Pretty much everyone realizes we want to maintain this because it's a landmark for our community.”
