Sen. Cooper optimistic about energy, tax bills

As the second week of the Wyoming Legislature’s 2024 Budget Session nears an end, District 20 Senator Ed Cooper of Ten Sleep had much to discuss about the first week.

Cooper broke down some of his positives and negatives of the first five days of the session by saying, “On the Senate side, we got through introduction of all of our bills, and like always we killed a few bad ones and we killed a few good ones. The introductory process requires a two-thirds majority with only three minutes to describe your bill. It doesn’t give a real good picture of the whole bill, and then if people don’t understand them they tend to try to kill them, and that’s not always the right answer.”

Cooper was happy to share that his two sponsored bills, Senate Files 0074 and 0089, both made it past introduction and will be discussed in corporations committee. Senate File 0074 will allow commissioners discrepancy for dissolution of noncompliant districts, and Senate File 0089 will provide tax exemptions to veterans. He said, “I’m confident in those two, I’ve spoken to both sides and they’re fully behind them on each.

As for co-sponsored bills, Cooper has still found some success, but some legislation he is involved with has been affected by political posturing. He mentioned House Bill 0151, which would provide additional protections to people purchasing firearms. This bill was killed immediately, while a very similar bill was not.

He said, “It got killed for the wrong reasons. There’s another bill that’s similar to it, so rather than look at both bills they killed the one that wasn’t theirs and on they go, and I don’t think that’s the right way to do business. There are groups on the far right that are influenced by a special interest group in Washington, D.C., and I don’t believe that those people in Washington really have Wyoming’s best interest in mind. I think they are more interested in promoting their own agenda.”

“They’re trying to project a radical right agenda onto Wyoming politics, where I believe that most of our Republicans – and darned sure in my district – are very conservative, common-sense oriented and want to represent the people that elected them,” he added.

He felt similarly about House Bill 0185, Enhanced Oil Recovery Severance Tax Exemption, which failed introduction last week. This bill would have provided tax incentives for oil producers to use new and emerging technologies to revitalize old, unproductive wells.

Cooper said, “Some people looked at that as a gift for big oil, and it was actually just the opposite; the incentive was for producers to bring in enhanced oil recovery technology to the old, depleted fields. It was extremely misunderstood, because it would have brought several billion dollars into Wyoming over the next few years and increase the production of our older oil fields. In the Big Horn Basin, all our fields are older fields.”

Although this forward-thinking bill failed to be considered this year, the success of Senate File 0042 so far is giving Cooper some optimism. This bill exists as an amendment to House Bill 0200, filed in 2020 to bring Wyoming’s definition of low-carbon generation in line with Internal Revenue Service and Environmental Protection Agency qualifications. The amendment would reflect changes that have been made to these qualifications since then. The amendment also pushes back the date that Wyoming must follow carbon generation guidelines from 2030 to 2033.

Cooper said, “We’ve got some really great new technology being developed by the School of Energy Resources, and we want to see these technologies have time to be proven and made to scale, so we’re doing what we can to help that along.”

He added, “Let’s continue down the path of fossil fuels, the things that are right for the state of Wyoming, but let’s look at new technologies and really give them a chance to survive. Without carbon capture storage and utilization, oil, gas and coal will be dead … If things keep going this way, environmental groups are going to win. They’re out to kill fossil fuels, and they’ll get it done unless we come up with solutions to meet new standards.

“We are literally in the catbird seat as far as developing new industry based on our capacity to sequester CO2, and it will be a multi-trillion dollar industry within the next 10-15 years.”

Cooper, a staunch supporter of tax reform, was also happy to see some property tax bills make it into the session after a disappointing showing at the General Session last year.

He named Senate File 0063, saying, “This gives us short term relief while we’re getting the whole system fixed … This whole property tax issue, it’s a good problem to have. What that tells me is that our property values are really increasing. The rest of the country is seeing where we live and how we live, and saying, ‘I want a piece of that.’”

“Now, we need to match our property tax with what the rest of the world is putting on this little piece of heaven we call Wyoming.”

As for the outlook of this week at the Budget Session, Cooper said that much of the time would be spent working on the budget. He said, “We went all the way through the budget on the first reading last week, [this week] we’ll go into second reading and second reading amendments, and that’s where the fight starts. That’ll be long hard days, but our goal will be to get it tidied up for a little bit of cleanup work on third reading, and then we’ll be ready.”

He added, “There’s been some issues; a lot of political posturing by certain groups on the appropriations committee and on the budget, so I anticipate some contentious moments, but at the end of the day, we are constitutionally required to get a budget passed and we’ll get it done. We don’t get to go home until we do.”