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ensure they land softly rather than crash into economic ruin.
• "Don't go overboard. It's not going to last," Midland Mayor Wes Perry wants to shout, as a reminder to his own neighbors and a warning to communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere that have never boomed like this, let alone endured a bust on par with the one Texas experienced a generation ago.
• For now, Midland is the picture of prosperity. Since 2008, sales tax revenue has shot up from $24 million a year to more than $38 million in 2013. The unemployment rate is the lowest in Texas, hovering just above 3 percent. The town has hundreds of unfilled jobs.
• A local Subway pays $15 an hour with a $1,000 starting bonus. Housing is so scarce that modest hotel rooms go for $300 a night.
• This, longtime residents know, is what an oil boom looks like. And it's always been followed by a steep, painful decline.
• When the energy market finally fades, the town wants to avoid being burdened with crushing debt or too many employees. So sales tax revenue is used only for one-time projects, such as street repairs. Police officers are hired piecemeal, two or three a year, as the population increases.
• Instead of using municipal money to lure an investor to build a proposed high-rise project, the city will instead provide an 80 percent tax break on revenues for five years.
• "Companies don't screw up in bad times. They screw up in good times. Same for cities," Perry said.
• That lesson was learned a generation ago. Midland and Odessa, along with parts of North Dakota, boomed in the late 1970s. The windfall enabled people to buy jets and Rolls-Royces and build mansions and lakefront homes. Then in the early 1980s, the bottom fell out of the oil barrel.
• The same people went bankrupt. Home foreclosures skyrocketed. Banks failed. People moved away. Homes and downtown buildings were abandoned.
• "It was awful to live through that," the mayor said, recalling "Black Friday" -- Oct. 14, 1983. That is the day the First National Bank of Midland, which loaned money so people could finance lavish lifestyles, collapsed under the weight of a plummeting oil market. The "majors" -- or big oil companies -- fled for greener pastures abroad.
• The most recent boom has largely been ushered in by new hydraulic fracturing technologies combined with horizontal drilling. Those systems allow once out-of-reach oil and gas to be extracted from rock.
• The big boys are back, and Midland and Odessa have seen their populations rise by at least 10 percent since 2010, not counting all those living in trailers or trucks.

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