Wyoming’s firefighting accounts are back in the black after Gov. Mark Gordon signed Senate File 152 into law on March 11.
The law secures $20 million to replenish the emergency fire suppression account, repays $20 million borrowed last year from the Legislative Stabilization and Reserve Account, replenishes $1 million to the governor’s contingency funds and sends $1.2 million to the Office of Homeland Security’s fund for disaster contingencies. The appropriation is immediate.
The accounts were basically empty after several large fires last year burnt hundreds of thousands of acres of private and state land.
“This Act is an improvised but well-thought-out response to last year’s devastating wildfires,” Gordon wrote in a letter outlining his decision-making about the bill.
The bill was heavily amended to include rehomed funding priorities lost when the Senate chose not to approve a supplemental budget. As introduced, it sought to create a wildfire management task force to study wildfire impacts and evaluate response and prevention systems, as well as redefine the state forester’s duties.
The bill’s final form includes expanding the responsibilities of the state forester, with a focus on coordination and fire suppression. It also adds one full-time employee and four part-time employees to the Office of State Lands and Investments for fire response.
Gordon line-item vetoed several provisions of the bill, including a loan program meant to help restore lands and fence line after a wildfire. Gordon says a different program that became law last week, the Small Business Emergency Bridge Loan, is broader and available to agricultural operators. Gordon again noted he’d prefer this program to be a grant instead of a loan, but added the “practicability of a loan program for ag land fire recovery can be tested over the coming year.”
Gordon also struck part of the bill that would have ended the state’s Large Project Energy Matching Funds Program. The program helps fund research and pilot projects for emerging forms of energy, like carbon capture. The Legislature had tried to cut funds for the program in this year’s failed supplemental budget.
“These funds are used to support our essential core energy industries as well as to underpin the future of Wyoming’s most venerable traditional energy industries,” Gordon wrote. “After decades of work to put Wyoming in the forefront of innovation to make sure Wyoming coal, uranium, oil, and gas – our core industries that built our schools and secured our state's financial wellbeing – stay an essential part of any energy future; it seems foolish at best and self-destructive at worst to abandon the very industries that are our lifeblood.”
Another section that would revert the Energy Matching Funds and Large Project Energy Matching Funds to the Legislative Stabilization Reserve Account also drew Gordon’s line-item veto. He restored the reversion date of June 30, 2027 and funds appropriated in last year’s budget bill.
Gordon has until midnight March 21 to sign or veto the remaining bills on his desk.
