Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Sorted by date Results 26 - 49 of 49
PINEDALE — State lawmakers overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to advance a bill raising Wyoming’s minimum age to purchase tobacco products to 21 years. The legislation – which passed the Joint Committee on Revenue by a 10-3 margin – was one of a suite of bills being considered by lawmakers who want to limit minors’ access to tobacco products, including cigarettes, cigars, chewable tobacco and nicotine-infused vapor products, like Juul. The age hike will still need to be approved by the full Legislature next winter, should it make it that far. Wyomi...
PINEDALE – Preparing to vote on legislation that would enact a corporate income tax in Wyoming, the Joint Committee on Revenue on Thursday found itself missing two members and with two choices to make. There was the option to advance an imperfect bill to its next meeting and work out its blemishes there, or to vote on the bill as it was, leaving it to its creator, Rep. Jerry Obermueller, R-Casper, to work out the kinks in time for the 2020 budget session in January. They chose the latter, passing the controversial piece of legislation by a 9...
CASPER — Lawmakers on Monday defeated two controversial bills that would have had significant implications on Wyoming’s elections. The bills — one to eliminate the practice of crossover voting in primary elections, another to combat voter fraud by requiring photo identification at the polls — have received considerable attention since first appearing last fall, inspired by national concerns over voter fraud and the revelation that thousands of voters purposefully switched their party affiliations to participate in the 2018 Republican primari...
CASPER — Wyoming lawmakers voted last week to create a committee specifically focused on addressing the negative effects of a rash of coal bankruptcies across the state over the past several months. Members of the Wyoming Legislature’s Management Council, a bipartisan group of state legislators that sets the legislative agenda for the rest of the government, voted to create the subcommittee in its Thursday afternoon meeting. The committee will focus on securing obligations from coal companies that often go unpaid during bankruptcy, albeit in...
CASPER — This winter, lawmakers voted to allow hemp in Wyoming, hoping the crop will become a boon for the state’s agricultural industry. But farmers will have to wait at least one more growing season before they can plant hemp in Wyoming soil. Submitted to the federal government in spring, Wyoming’s industrial hemp plan was put in motion in the green rush following the legalization of hemp in the 2018 farm bill. Some lawmakers and farmers see the plant as a new economic opportunity. It’s ideally suited for Wyoming as a cool weather crop th...
CASPER — Gov. Mark Gordon’s task force to address the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people met for the first time Wednesday in Cheyenne. The meeting, which followed a panel on the topic Tuesday in Riverton, marked the Wyoming state government’s first institutional step to take on the issue. Similar to a task force on human trafficking created several years ago, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force aims to understand an issue that has gained more attention but, to this point, has gone unaddressed. Cara Chambers,...
CASPER — Two years after one of the largest drawdowns in spending in state history, Wyoming’s lawmakers are once again prepping to tighten the belt. Operating under its smallest budget in nearly two decades for 2019-20, Wyoming has quickly had to try to do more with less for years now, working with hundreds of millions of dollars less in funding than this time a decade ago. But four months away from the date of Gov. Mark Gordon’s spending proposal for the 2021-22 biennium, Wyoming’s budget still faces a future in the red. In the years since tho...
CASPER — The first week of July is often a slow one in state government, shortened by a federal holiday and marked by a light legislative schedule. However, the first week of July also means something else in Wyoming – the time many of the laws passed by the Legislature this winter finally go into effect. As the clock hit midnight on Monday, more than 200 laws passed during the 2019 legislative session went into effect, impacting the lives of Wyoming residents in some ways major, some ways not. A common centerpiece in many homes around Wyo...
CASPER — A new poll leaked to a conservative media outlet shows Rep. Liz Cheney leading former Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis by more than 20 points in a hypothetical head-to-head primary matchup for outgoing Sen. Mike Enzi’s seat, though neither woman has declared their intentions for 2020. According to a report describing the poll — leaked to Breitbart News early this week — Cheney leads Lummis 56 percent to 34 percent among likely voters in Wyoming. However, among definite voters, Cheney leads just 31 percent to 19 percent — a 12-point differe...
GILLETTE — After years in legislative limbo, Hot Springs State Park could be set for some changes. At Thursday’s meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation, Recreation and Cultural Resources, officials with the Department Of State Parks And Cultural Resources unveiled the next steps in a long-awaited plan to update one of the crown jewels of the state parks system. Though no immediate actions were announced, the agency updated committee members on a new law sponsored by the committee chair – Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devil...
CASPER — Last week in Cheyenne, Gov. Mark Gordon signed a proclamation declaring June 10 as “Equal Pay Day” in Wyoming, underscoring one of the largest gender pay gaps in the nation. At the time of signing the proclamation, however, Wyoming seemed to be doing better than it had in previous decades, where the state’s pay gap had been rated as one of the nation’s worst. According to single-year data from the United States Census Bureau, Wyoming’s gender pay gap was now ranked 39th in the nation – contradicting findings from an extensive Dep...
CASPER - The race to fill outgoing Sen. Mike Enzi's seat has its first declared candidate. Activist and community organizer Yana Ludwig, a Democrat, will be announcing her candidacy for the party's nomination in a Friday afternoon event at Washington Park in Laramie, where she has lived since moving to the state in 2016. Enzi announced in May that he would retire from the Senate. Ludwig is the first candidate to officially announce their intentions, though former GOP gubernatorial candidate Fost...
CASPER — With limited options left on the table, the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Revenue Committee will be reviving a number of failed money-raising bills from the 2019 general session, including an ill-fated corporate income tax bill. At its meeting last week in Lander, the committee voted to continue work on bills to raise the state’s gas tax, enable additional local option taxes and continue discussions on the National Retail Fairness Act — a corporate income tax bill that was killed after immense pressure from industry lobbyists and the...
CASPER — A state-appointed group tasked with finding sustainable air service for Wyoming’s far flung communities took a significant step in the process last week, announcing the state had entered into negotiations with a Utah-based airline to provide regular flights to as many as four Wyoming cities. Members of the Commercial Air Service Improvement Council announced Friday that the state would be entering into contract negotiations with St. George-based SkyWest Airlines for its proposal to provide regular, regional flights to cities like Gil...
CASPER — Wyoming ended 2018 with the ninth-highest per capita income in the nation. However, while incomes in Wyoming grew 4.5 percent over the previous year thanks to a resurgence in several of its extractive industries, overall income growth in Wyoming came at rates slower than a number of its neighbors in the region, several of whom are in the midst of significant periods of economic growth. According to 2018 estimates released Tuesday by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, at $60,095 Wyoming’s per capita income last year was nearly $10...
CASPER — Nearly two weeks after one of the most powerful winter storms of the decade hit the Northern Rockies and Midwest, Wyoming has largely moved past March’s record-setting snows and settled into the rhythm of spring. In the fields, young calves graze alongside their mothers. In the oil fields, workers in their shirtsleeves have set to laying and welding the pipelines to facilitate another boom, and the state’s farmers have gotten back to work in the fields. Neighboring Nebraska, meanwhile, has been struggling to dig itself out. While...
CHEYENNE — In the past five weeks, the Wyoming Legislature has examined a property tax, a tax on wind energy, and taxes on hotel rooms, cigarettes and vape products. None of those taxes, however, have attracted the attention or scrutiny that House Bill 220 – or the National Retail Fairness Act – has managed to draw. After rushing through the House of Representatives, the effort to introduce Wyoming’s first corporate income tax has garnered the wrath of a cadre of foes, including lobbyists for multi-million dollar companies and Washington D.C. t...
CASPER — Over the next 40 days, members of the Wyoming Legislature will consider between 400 and 500 bills. Some of those bills will have been talked about, poked and prodded for months, originating in committees comprised of seasoned lawmakers with serious policy chops and the institutional knowledge to understand how to dress a piece of legislation — as the popular saying goes — to get it ready for “prime time.” Other pieces of legislation might be partisan-driven, or of dubious legal merit, and may have no hope for passage. Others might attr...
CASPER — A Democratic organizer from the Wind River Reservation said she and other activists faced difficulties in their efforts to vote early in Fremont County, prompting allegations of voter suppression seen on reservations in other areas of the country. In a Facebook post Tuesday night, Lynnette Grey Bull — a Democratic activist behind a large “Get Out The Vote” effort among the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes on the reservation — said she and other GOTV activists were told by an employee at the Lander county clerk’s o...
CASPER — Wyoming’s revenues greatly exceeded earlier projections made by the state’s Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, according to new numbers released Wednesday morning. Though the new infusion of funds to the state’s general fund was still not enough to cover the state’s annual budget on its own, Wyoming’s revenues were boosted by strong years both in the oil industry and the stock market which, in turn, helped spur spending on Main Street. The biannual CREG report showed 2018’s general fund revenues exceeded the group’s optimistic repo...
CASPER — More than 12,500 Wyoming voters changed their party affiliation this summer, new numbers from the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office show. The long-awaited data, which covered a period between July 6 and Sept. 20, addresses the question of crossover voting — or the practice of members switching their party affiliation on Election Day to influence the result of another party — and its influence on the election. In Wyoming, it is legal to register to vote or change your party at your polling place on the day of the election. Many co...
CASPER — Goods and commodities from Wyoming go places most of us never even imagined: tractor bodies and railroad fixtures to counties like Brazil or Japan, plaster boards to Chile or Indonesia. One of Wyoming’s signature sectors – the beef industry – is often overshadowed on the state’s ledgers. Soon, though, the beef industry could be taking on a more pronounced role in Wyoming’s export portfolio. Wyoming’s businesses, despite their landlocked location, are very much a part of the global economy, responsible for introducing more than $1....
CASPER — In 2017, Wyoming made headlines for all the wrong reasons. “Bad news, Wyoming women,” began the January 2017 article in Forbes. “Your state has the worst gender pay gap out of all 50.” The story, to anyone who’d been in Wyoming for any amount of time, was old news: Wyoming has had a long-standing reputation for paying women less than men. The state Legislature first took the initiative to study the issue in 2003 after another article — with similar findings — noted the state’s disproportionate pay scales. More than a decade after firs...
CASPER — Allegations Republican candidate for governor Mark Gordon won his primary because of Democrats voting in the GOP contest are statistically unfounded, new voter registration numbers from the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office show. In the weeks after the election, some Republicans in Wyoming have claimed Gordon, who defeated runner-up Foster Friess by more than 9,000 votes, was pushed over the finish line by Democrats who switched parties to prevent more hard-line candidates from winning. Anecdotes of county boards of elections run...