Good Ole Kemmerer
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3/4/2009
The whorehouse closed in the early 1980's. There's two bars downtown and one near the BLM office in Frontier. The shops along Main St. are mostly boarded up or run down, and the sheepherders never make it into town since they're Chilean, Peruvian, Mexican, or Basque and spend ALL of their time out there with the herds.
The coal mine and power plants pay pretty well as do the oil/gas field companies.
You're right about many of the locals, but not all. There are some good people there, but they seem to be overshadowed by the jerks. It's a bad place to relocate your children to also. Our kids were continuously hazed by the local kids, some of them had cops for parents. The hazing involved verbal abuse, shunning, ridicule, and physical attacks at times. The schools weren't that great either. We had a 3rd grade teacher who ended up failing about 60 - 75% of their students and quite a few moronic HS teachers. There are some good teachers there, but they need more. The schools are under new management as of last year so, maybe something will change. They do put too much emphasis on athletics and not enough on education.
As a whole the community had it's priorities bass-ackwards. They want to create some kind of twisted "retirement community" where the winter temps drop to -35 degrees with high winds. They make sure that the golf course gets funded, but don't plow the streets for weeks on end until people start having "real" problems.
They just built an "events center" and a new hotel that looks like it has some potential. However they've waited too long to do this, having missed the oil and gas "booms" that occurred in the late 1990's and during the Bush years. Much of the money's long gone and they missed the boat again. If you move there expect your taxes to jump dramatically to pay for the new events center that the townsfolk were opposed to, and the city officials were all for. One of the city officials stated that he didn't care what everyone else thought since they had no working plans to do anything, and that he was going to go ahead and do it anyway.
Unfortunately that's the prevailing mindset of the town managers in Kemmerer. They only have one grocery store, which was granted a monopoly by the city managers. The grocery store is nasty and too expensive. Most people want to go and drive the 100 miles to Evanston, WY to shop instead of paying top dollar for crap in Kemmerer.
To put it simply, if you've got kids, don't live there. If you're single don't move there. If you're married with no kids, and you're not too advanced in your years, it could work.
On the brighter side, the hunting and fishing are pretty good and it's only 2 hours from Salt Lake City, UT.
Bp | Palmer, AK