Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
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A group of activists that included healthcare workers commandeered a meeting of the Wyoming Legislature's Joint Committee on Labor, Health and Social Services Thursday to demand legislative action against COVID-19 vaccination requirements at medical facilities around the state. After the meeting, nearly 80 people gathered outside to demonstrate against vaccine mandates. Though COVID-19 vaccinations or mandates were not on the labor committee's agenda, activists from as far as Gillette and...
Wyoming officials are facing mounting pressure to audit the 2020 election from pro-Trump activists asserting, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the former president through wide-spread voter fraud. Activists across the state have flooded state lawmakers’ inboxes and voicemails with demands to investigate the state’s elections. These calls align with partisan efforts to relitigate election results in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Activists have also repeatedly implored staffers of Gov...
Wyoming lawmakers rejected a proposal Wednesday by State Rep. Chuck Gray (R-Casper) to give the Wyoming Legislature the power to audit elections. Gray, who is running for Congress against incumbent U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney in next year’s Republican primary, has made “election integrity” a centerpiece of his campaign. Gray has also touted his visits to the site of an election audit in Arizona inspired by former President Donald Trump’s disproven claims the 2020 election was stolen from him. County clerks’ offices are responsible for auditing...
A Florida resident who has become an odd player in the campaign to replace Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney says controversial statements he made in the past, like those related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, were part of an effort to discredit a liberal media that was poised against him. In an interview with WyoFile, Karl “K.W.” Miller, who recently moderated a candidate forum in Casper featuring all but two participants in the 2022 Republican primary for Congress, downplayed his past statements seemingly showing support for the conspiracy the...
In a Cheyenne strip-mall banquet hall, Scott Presler — a nationally recognized conservative activist and Donald Trump loyalist best known for organizing post-protest community cleanups in liberal cities — whipped up the crowd. It was April 24, more than 100 days since the storming of the United States Capitol, 71 since Wyoming’s lone U.S. Representative Liz Cheney voted to impeach the former president and nearly 500 before the 2022 Republican primary. It was also the first day of Presler’s nationwide rally tour aimed at networking and trainin...
Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney on Tuesday criticized plans by the Biden administration to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan before this year’s 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The planned troop withdrawals would mark the United States’ exit from a nearly two-decade long conflict in the Middle Eastern country set off by attacks orchestrated by extremists in the desert nation. It is the longest war in U.S. history. Some 2,500 U.S. troops and another 7,000-plus NATO forces would be affected. “President Biden’s decisio...
CASPER — Rep. Liz Cheney survived an internal challenge to remove her from House leadership on Wednesday night, staving off an attempt by Trump loyalists to punish her for supporting impeachment. The final vote to keep the Wyoming congresswoman in her position as Republican Conference chair was 145-61, The Associated Press reported, showing the strength of the third-ranking Republican’s support in Washington after weeks of speculation the conference would oust her over her vote to impeach President Donald Trump last month. Cheney told rep...
CASPER — A longtime Wyoming Republican Party official revealed last week he would no longer serve as the group’s parliamentarian and treasurer after months of growing tensions with state party leaders. In a letter to state party chairman Frank Eathorne that was distributed to the 80 members of the state party’s central committee over the weekend, Doug Chamberlain – a former 18-year member of the Wyoming Legislature and a onetime speaker of the House – announced he would no longer be serving in the volunteer roles due to a series of recent de...
CASPER — Wyoming lawmakers are considering allowing the shipment of Wyoming-made liquor across state lines as a part of a package of bills allowing greater flexibility for the state’s small distillers amid mounting economic challenges brought on by COVID-19. Spurred by concerns of distillers like Casper’s Backwards Distilling and Kirby-based manufacturer Wyoming Whiskey, members of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions voted almost unanimously to draft legislation allowing multiple retail...
CASPER — Kanye West is officially trying to get on Wyoming’s presidential ballot as an independent candidate this fall, a spokesman with the Wyoming Secretary of State confirmed Tuesday morning. Within a day of the rapper’s filing, county clerks began to field reports about West’s signature gatherers violating state law by being too close to polling places. According to the Secretary of State’s Office, representatives for West, who lives on a ranch outside of Cody, filed paperwork sometime Monday night to officially let him on the campaign...
CASPER — Gov. Mark Gordon’s office says it could submit its first formal bid for 5 million acres of Occidental Petroleum-owned land in southern Wyoming next week in what would be the first official step in closing one of the largest public land purchases in American history. Wednesday was the initial deadline for the state to bid on the property — which includes one million acres of “checkerboard” surface lands as well as 4 million acres of mineral rights. The State Loan and Investment Board would have needed to convene publicly to approve a...
CASPER — The Wyoming Legislature still doesn’t have a date for a special session planned for later this spring to respond to COVID-19 and its economic fallout. Lawmakers still don’t have a true agreement with Gov. Mark Gordon on how to spend more than a billion dollars in emergency funding before it expires on Dec. 30. And they haven’t figured out a means of expanding access to health care for thousands of uninsured Wyomingites. But as of Friday, they do have a starting point. As the week ended, members of legislative leadership put their s...
CASPER — Legislative leaders voted unanimously on Thursday to pursue several pieces of emergency legislation, all but guaranteeing the Wyoming Legislature will meet in its first special session since 2004. In a conference call with Management Council on Thursday morning, Gov. Mark Gordon outlined a tentative agenda for state lawmakers in the coming months to begin to immediately stabilize the state’s economy – which is projected to experience revenue declines anywhere between $555 million and $2.8 billion due to COVID-19 and an overseas price w...
CASPER — Futures prices for oil fell into the negatives for the first time in recorded history Monday, further straining a Wyoming economy already reeling from months of price declines, continuing strife in the coal industry and the shutdown of numerous businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. West Texas Intermediate oil contracts for the month of May plunged nearly 300 percent to nearly negative $38 per barrel ahead of Tuesday’s expiration date to purchase May contracts — one of the largest price drops in history. Prices are likely to rebou...
CASPER — As record numbers of workers across the United States are forced to apply for unemployment benefits as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, workers in Wyoming can rest somewhat reassured that the state’s unemployment fund is among the nation’s strongest. According to a report released by the Tax Foundation on Thursday, Wyoming’s unemployment insurance fund was flush enough to fund current levels of unemployment claims for 321 weeks — the longest such duration in the country. That time estimate, based off of unemployment claims as of Apri...
CASPER — As the executive director of homelessness advocacy group Family Promise of Cheyenne, Lori Kempter knew all too well how vulnerable people can be, even in the days before the COVID-19 outbreak. Running the sole homeless shelter for families in the state’s capital, Kempter has spent her career helping to break the cycle of instability for many families stuck in homelessness, helping them secure steady employment and safe housing at critical points in their lives. Since the coronavirus all but shut down the state’s economy, putting a reco...
CASPER — For decades, hundreds of members of the Wyoming National Guard have been sent to serve in wars overseas, sometimes participating in military actions that have gone unapproved by Congress. Wyoming’s guardsmen have long been tapped by the federal government to serve wherever they are needed, no matter if the country they were deployed to was at peace or at war. A bill introduced this week by Rep. Tyler Lindholm, R-Sundance, however, seeks to end that practice. Counting a group of 15 bipartisan co-sponsors, Lindholm’s “Defend The Guard Ac...
CASPER — Next week, Gov. Mark Gordon will head to Washington, D.C., to testify before Sen. John Barrasso’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works about potential reforms to Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. The governor is the latest in a string of Wyoming officials invited by Barrasso to speak in Washington since he took command of the committee in 2017. A hallmark provision of the act, Section 401 allows states and tribes to manage the permitting of federal projects that discharge into their jurisdiction’s waters. It is also one o...
CASPER — As state lawmakers wind down committee work for the 2019 interim session, Wyoming’s cities and towns are beginning to prepare for battles over a number of issues in Cheyenne this winter. The overarching theme: The need for the state to step up and allow municipalities to help themselves. In meetings across the state this month, cities and towns have been pulling together a wish list of legislative changes big and small that they would like, concerning everything from stabilizing their often unpredictable revenue streams to ret...
CASPER — Wyoming lawmakers on Thursday defeated legislation that would have prevented some people with mental illnesses from buying guns. The legislation would have required the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation to submit certain mental health records to a federal database used for background checks while purchasing firearms. The bill, which failed by a 9-5 vote, essentially mirrored federal legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in the 2018 budget. Introduced in the wake of a mass shooting at a high school in P...
CASPER — State lawmakers are considering a slight tax increase on alcohol sales in Wyoming in an effort to raise nearly $2 million in funding for treatment programs across the state. The proposed tax increase – which would be the state’s first such increase since Prohibition – would essentially double minuscule taxes already imposed on beer, hard liquor and wine in Wyoming through July 1, 2024. These taxes are paid on top of the state’s existing sales taxes, an amount which, according to a 2007 issue brief from the Legislative Service O...
CASPER — On paper, Wyoming appears to be one of the least discriminatory places in the country. As the scourge of white nationalism has grown across the Mountain West — accounting for one-tenth of all hate propaganda produced across the nation according to the Anti-Defamation League — Wyoming appears to be an outlier. The state counts just one Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group operating within its borders and amassing only a handful of recorded hate crimes over the past three years, leading the nation at a time where hate crime...
CASPER — At the start of the summer, Gov. Mark Gordon sat down with top officials within the Wyoming’s economic development think tank, Endow, with orders to pare down the group’s ambitious economic development agenda into something smaller and more incremental than the grand 20- year vision crafted under the administration of his predecessor, Matt Mead. Several months later, that agenda appears to be taking shape. This week, Gov. Mark Gordon hinted at some of the early specifics for his re-imagining Endow in an appearance at an aeros...
CASPER — With a month until his administration releases its first budget, Gov. Mark Gordon said all ideas to trim spending are on the table in 2020, explaining that Wyoming appears to be entering “a new period” in its history as the outlook for fossil fuels as the state’s primary economic driver grows increasingly grim. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Gordon said that he anticipates a number of cuts to be included in his proposed budget, setting the stage for a major funding debate in a Legislature still smarting from ma...
CASPER — At the close of the 2020 census, Wyoming’s lawmakers — like those in half the states around the nation — will sink their teeth into the arduous task of drawing up the legislative districts that will decide the landscape of the state’s elections over the next decade. The Joint Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions, which could potentially handle the task, received a briefing from Legislative Service Office staff several weeks ago outlining what the process may look like in Wyoming and discussing the basic princ...