The Wyoming Legislature has passed the halfway point in its 40-day general session. To mark the occasion, three WyoFile and three Wyoming Public Radio reporters share moments that feel emblematic of the attitudes and energy of the session so far.
Jordan Uplinger: This is the Cheyenne Roundup, a weekly look at Wyoming’s legislative session, from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. I'm Jordan Uplinger, Wyoming Public Radio's statehouse reporter, and with me is WyoFile’s state government and politics reporter, Maggie Mullen.
Maggie Mullen: Happy to be here. So Jordan, we’ve reached a milestone!
JU: This past Wednesday was the halfway point of this year’s 40-day legislative session.
MM: We thought it would be a good time to check in with our colleagues.
JU: We've asked them to share moments from the first half of the session that feel emblematic of the attitudes and energy of the session.
MM: Let’s get started with WyoFile. Education Reporter Katie Klingsporn has been following a contentious debate on House Bill 199. That’s the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act. Klingsporn told us that Rep. Steve Harshman's (R-Casper) remarks show how high emotions run around the idea of universal school vouchers, even among Republicans.
Rep. Steve Harshman: Boy, I think we passed a pretty good bill last year. Maybe we made a mistake and we let the camel's nose under the tent. And, I guess if I had hindsight and thought we're going to now go ahead and ignore this Constitution and the articles and just throw out $7,000 to anybody that wants it.
Katie Klingsporn: So to understand the context of this quote, it's important to understand the rise of the school choice movement across the United States, and also the education savings account program that passed last year in Wyoming, which offered income-qualified families money to pay for non-public school costs, like tuition for private school. That included pre-K costs.
The new bill, House Bill 199, is a universal voucher program, which means it offers $7,000 to any family, regardless of income, for non-public school costs, but this time, it doesn't include pre-K. The measure has inspired intense debate with opponents calling it unconstitutional and proponents saying that it represents school choice for parents. It passed the House easily and is now being considered in the Senate.
JU: Staying in the House of Representatives, Wyoming Public Radio’s Jeff Victor has been tracking efforts to create more affordable housing in the state. Let’s start by hearing from Rep. Christopher Knapp (R-Gillette).
Rep. Christopher Knapp: This is our last day for getting bills through committee and to the two bills that didn’t get heard, which was House Bill 332 and House Bill 68, I offer my apologies.
Jeff Victor: Knapp is the chairman of the Corporations Committee and that committee has had a lot on its plate, including a mountain of election security-related bills. Sometimes the committee even met twice in one day.
But in the end, it wasn’t enough to get through all the bills. One of the bills you can hear Knapp apologizing for in the clip we just played was about affordable housing.
House Bill 68 would have given cities and towns the ability to finance infrastructure upgrades by borrowing from their future property tax revenue. It’s called Tax Increment Financing and basically everyone involved in the housing space, from municipalities to builders to nonprofits, want to use it to get more affordable housing in their communities.
House Bill 68 was one of six affordable housing bills filed this session. Five of those six bills, including this one, died without any discussion.
MM: So housing hasn't gotten much traction this session but immigration has. And WyoFile reporter Andrew Graham has been following lawmakers' attitudes toward immigrants. He pointed to a recent comment Rep. Lee Filer (R-Cheyenne) made during a presentation by the Wyoming Highway Patrol to the House Judiciary Committee. Graham said it represents a view held by many in the Wyoming State Capitol.
Rep. Lee Filer: Not even 100 miles south of here this is allowed. They’re allowed to just come in, and, believe it or not, there's probably just some of them that want to come here to work. But we need to give you guys the right tools and these troopers the right tools to make sure that, one, they’re protected and, two, they're protecting us.
Andrew Graham: So that was Rep. Filer asking a Wyoming Highway Patrol commander to bring lawmakers’ budget requests for the kinds of enhanced equipment, including bulletproof vehicles and drones, that Wyoming troopers saw used by their counterparts in Texas on a deployment to the U.S/Mexico border last summer. When Filer talks about “100 miles south of here,” he’s referring to Denver and other Colorado municipalities with more liberal views on immigration.
While Filer suggested that “believe it or not”, some people migrate to Wyoming to work, most of the conversation focused on immigration as a huge threat. And at that meeting of the House Judiciary Committee, there were no immigrant families or advocates for those communities to counter the perception that most people coming into the country illegally are to commit other crimes or otherwise disrupt public safety.
The Legislature this year has treated illegal immigration as a threat the state needs to solve, largely by making it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to live here. I’ve heard many times this session the catchphrase “every state is a border state.” But what’s largely been lost in the echo chamber of the statehouse this year is just how embedded many of those immigrants are in the state’s small towns and in the fabric of Wyoming’s economy. Those voices just aren’t heard in the halls of the statehouse.
One particularly onerous piece of legislation to crack down on immigrants, a bill brought by Rep. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Torrington), briefly changed that dynamic. Her bill would have criminalized transporting or sheltering an undocumented person. It was so scary to immigrant communities, particularly people in families where some members are citizens and some aren’t, that it drew a wave of public opposition and, in many ways, a bunch of new voices to the statehouse. Senators killed that bill on a 20-10 vote. Other immigration-related legislation carries on, however.
JU: Switching gears, Wyoming Public Radio’s Natural Resources and Energy Reporter Caitlin Tan has been keeping an eye on conversations around climate change and the state’s energy policy going forward.
Caitlin Tan: For years, Wyoming has generally agreed on the science that shows climate change is happening. That means figuring out how to combat things like water shortages and drought. And figuring out how to reduce emissions, if we want to see our legacy industries survive, like coal. Two ways Wyoming has done that, one is the cloud seeding program. The hope is for more water for agriculture users and Colorado River Basin states downstream. The second is carbon capture technology. Lots of money, laws and time have gone into developing it.
But this year, we’re seeing efforts to undo all of that, largely based on unfounded conspiracies, like climate change isn’t real. [Or] cloud seeding chemicals are harming Bighorn sheep. I think Rock Springs’ Rep. J.T. Larson (R-Rock Springs) captures that he was speaking to fellow lawmakers about a bill to stop cloud seeding.
Rep. JT Larson: On one hand we are saying that this cloud seeding program is potentially dangerous for water users, but on the other hand we’re saying emissions from coal fired plants have no impact on the climate. So what is it? Are emissions causing an impact on our climate or are we? Or? I’m just trying to figure that out. I’m trying to reconcile that. I believe the climate hoax is a problem with our coal emissions. It's just a hoax in my opinion. But I think this has been an effective program. I don’t know, I'm just trying to drill down on that.
CT: Two bills are moving forward in this realm. One would end carbon capture efforts. The other is a water project funding bill. Most recently, Sublette County Rep. Mike Schmid (R-Pinedale) amended it to strip funding for all cloud seeding projects in the state. If passed, this could fundamentally change Wyoming’s approach to energy and water issues going forward.
MM: Speaking of Rep. Schmid, he's been at the center of several bills that WyoFile’s Wildlife and Natural Resources Reporter, Mike Koshmrl, has been following. That includes a proposal to allow unlimited mountain lion killing that got some strong reactions.
Lee Livingston: We had a very robust discussion on this bill within my board. There are quite a few who are in favor of it. Some are being quite impacted. They feel [it] by excessive lion numbers. In the end, we came to the conclusion that wildlife management is better left in the hands of wildlife managers.
Mike Koshmrl: That is Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association Pres. Lee Livingston, he's an outfitter and former county commissioner who lives in Cody, testifying in regards to a bill that would have required unlimited mountain lion killing all around the state, just doing away with any types of controls on mountain lion mortality.
It was very controversial, and there have been a number of very controversial wildlife bills this legislative session, a couple that were related to grizzly bears. There was a bill that was going to separate how whitetail and mule deer were going to be managed, and none of those measures has survived. A lot of them have run into opposition, and they died pretty early in the legislative process, owing in part to opposition from people like Lee Livingston.
There are other wildlife bills moving. One of them comes out of the incident that happened in Sublette County with a wolf that was brought into a bar last year. Another one would do away with the state protected status for wildlife species, but a lot of these really hot-button, controversial bills have died because of testimony from people like Lee Livingston.
JU: So a lot of the wildlife that Mike just mentioned depend on federal land in the state. Wyoming Public Radio’s Hanna Merzbach has been following a resolution that would demand the U.S. Congress hand over 30 million acres - so all federal land in Wyoming except Yellowstone.
Hannah Merzbach: That resolution is now dead, but there was a lot of fiery debate before that. One moment stood out to me when it was considered by the Senate Agriculture Committee. It shows how we are seeing a resurgence in Wyoming and the West of conservatives defying the feds’ authority to own land.
But Alec Underwood with the Wyoming Outdoor Council had a lot of questions, like how would the state take over wildfire and grazing management?
Alec Underwood: While also ensuring that the public has access to public lands and that the habitat for wildlife on public lands be maintained?
Sen. Tim French (R-Powell): Sir thanks for your testimony but I’m going to push back on that. I would much rather the people of the State of Wyoming control the land.
HM: [French] basically used this as an opportunity to bash the feds. He goes on to say that the feds have closed roads and limited access, and the state would do a much better job, and…
TF: Do you realize how many billions of dollars would come to the state of Wyoming, the people of Wyoming, if we got all the mineral money?
HM: This argument that Wyoming can demand this land is based on an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that many say isn’t legally sound. The resolution had a really bumpy ride in the Senate. It failed, only to be resurrected and then fail again on a tie vote. It’s dead for now, but I don’t think these kinds of arguments are going away anytime soon.
MM: We'll be back next week with an update on that, and of course, all things Wyoming Legislature.
JU: Thanks for listening to the Cheyenne Roundup, your weekly look at what lawmakers are up to during the 2025 Legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. New episodes drop every Friday throughout the session.
Editing and producing by Tennessee Watson and Kamila Kudelska. Follow our ongoing legislative coverage at wyomingpublicmedia.org and WyoFile.com. And thanks again for listening.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
