Cooper: Budget doesn't do enough for state's future

State Senator Ed Cooper of Ten Sleep (R-SD20) provided an update on the second week of the 2024 Wyoming Legislation Budget Session, and although he largely approved of the 67 amendments to the budget as it stands after completing the second round of readings, he did voice frustrations.

He said, “We worked late every night that we worked on the budget in the Senate, usually finishing at 11 or 11:30, and the House got done after us. It was easily 15- to16-hour days every day. It’s exhausting, but we did some good work. There were some good, solid amendments in there but there were some things that did a lot of damage to the budget and to the state in my opinion as far as forward thinking. In one case, we had put $200 million into savings from the general fund for future school capital construction. Certain people didn’t think that was appropriate, and they were able to remove that from the budget… There was another $118 million in school construction funding that was taken away.”

In addition to school construction projects, energy research has taken a considerable hit from budget cuts. Cooper said, “There was $75 million in matching funds, research money for the University of Wyoming that they stripped out. Some research projects are going to get hurt severely by that, projects that are underway right now. They also stripped $55 million out of the governor’s discretionary fund, which he (Governor Mark Gordon) uses for matching funds for energy development projects. This isn’t just money given to companies, it’s being invested in several research groups in Wyoming … We’ve got a lot of energy-related economic development projects going on in the state, and unfortunately, some people that have been pushing back on this budget pretty hard have been extremely shortsighted.”

He continued, saying, “My idea of economic development in Wyoming is to keep the oil and gas and coal in play; we have a lot of these resources, and we need to make sure we avoid damaging our industries in Wyoming that depend on them. The shortsightedness of this budget is doing exactly that. It doesn’t matter if you believe the far-left that thinks we’re about to burn the Earth down, or if you’re a far-right Flat Earther. The fact is, the way the rest of the country perceives the issue, they are out to kill fossil fuels and we must continue to protect them in our state.”

One last issue Cooper raised with the budget is the extent to which legislators have modified it from the state it was presented in by the Joint Appropriations Committee. He said, “The appropriations committee spent literally hundreds of hours preparing it, and we stepped in and gutted it. That really bothers me a lot; we should have shown the appropriations committee more respect in their decisions than we did. Why did we spend millions of dollars of the state’s assets developing a budget just to rip it apart and start over?”

Cooper said that he’s confident legislators will come out with a budget on time, but right now there is a $900 million discrepancy between the budgets prepared by the house and Senate. “That’s a pretty big chasm to try to fill,” said Cooper.

“We’ll be going through concurrency next week, and if we can’t come to an agreement, we’ll throw that committee out and appoint another one. We’ll stay at it until we get it done,” he added.

PROPERTY TAX

Cooper was thrilled to see many of the property tax bills presented at this session get brought forward into committee, saying, “We moved just about all the property tax bills forward to committees and out onto the floor, and we can really get some good deep discussion on them and pick them apart. There’s a couple of them that are really bad, and there’s a couple of them that are pretty darn good. There are two in particular that I’m pretty sure will move forward.”

The first of the bills that Cooper mentioned is House Bill 0045, of which he said, “It’s still being developed but as it stands it has about $200,000 of exemption to a homeowner, or 25% of their assessed value for single family residence… It’s a pretty good plan, with the exception that it doesn’t have any backfill to the counties, and it would be expensive to them as it’s written.”

He stated that in his opinion, the better option is Senate File 0021. Cooper said, The bill that’s a little better plan in my opinion is Senate File 121. That came out of the revenue committee a year ago. It had similar provisions in it, but it also had a backfill for the state to keep the counties and cities whole.”

He added, “Either one of those have a lot of issues that prevent them from going into effect immediately, so what I would like to see is Senate File 0063 pass. What that does is it puts a 5% cap on how much property taxes may increase from year to year. I think we need immediate relief in addition to a long-term fix. I think we’re a lot closer to working something out than we were a year ago, and I’m confident that we’ll come out of this budget with a good property tax relief bill of some sort.”