“They mine coal in Wyoming now,” he laments. “When the Deer Creek mine here closed down about four years ago, we lost about 200 jobs that each paid $60,000-plus. Some paid $100,000.”
It’s a key reason why Emery County is branded with a new distinction it did not want: It is the only county in the state that had a statistically significant decrease in median household income in the past decade — while the economy and incomes were booming elsewhere in Utah.
That comes as the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday released new five-year estimates from its 2014-18 American Community Survey.