VERNAL — Sen. Bob Bennett found precisely the right person to help guide elected officials and civic leaders in the Uinta Basin who attended his 5th Annual Rural Business Conference on Thursday, as they try to get a grip on the impacts of the latest energy boom.

Melissa Blake, mayor of Fort McMurray, a remote town in Alberta, Canada, has seen her community go from a population of about 6,000 to roughly 73,000 over the past 20 years, with no sign of slowing down, ever since technology became available to capture the oil from mineral-rich sands.

"We now don't refer to this as a 'boom' because that is inevitably followed by a 'bust,' " said Blake, who is 18 months into her three-year term as mayor. "This is sustained growth. We're going to be proving this out for 30 years."

Earlier this year Blake appeared in a "60 Minutes" segment that featured Fort McMurray and its untold wealth of oil sands, burgeoning population and employment opportunities.

Her appearance at the conference was specifically meant to aid Uintah and Duchesne county officials and Uinta Basin businesses as they begin to deal with similar challenges faced in Fort McMurray, although presently on a smaller scale.

Blake urged communities where expanding oil and gas production is creating heightened demands to have long-term vision, creative recruitment strategies, and above all, to partner and cooperate with each other.

She said local leaders should "look at worst-case scenarios and pressure-test population estimates." She noted that the growth estimated for Fort McMurray exceeded projections every year for the past six years.

Keeping the needs of their communities "up front and center" before state and federal government officials is a must, she said, if city and county officials expect to get the money they need to stay financially afloat when everything hits them at once.

Bill Johnson, economic development director for Uintah County-Vernal knows exactly what Blake is talking about. Convincing lawmakers that the area needs an infusion of cash to handle the demands the oil and gas industry are placing on infrastructure, in particular, can be exhausting.

"We are begging for up-front money," he said. "I think our problem is trying to get the Legislature's attention. They are going to have to address what's happening here. The end of the rainbow has the jackpot, but right now we need seed money."

Bennett said he had learned a great deal about what is going on in the Uinta Basin, mainly by what was said during an automobile tour of the area that he took Wednesday. In his address to conferencegoers, he noted there were two trains of thought that he heard as he listened during his tour, one of optimism and new ideas and one of pessimism that focused on the past boom-bust cycles. He preferred to dwell on the future, he said.

"Let's feed our opportunities and starve our problems," he said during his opening address to a crowd of about 450 people. "There are tremendous opportunities in rural Utah."