Gillette councilors axed the city’s local hate crimes ordinance Tuesday evening, just two years after the city council ushered in the law.
The short-lived “malicious harms” ordinance died on a 4-3 vote, mirroring the split that brought it into being in 2023.
“This decision does not change our city's commitment to protecting every person who calls Gillette home,” said Mayor Shay Lundvall, who voted for the repeal, arguing the ordinance was unnecessary. “Every person in Gillette deserves to feel safe, and every business owner deserves to know that their employees and customers are protected.”
The ordinance had tacked on an additional misdemeanor for those accused of committing a violent crime while targeting their victim based on their identity. It listed as protected statuses, “race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, disability, or age.”
The ordinance would have only kicked in alongside other criminal charges. But residents like Katherine Pointer said it nonetheless represented a threat to free speech.
“There are already laws in place to protect all citizens,” she said. “Hate crime laws can infringe on free speech, our First Amendment rights, by penalizing thoughts or beliefs.”
No one was ever charged under the ordinance, but residents who opposed it claimed the law’s mere existence had caused “division” within the community.
Councilor Heidi Gross said no one had provided proof for that alleged division.
Gross voted to pass the hate crimes ordinance in 2023 and voted against its repeal Tuesday. She warned that eliminating the ordinance would send a message to the wider world about who was welcome in Gillette.
“We know that we are losing our young people. They are leaving this state because they don’t have job opportunities to come back to, or they don't like the direction the state is going in,” Gross said. “We have to have a vision, and we have to think about the future generations … I think about: How do my children feel about this?”
Nearly two dozen local residents took to the microphone during more than half an hour of public testimony, many pleading with councilors not to repeal the ordinance.
Resident Christy Gerrits said her “friends with brown skin” are frequently “followed throughout Walmart because they suspect them of being shoplifters.”
“You can imagine this does not make her or her family feel welcome here,” Gerrits said. “African American families are also discriminated against and harassed just because of the color of their skin. This ordinance wouldn't prevent that, but it does send a message that, as a community, we don't tolerate it. Instead, by voting to repeal the malicious harms ordinance, you are sending a message that you just don’t care about everyone.”
Others questioned whether the community could withstand more negative press of this nature so soon after the Campbell County government agreed to pay $700,000 to a former library director who refused to remove LGBTQ+ books.
“I like to believe what you believe, Mayor [Lundvall], that Gillette’s this great place. And it is, but there’s this underbelly,” resident Dara Corkery said. “We saw it at the library. We saw librarians threatened. We saw a magician threatened. We saw the belittlement of our library director … I think it’s time to show that we are better than this.”
Others were supportive of the repeal. Resident Ben Decker took issue with the designation of protected classes.
“When we focus on these differences, it can create people that perceive that they are victims, even though they're not,” he said. “I think that we should focus on the fact that we’re all human, we all get picked on. And that, yeah, bullying, that's something we should try to get rid of. But focusing on the reasons we get bullied or these differences isn’t the way to do it.”
Some comments veered into other culture war issues not covered by the law or its repeal.
“Wyoming has been leading the state in equality for over 150 years, and now a group wants to take us a step backwards and have women share a bathroom with a mentally disturbed transvestite,” said resident Dean Vomhoff, who also talked about bathrooms during a public comment on the repeal’s first reading. “What you have done is caused hatred by saying one group is better than another, which goes against our Wyoming Constitution.”
Councilor Gross labeled these and similar statements “noise and distractions” that had misrepresented the ordinance. At her request, City Attorney Sean Brown gave a 20-minute presentation, outlining how the ordinance’s specific language was crafted to conform with existing case law surrounding hate crimes and “malicious harms” penalties and how such an investigation would be triggered.
Brown said the ordinance, like others nationwide that have been declared lawful, targeted conduct rather than expression.
“The spectrum that the [U.S.] Supreme Court has laid out is: The more your legislation is aimed at unprotected conduct – so battery, property destruction, stuff like that – the greater chance it is going to be upheld on First Amendment grounds,” he said.
The councilors who voted to repeal the ordinance said little in defense of their vote, though both Jack Clary and Chris Smith said they were voting to repeal, at least in part, because they had promised they would on the campaign trail.
“Rightly or wrongly, I made a commitment,” Smith said. “I made a promise. I’m going to honor that word.”
Others said their experience, during the ordinance’s original passage and throughout the repeal process, demonstrated the law’s importance.
“Right after the first reading, this anger, this hate, became very apparent to me,” said Councilor Jim West. “Death threats: ‘Get out of town.’ ‘You're not welcome here.’ ‘Your children aren't welcome here.’ It imprinted into me right there the exact reason that we need to stand up and support this type of thing.”
West spoke at length about his support for the ordinance and his opposition to its repeal, highlighting residents, including a member of his own family, who do not feel safe in Gillette.
“The heart of this ordinance has always been very simple: Respect every human being,” he said.
The repeal is effective immediately.
