Doing Business

Sheridan County –
Building on Its Past …
While Investing in Its Future 

Sheridan's Historic Downtown, with its unique shopping offerings

The New Frontier

While the allure of the Old West, a historic downtown and breathtaking scenery remain major components of its economic base, Sheridan County’s community leaders are also cashing in on the next frontier – technology. 

The leadership has not forgotten its roots, which are still flourishing in a tourism-based economy. During the past year an economic development task force comprised of key members from the Sheridan County Chamber, City of Sheridan, Sheridan County, Forward Sheridan, the Wyoming Business Council, and other organizations actively worked together on forward planning for the community. We’ve taken steps to ensure Sheridan County is more than just a vacation destination. 

A recently completed streetscape improvement project welcomes residents and visitors alike to North Main Street, Sheridan’s main thoroughfare, and the City, Downtown Sheridan Association, and North Main Neighborhood Association are working to better define the district through improved gateways, parks, trails, design standards, and pedestrian and cyclist access.

Best of the West -

Consistently ranked at the top of Best of the West lists, Sheridan boasts a vibrant downtown that features a farmer’s market, a June-September monthly street festival that draws more than 3,000 each month, seasonal events, and the WYO Theater, a live-performance venue.

Renovation of historic downtown warehouses for business and residential options is also creating new opportunity for the downtown area.

New Business Incubator, Hi Tech Park - 

Operating the fiber optics switch at ACT

Looking toward the future, Sheridan County leaders have developed a successful business incubator that could be a game-changer in traditional healthcare services reaping new jobs and investment for our community. 

Leveraging a $1 million grant provided by the Wyoming Business Council in late 2010, Sheridan County commissioners and Forward Sheridan (the county’s public/private economic development agency) have created the High Tech Business Incubator. By February 2011, the incubator had reached capacity – all of the offices were occupied. The tenants are there because they either generate or aggregate data.

Among those tenants is Apollo Telemedicine, which is working with other technology businesses and Forward Sheridan in introducing, evaluating, and implementing video conferencing capabilities throughout hospitals and mental health clinics in the state. The outcome of the project is to reduce exporting medical care dollars to neighboring states and keep patients locally, by improving access at the point of care. 

Other tenants include one creating phone applications targeted to nurses and first responders, one that writes computer code, and another that provides environmental technology to Wyoming’s profitable extraction industry. 

Another job generator is the new 38.5-acre Hi Tech Business Park that has already landed its first tenant. The park, once a part of the Wrench Ranch, provides shovel-ready sites for advanced manufacturing businesses. With its interstate access and redundant high-speed Internet capabilities, it proved to be a lure for Vacutech, a manufacturer of commercial, industrial and medical central and mobile vacuum cleaning systems, which is creating 35 new jobs in the Sheridan area. A second tenant of the park, with facilities under construction, is Ptolemy Data Systems - a high-tech support business and data center.  

It’s a new frontier for Sheridan County … and for Wyoming.

Reprinted from the Sheridan County Chamber’s Images Sheridan County magazine,
 produced by Journal Communications.