Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
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The state’s mental health and substance abuse treatment network took center stage early in the 2021 legislative session as lawmakers advanced bills to ease licensing requirements in an effort to bring more counselors to the state. Two House bills developed by the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services committee over the last year give boards that license the state’s addiction and mental health counselors more flexibility and lessen some requirements for addiction treatment experts in an effort to attract more to the state. Debate on the leg...
As Wyoming’s COVID-19 problem continued to worsen last week, sports fans visited the state’s most infected community — Laramie — for a football game. It was the University of Wyoming’s first home game of the season and the Cowboys delivered, trouncing the University of Hawaii 31-7. What the event might do to the COVID-19 scoreboard, however, remains to be seen. For some, the event was emblematic of a disconnect between the record-breaking virus spread in Wyoming and state officials’ reluctance to enact health orders to stem the tide. “It is gro...
An intelligence officer in Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation warned other law enforcement that Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters were traveling through Wyoming on their way to Sturgis, South Dakota, according to an email obtained by WyoFile. “We have received credible information from a South Dakota Agent and South Dakota ATF Analyst that BLM & ANTIFA members are currently staying in Cheyenne enroute to Sturgis, South Dakota,” DCI Intelligence Analyst Lanae Fry wrote in an Aug. 6 email. “We’re awaiting further detail. W...
The state of Wyoming signed a contract in late April with banking giant Barclays to pay it $2.5 million to evaluate the purchase of 1 million surface acres and 4 million mineral acres from Occidental Petroleum. The state has already paid Barclays $1 million of that sum. An initial $500,000 payment in May was debited from an account for state construction project overruns, and another $500,000 was paid last week out of the governor’s budget, according to the governor’s spokesperson and data provided by the state auditor’s office. The fact that...
In September 2019, the University of Wyoming investigated a top administrator who resigned weeks later, using a secretive process that mirrored the inquiry that led to the ouster of former president Laurie Nichols and brought scrutiny to how the institution is governed. In late August, the university’s general counsel hired a Denver law firm to investigate Sean Blackburn, then the school’s vice president for student affairs, according to documents obtained by the Star-Tribune and WyoFile. The university had used the law firm — Flynn Inves...
No new cases of COVID-19 have surfaced since a staff member at the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk, the state’s only women’s prison, tested positive, a prison spokesperson said on Tuesday. The agency announced on April 10 that a staff member had tested positive for the disease. Since then, four staff members who had been in contact with the sick staffer came out of quarantine on April 15 without ever showing symptoms of being ill, Wyoming Department of Corrections spokesman Mark Horan told WyoFile on Tuesday. Three inmates have also been quara...
Debate in Wyoming is increasing over whether Gov. Mark Gordon closing some businesses but stopping short of a stay-at-home order is inadequate or a threat to liberty, even as a top doctor contends a hospital surge is still on the horizon. The growth of confirmed cases slowed last week, though a wave of new confirmed cases over the weekend brought the state’s case load to 275. Of those cases, 140 have recovered, according to the Department of Health. But Dr. David Wheeler, the head of the Wyoming Medical Society, said case counts might grow f...
By the end of the second full week since the Wyoming Department of Health announced the state’s first confirmed COVID-19 case, the virus was still tightening its grip on the Equality State. The DOH’s official number of confirmed positive cases went from 29 Monday to 70 by Friday morning. Wednesday marked the state’s single biggest increase of known infections in one day, with a 70% increase over 24 hours, the Casper Star-Tribune reported. On Friday, DOH reported 17 people had recovered from the virus. However, public health officials warn...
Concerns in the Wyoming Senate over gender reassignment surgeries threaten an effort to criminalize female genital mutilation that soared through the House. Protecting girls and women from FGM has widespread bipartisan backing among lawmakers. Legislating transgender medical care does not. And a clause in the bill dealing with sex reassignment surgery now threatens to drive a wedge between disparate groups that agree they want to ban a violation of women’s rights. The bill passed through the Senate, Labor, Health and Social Services C...
At 10 p.m. Tuesday, beneath near-empty galleries, outnumbered Democrats in Wyoming’s House of Representatives mounted a failed but emotional stand against a bill to impose a 48-hour waiting period on abortions. Midnight, the deadline for House bills to pass a first floor vote in the chamber and thus survive, was just around the corner when House Majority Floor Leader Eric Barlow (R-Gillette) called out the last list of bills the House would debate that day. The tour groups and citizens that wander the recently renovated Capitol had long s...
By refusing to regulate a private immigration jail planned outside Evanston, Wyoming’s five statewide elected officials leave the state vulnerable to litigation and immigrants to poor treatment, the American Civil Liberty Union of Wyoming says. The ACLU asked the governor, treasurer, superintendent of public instruction, secretary of state and auditor in a Jan. 21 letter to exert their authority over the project. The officials should follow state statute that requires both approval and regulation of for-profit incarceration in Wyoming, the c...
An outside law firm quietly investigated former University of Wyoming President Laurie Nichols at the direction of the university’s board of trustees in the weeks before she was informed she wouldn’t continue as the school’s chief executive, an investigation by the Star-Tribune and WyoFile found. The board-directed inquiry was specifically into Nichols’ conduct, two sources who were contacted as part of the investigation said. One of those sources later confirmed that the inquiry focused on the nature of Nichols’ interactions with people. A thi...
GILLETTE— A year to the day before Blackjewel LLC shocked Wyoming by abandoning the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr coal mines, the Golay family gave up on Blackjewel. The Golays had cleaned mine buildings for decades, and for multiple owners. But by July 1, 2018, Blackjewel had driven them out of business, they told WyoFile. Months of the company stiffing their family-run cleaning business had left them unable to pay their home mortgage or other bills. They’d foregone those personal obligations to pay their four employees, the Golays said, unt...
An Albany County District Court judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Wyoming to present for her private review contested documents regarding former university President Laurie Nichols, who was demoted without explanation. Judge Tori Kricken on July 16, ordered UW’s lawyers to provide “documents to the Court” by Aug. 15 for her review, along with further legal arguments as to why the records should be kept secret. She set a hearing for Oct. 8. The order is the latest development in a public records lawsuit filed by WyoFile, Lee Publi...
Secretary of State Ed Buchanan is seeking a judgeship just seven months after winning election to his statewide office and a judicial commission has submitted his name and two others for Gov. Mark Gordon's consideration. Buchanan put in an application with Wyoming's Judicial Nominating Commission for a vacant circuit court judgeship in Goshen County. He was one of three names selected by the commission. The names now go to Gordon, who has 30 days to select a candidate. The other two candidates a...
State Treasurer Mark Gordon, Cheyenne businessman Sam Galeotos and natural resources attorney Harriet Hageman are the leading half of the packed Republican gubernatorial primary field, according to a mid-June survey conducted by University of Wyoming pollsters. By far the largest percentage of the survey respondents — 35 percent — remained undecided with their votes, leaving the GOP’s nomination up for grabs as the campaign enters a six-week sprint to primary day, Aug. 21. The poll — commissioned by Wyoming Public Media and Wyoming PBS — measur...