Wyoming lawmakers scramble to salvage spending priorities after budget fails 

Lawmakers and lobbyists scrambled Thursday to find new homes for their funding priorities by inserting them into often unrelated bills after the Wyoming Senate jettisoned the state’s supplemental budget bill the night before.

After many long days and late nights of debate in both chambers, Senate leadership announced Wednesday evening they would not pass a supplemental budget, sinking for the first time in recent memory the Legislature’s method for adjusting spending levels halfway through the state’s two-year budget cycle. 

With it gone, lawmakers took to unconventional maneuvers Thursday to try and ensure their favored spending initiatives would survive the increasingly topsy-turvy session. 

Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, sought to stick a $10 million appropriation for a shooting range in Cody into the state’s water infrastructure construction bill. 

Down the hall, Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, successfully extolled his colleagues to place $500,000 for an agreement with the University of Utah to educate Wyoming medical students into a bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. 

Lobbyists for health care programs scrambled to find a home for $4 million to fund a program for preschool children with disabilities. 

Rep. J.T. Larson, R-Rock Springs, unsuccessfully tried to insert a $15 million grant program that supports local government infrastructure projects with mineral royalty funds into a bill regulating how the state invests its considerable stock portfolio. 

Legislative chaos, generally speaking, reigned. 

Gov. Mark Gordon kicked the day off with a statement sharply criticizing lawmakers for rejecting his “carefully analyzed, well-vetted” budget. 

“This Legislature has overlooked emergencies and ignored unanticipated expenses in a quest for political talking points,” he wrote. “This is what occurs in a ‘no compromise’ environment.” 

He concluded his statement with a quintessentially Wyoming piece of colloquial criticism. “It is hard to raise a calf or drill a well on rhetoric alone,” the governor wrote. 

Gordon called on lawmakers to ensure a few key funding priorities survived. Those included money for fire suppression and recovery initiatives for the historic wildfires that swept the state last summer. He also included funding for an ongoing property tax relief program, and an inflation adjustment to school funding. 

On Wednesday, hours before the Senate sunk the budget bill, a Laramie County judge ruled that lawmakers have underfunded public schools, in violation of the state’s constitution, for years. The ruling will likely require lawmakers to pump considerably more money into public education, even as they hope to cut spending. 

Lawmakers have already found alternative vehicles for Gordon’s biggest spending priorities through other bills. On Monday, senators added the inflation adjustment for school funding into a separate education bill. A bill creating a wildfire management task force now includes $100 million in loans for ranchers and another $49 million in grants for conservation districts so that both entities can pursue wildfire restoration projects.

The future for those bills is hardly settled, however, as the House and Senate disagree on whether to deliver such relief funds as loans or grants. The Senate generally prefers grants, mirroring Gordon’s position.

It remained unclear Thursday whether and how lawmakers might set up a program to reimburse towns and counties for the revenue lost to local governments through the property tax cut. As it currently stands, Senate File 69, “Homeowner property tax exemption,” the bill through which both House and Senate leadership have agreed to cut property taxes in every county by 25%, does not carry any measure to backfill.

But what is more likely to fall by the wayside amid the inter-chamber jousting are spending measures with smaller political constituencies. Funding for behavioral health and maternal health care programs appeared unsure of a new home. 

Employees of the Wyoming Office of Tourism were also snubbed by the Legislature’s decision to ditch the budget bill. That bill contained a roughly $500,000 appropriation to provide pay raises to those state employees, who have fallen behind on salary increases. Since the tourism promotion agency was moved off the general fund and is supported by lodging taxes, those employees did not get broad raises that went to other state workers. 

“It’s unfortunate that the hard working staff at the office of tourism is going to have to wait another year,” Chris Brown, executive director of the Wyoming Hospitality and Travel Coalition, said. 

The lack of a supplemental budget bill has also raised constitutional questions for lawmakers, as the state constitution sets guidelines ensuring that bills only address a single, cohesive topic and that their contents don’t stray too far from what their title would imply. Lawmakers on Thursday repeatedly questioned each other’s amendments, as funding for programs was shoehorned into bills that had nothing to do with them. 

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“This, in my opinion, is blatantly unconstitutional,” Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne, said during debate on Larsen’s medical school amendment. “Just because this has happened does not mean we go into crisis mode and start doing things unconstitutionally.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Art Washut, however, offered a different opinion. The House had already adopted the spending program once, Washut noted. “The body on the other end of the hall just told us to go pound sand and I think it’s time for us to stand up for our position,” he said. 

Representatives adopted Larsen’s amendment, however, with a 32-27 vote. Senators voted later in the day not to adopt the House’s amendments, signaling the uncertainty that will continue for spending initiatives that are now scattered across the legislation. The anti-DEI bill, and its ride-along medical education spending amendment, will go to a conference committee.