Day one of the Wyoming Legislature’s pre-session hearings on Gov. Mark Gordon’s $11 billion proposed budget featured friction between the secretary of state and a legislator, along with questions to the governor about his “all of the above” energy strategy.
In the run up to every legislative budget session in Wyoming, state lawmakers on the interim Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) hold hearings on the governor’s recently-released budget request and hear hours of testimony from agency heads on their departmental asks.
Agency heads can either advocate for what the governor recommended their departments be funded at or ask lawmakers for a higher amount than what the governor set in his proposal.
Legislators ask questions of agency leaders and then meet again in January to mark up the draft budget as they see fit, either funding agencies above what the governor recommended, staying at the governor’s recommendation or funding agencies lower than the governor recommended.
One point of contention on Dec. 1 came during the secretary of state’s budget presentation to the JAC.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a founding member of the further-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus, said his No. 1 budget priority would be restoring funding for the advertising required by state law for the 2026 citizen-led property tax reduction ballot initiative.
Gordon’s proposal showed the secretary of state receiving $9.52 million for his office, omitting the $125,000 for advertising the ballot initiative in newspapers in each county and statewide outlets that Gray asked for. Gray promised to find that funding one way or another.
“I’m going to make sure that this is done, and that’s going to include possible litigation against the governor’s office if we don’t have the process in place for us to do this,” said Gray. “This is statutorily required.”
Gordon previously told WPR Gray’s claim is false, writing in an emailed statement that, “My recommendation does nothing to block the legally required publication of this initiative. It rejects a request for additional money for publication costs to carry out the same statutory duty he did two years ago when no additional funds were requested.”
Sen. Ogden Driskill (R-Devils Tower) argued Gordon’s decision to deny Gray’s request doesn’t mean it won’t be possible to advertise the initiative, just that Gray would need to shift money around from another division in his office.
“It does appear that you easily can do it,” said Driskill. “It’s obvious that it can happen one way or another. There’s been a lot of fanfare about [the ballot initiative] being stopped, because if the exception request doesn’t go through, that somehow we violated laws in the Constitution. I think [that’s] blatantly untrue. It can still be fulfilled. It’s just a matter of where the money comes from. There’s nowhere in the law that I find that says it has to be done by a special appropriation.”
Gray responded that if his office decided to allocate funding to cover the $125,000 gap, it could redirect money meant for management of the state’s voter registration system during the upcoming 2026 elections.
Joe Rubino, Gray’s policy director, said a Legislative Service Office (LSO) staffer told him to submit the advertising request as an exception request in his budget ask, and that their methodology for including the request was similar to ballot initiatives in the past.
In a different portion of his presentation, Gray noted that the business division in his office processed over 830,000 filings in the last fiscal year, a 23% increase from the previous year. Gray said there’s been a corresponding increase of dissolutions of fraudulent business entities, including those tied to foreign nations like North Korea.
Rubino told Sen. Mike Gierau (D-Jackson) that almost 200 filings for different business entities had been dissolved in the last year.
Gray asked for new positions for the business division to manage that growth.
On Dec. 2, the Appropriations Committee will hear from the state Supreme Court’s chief justice on the budget request for the judicial branch.
Hearings will continue this week and next week, with alterations to the governor’s proposal taking place in January. The budget session begins on Feb. 9.
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.
