Wyoming lawmakers are working to agree on the state's budget for the next two years. And they’re still plowing through a lot of other bills – and the continuing reverberations of “Checkgate.” WyoFile's Maggie Mullen and Wyoming Public Radio's Chris Clements break down week three of the budget session.
Chris Clements: This is the Cheyenne Roundup, a weekly look at Wyoming’s legislative session, from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile.
Maggie Mullen: I'm Maggie Mullen from WyoFile here with Chris Clements from Wyoming Public Radio.
CC: We’re here in Cheyenne on Friday, Feb. 26 at about 10 in the morning. Big moves this week with both the budget and inquiries into Checkgate.
MM: Checkgate. Remember, Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist, handed another donor’s check to at least four lawmakers on the House floor on the first day of the session. Since then, the House unanimously voted to launch an investigation into the matter.
CC: Last night, on Thursday, the House’s special investigative committee met for the first time in the historic Supreme Court chambers.
MM: Fourteen witnesses testified, including Bextel, and the hearing lasted more than four hours. It brought some new details to light.
For example, Reps. Christopher Knapp of Gillette and Marlene Brady of Green River said for the first time that Bextel had handed them checks on the House floor.
Some of the evidence presented to the committee included security footage of the floor, as well as text messages between Bextel and lawmakers. A few lawmakers even brought their checks with them to show the committee.
Bextel was the last witness to testify and she once again denied any wrongdoing. She also covered quite a bit of ground in her testimony.
CC: She spoke about her fundraising prowess and her ambition to double the $400,000 she said she raised for Republican candidates in 2024.
MM: And she lamented losing the chairmanship for the Wyoming Republican Party “by just a few votes” last May. She begrudged mitigation fees designed to fund affordable housing and the two rocks she said were thrown through her windows in Jackson on account of becoming “the public face” of opposing such fees.
CC: But Bextel told the seven-member committee she could not recall certain details directly related to the question at hand: Did she hand out campaign checks to lawmakers on the House floor, and did those actions constitute bribery?
MM: The one witness asked to appear who did not testify was Don Grasso, the Teton County donor. It’s not clear if he declined the invitation or if he’ll testify at a later meeting of the committee.
CC: About 30 people showed up to the meeting, with roughly 10 lawmakers in the audience, too. Things felt pretty tense as witnesses were called over and questioned about whether and where they received checks. I noticed a few lawmakers who were involved say, quite a few times, “I don’t recall” in response to basic questions about Bextel and the checks.
Later, as an LSO [Legislative Service Office] staffer was showing a powerpoint of texts between lawmakers and Bextel, she tried to interrupt the hearing from her seat in the audience twice. Rep. Art Washut, the chair, had to gavel her down.
Multiple times, Rep. Scott Heiner, a Freedom Caucus member, asked Democratic lawmakers like Karlee Provenza why they didn’t handle the checks incident by making an internal, private complaint.
Provenza was the lawmaker who motioned for the committee’s creation earlier this month.
Maggie: I wrote a story about that formal process, known as Joint Rule 22-1 this week and how there have been examples in the very recent past of lawmakers, including Freedom Caucus members, going to the press with concerns of wrongdoing instead of using the formal process.
CC: I caught up with Provenza after the meeting Thursday on the lawn in front of the Herschler building to ask what she thought of the proceedings.
Karlee Provenza: I’ll just say that it’s really interesting that I keep getting asked about following rules when I use my First Amendment rights. It’s really unfortunate.
CC: Later, Bextel blamed the investigation on Wyoming Democrats and so-called “counterfeit Republicans.”
Beyond that meeting, we’ve got a parallel criminal investigation into the checks through the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office.
MM: Meanwhile, lawmakers are still hashing out the budget.
CC: That’s right. The House had to play some major catch up last week. Remember we talked about second reading, which was the first chance all lawmakers had to propose tweaks to the budget bill? Well, third reading was their last chance to get those changes made.
MM: And they had a lot. More than 120.
CC: I watched a lot of those amendments. It took all day Friday and into Saturday afternoon.
MM: Wow Chris, your editors must be masochists. I took Saturday off, so tell me the highlights.
CC: They mean well Maggie, so keep that in mind. We’re grinding over here.
Lawmakers in the House restored funding for state employee pay increases and partially walked back cuts to the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming Business Council.
At one point, a lawmaker collapsed while speaking about an amendment he supported. Another lawmaker later told the body he’d been dehydrated.
But not every budget amendment made it. Many of them sought to restore the governor’s initial budget proposal and were subsequently voted down by the Freedom Caucus and its allies. That includes an amendment that would’ve restored technology funding for the state Department of Family Services.
MM: That puts the House’s version of the budget bill about $167 million below where the Senate landed. The upper chamber’s third reading was a breeze by comparison. They fine-tuned funding for the Department of Health and the University of Wyoming, and passed their version on Friday evening.
CC: So this sets us up for a Joint Conference Committee, what my colleague Jordan Uplinger calls the “final boss of committees.” This committee will need to reconcile those two versions into one to send to the governor. And we found out who will be on this rather powerful committee earlier this week.
MM: The House made their move first. House Speaker Chip Neiman of Hulett selected himself, as well as Reps. John Bear of Gillette, Abby Angelos also of Gillette, Scott Heiner of Green River and Ken Pendergraft of Sheridan.
CC: All five are members or allies of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, a group of Republicans that has taken the hardest line on the budget. Three were members of the Joint Appropriation Committee (JAC), the committee that denied many of the governor’s funding requests in its first draft of the budget bill.
MM: On the Senate side, Senate President Bo Biteman of Ranchester selected himself and Sens. Tim Salazar of Riverton, Tara Nethercott of Cheyenne, Mike Gierau of Jackson and Gary Crum of Laramie. Salazar and Gierau also sat on the JAC.
CC: The Joint Conference Committee meets for the first time today at noon, so we better get over there after this. And as we mentioned before there's a $167 million dollar gap between the two versions.
MM: I spoke to Gierau about that.
Mike Gierau: The differences are not that big numerically, but they are rather stark philosophically.
CC: It’s striking to hear him say that since in the last budget session, the difference between the House and Senate was $1.1 billion. So let's talk through what the sticking points are likely to be.
MM: The University of Wyoming will certainly be a sticking point. The House ultimately voted to cut $20 million, while the Senate’s budget fully funds the state’s sole four-year public university. Gierau told me there’s at least 12 senators who won’t vote for the budget if UW isn’t fully funded.
CC: Full disclosure: The two chambers also diverged on Wyoming Public Media.
MM: The House still has a budget footnote that would restrict state dollars from flowing through UW’s block grant to WPR. Meanwhile, the Senate tossed that footnote with what Sen. Ogden Driskill called the Big, Beautiful Amendment.
CC: Another thorn in lawmakers’ collective side will likely be funding for the Wyoming Business Council, the state’s primary economic development agency.
MM: State employee wages are also still an issue. Both chambers adopted pay raises, but use different funding mechanisms. The House, for example, voted to divert severance tax dollars to pay for the raises instead of using money from the general fund, which is essentially the state’s main checking account.
CC: The House also passed cuts to SUN Bucks, which is federal money for food assistance over the summer for kids. One person who works in that field told a colleague of mine that it’s part of the solution to childhood hunger. It’s estimated one in five Wyoming kids are food insecure.
Let’s step back and look at the big picture for a moment.
MM: This whole budget process started with the governor making a recommendation. And he’s been pretty vocal throughout the markup process that his recommendations are needs, not wants.
At a press conference earlier this week, Gordon said he was glad to see the House compromise on a few things.
Mark Gordon: It's obviously been pretty wild and wooly for, for a bit. Um, we're generally fairly encouraged by what we're seeing. Uh, it, it, um, was nice to have, um, the Senate recognize how carefully we had put the budget together, Uh, and, and it's been nice to sort of see, uh, the house kind of begrudgingly come, come back, uh, to, to some of those things.
MM: On top of all this, lawmakers are also racing to pass a bunch of bills on a whole range of stuff.
CC: That’s right. I wrote a story this week about a whole passel of election-related bills. The bills still in play would create a process for voters to recall locally elected officials, like mayors and town council members. Another would increase when recounts should be done by hand. And yet another would require county clerks to hand count about 5% of all the ballots cast during this year’s elections.
MM: One thing that’s not in play, really, is an attempt to fully ban abortion. Following the Wyoming Supreme Court's ruling that the state's two bans are unconstitutional, the governor asked the Legislature to pass a resolution to put the issue to voters in this year’s elections.
But a resolution to do so failed, and another bill to do something similar never materialized.
CC: Another slate of bills I’ve been watching is property taxes.
MM: Yeah, there’s a contingent of lawmakers who want to find a way to backfill some of the revenue losses towns and counties have seen, and another contingent wanted to get rid of residential property taxes entirely.
CC: So, axing residential property taxes entirely is off the table. That bill failed. But a bill that would funnel more sales tax revenue to towns and counties is moving forward.
MM: This tug-of-war we’re seeing between the state and local governments over these revenue streams is kind of embodied in a bill that would require local voters to repeatedly approve recreational mill levies.
CC: Mill levies are a tax rate that local governments use to raise money for public services, like airports, hospitals, public schools and, sometimes, recreational facilities like pools.
MM: Arguments for it center around giving voters more of a say, more often about how tax dollars are used. Arguments against it focus on how going back to voters every four years would create uncertainty and make it more difficult to retain staff, keep up on maintenance and advertise for upcoming programming, recreation advocates say.
CC: I talked to the director of the Pinedale Aquatic Center, Amber Anderson. She spoke to me about this bill and said it could have serious consequences for the rec center, which relies on a mill from a local school district.
Amber Anderson: Without that, those funds can't guarantee as structured that we would be able to continue to provide services for the community.
CC: But that bill is moving forward in the process.
So, we passed the halfway point of the session this past week, and things will only move quicker from here.
MM: The bills that are still in play have all been approved by either the House or Senate. They need to survive three more votes by Thursday. So by the time we talk next Friday, we’ll have a better sense of which bills are headed for the governor’s desk.
CC: Thanks for listening to the Cheyenne Roundup, your weekly look at what lawmakers are up to during the 2026 legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. New episodes drop every Friday throughout the session.
MM: Make sure to like this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Chris: Editing and producing by Nicky Ouellet, Anna Rader, Jordan Uplinger and Tennessee Watson.
Maggie: Follow our ongoing legislative coverage at wyomingpublicmedia.org and wyofile.com. Thanks for listening.
