Wyoming Capitol Outlook

In the closing days of an eight-week session, tempers fray, which can lead to some harsh words among colleagues, especially back and forth between House and Senate.

Nowhere is that more true than in the Joint Appropriations Committee, where they are thrashing out the final details of the supplemental budget bill in conference. The big issues are a property tax cut (which the Senate cut, but the House wants to keep in, using funds earlier appropriated for new building at the Capitol Complex) and whether or not to put $100 million in surplus revenues into the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund or an easier-to-access rainy day account.

But the fights can be about almost anything. This morning, it was a House amendment directing state agencies to look for budget cuts. Senators led by Chairman Phil Nicholas (R-Laramie) argued that the legislature shouldn’t tell the governor’s executive branch agencies what to do – even though the amendment would pretty much underline what the governor was already saying to the agencies.

“Absurd,” said Nicholas. And a lot more.

“The image we’re giving ourselves is ridiculous,” said Sen. Ray Peterson (R-Cowley).

Disagreeing on the amendment, but perhaps agreeing with the description, House Chairman Rosie Berger (R-Sheridan) finally cut it off with a terse, “Thank you for that dialogue.”

Perhaps the legislators would be in better frames of mind if they didn’t have so much to finish in the final week. At this point, those minds are mostly made up, the arguments are mostly exhausted, and there is rarely the opportunity to bring new facts or ideas to the table.

A meeting this morning of the House and Senate Travel. Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources committees was an exception, though. Experts from universities and the Wyoming Game & Fish Department presented information on research about sage grouse, wolves, elk, and…zebra mussels.

It was an informational meeting, and that was what made it so refreshing – no political posturing. (That is, unless things heated up when they got to wolves – by then I was listening to the howling in the Joint Appropriations Committee). Experts from the University of Wyoming and Colorado State University presented their project to map sagebrush – by quantity, quality, and species – for the entire state…a key tool in keeping sage grouse populations from succumbing to loss of habitat.

State officials are hoping to keep sage grouse off the endangered species list – not an easy task, given that the birds are “not the brightest of animals” according to CSU scientist Cameron Aldridge, and won’t do much to save themselves.

The legislators listened and asked questions, and it was heartening to think that they really want to know what the science tells us. Those present included the two committee chairs, Sen. Bruce Burns (R-Sheridan) and Rep. Pat Childers (R-Cody), as well as Sens. Kit Jennings (R-Casper), Kathryn Sessions (D-Cheyenne), and Hank Coe (R-Cody; and Reps. John Patton (R-Sheridan), Kathy Davison (R-Kemmerer), Dave Bonner (R-Powell), Bill Thompson (D-Green River) and Allen Jaggi (R-Lyman).

As for the zebra mussel – well, it’s a little shellfish that has traveled from its southeast Atlantic Ocean origins on the bottom of boats through Europe and across to the United States, where it has done tremendous damage to fisheries in the Great Lakes. It has now appeared in Colorado and California, and officials are doing their best to stop its spread in western waters.

Speculation about the infusion of federal stimulus cash into Wyoming continues unabated, with state officials shy about asserting a hard figure for what the state will get. You’ll read $501.8 million in the paper tomorrow; or possibly $516.8 million – both figures far underestimate what’s coming our way.

Those numbers – released today by Lynn Boomgaarden, Wyoming’s Director of State Lands and Investments – represent the minimum Wyoming government will receive in discretionary or non-discretionary funds, and she acknowledges the estimates are conservative. But if you look down the list – highway money, water money, education, and so on – you see a lot of blanks: grants to combat violence against women, grants for home weatherization, funds for Health Information Technology, areas where we don’t know yet what the rules will be sharing in the largesse. And there are other programs where we know the total dollars available nationally, but haven’t yet figured what we will apply for - like $1.5 billion (nationally) to combat homelessness; or $125 million (nationally) in rural law enforcement grants. There is funding available in all these categories, and if Wyoming fills out the forms, and makes a few rules, we’ll get some of it - but it’s not part of the $516.8 million calculation.

But that’s not all.

The $516.8 million represents only what comes to and through state government. There will also be millions distributed through federal agencies that are very big players in Wyoming, like the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. And there will be tax cuts that go directly to individuals, and work-study funds for Wyoming citizens that don’t flow through state agencies.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal and his staff are wisely cautious in what they say about the “moving target” of the stimulus package, which is still being shaped back in White House and various federal agencies. But it’s clear that it goes far beyond the formula dollars for transportation, education and other areas, and well beyond the $516.8 million identified so far. Let’s take a guess – really, nothing more than a guess – and say it will be above $600 million when the auditors have moled their way through the budgetary labyrinth. And that’s conservative.

Lynn Boomgaarden will be a guest on Wyoming PBS’ Capitol Outlook this Friday.

It should surprise no one to hear that tempers fray in the legislature as the session scrambled toward the close. And the hottest friction points are often between House and Senate Committees which have to work out differences regarding key bills in last-minute conferences. Publicly, legislators are generally polite. Behind the scenes and off the record, it’s a lot more interesting.

It’s not just soap opera interesting – often, there is important legislation at stake, such as the House bills to toughen penalties for DUI (driving under the influence), which died this week. Legislators say part of the problem was the poor relationship between the Senate Judiciary Committee (chaired by Sen. Tony Ross, R-Cheyenne) and House Judiciary (chaired by Rep. Keith Ginghery, R-Jackson).

Appropriations is another hot spot. There were threats on the Senate side (chaired by Sen. Phil Nicholas, R-Laramie) not to pass out a supplemental budget bill, because of battles with the House committee (chaired by Rep. Rosie Berger, R-Sheridan). That’s not likely to happen – there are too many goodies for too many legislators in the spending bill – but the two sides are barely speaking.

Same goes for the Labor, Health and Social Services committees (House side chaired by Rep. Jack Landon, R-Sheridan; Senate side led by Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper), where the enmity spans a couple of legislative sessions.

February 24, 2009

The move to cut property taxes for homeowners in Wyoming has gotten mixed support from the 60th legislature, where solons can’t seem to decide whether constituents consider it a priority. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted tonight to cut funding from an expanded homestead tax exemption bill – but not without a moment of sympathy for struggling homeowners like…Harrison Ford.

Ford, most of us know, lives in Jackson when he isn’t making movies. The homestead property tax exemption bill (HB 68) that passed the house would give most property owners in Wyoming a $300 tax break. Though there have been efforts to limit it to people with low incomes, or to houses below a certain appraised value (say, $275,000), the bill that passed the House, and a Senate committee, would apply to everyone who has lived in his or her house for a year and submits an affidavit to the county assessor.

Sen. Mike Massie (D-Laramie), who wanted to “means-test” recipients of the tax break (he suggested the property tax discount go only to households earning 300 percent of poverty level income), asked at the committee meeting tonight, “If we pass this bill, does Harrison Ford get a tax break?”

Appropriations Chairman Phil Nicholas (R-Laramie) said, “He probably needs it.”

Riposted Massie: “You’ve seen his last movie?” (Was that the forgettable fourth Indiana Jones movie; or has there been an even more forgettable movie since?)

The bill came back to the Appropriations Committee because of the price tag: it eliminate about $40 million in property tax revenues, which the state would then have to make up to local governments. The House has included the legislation in its supplemental budget, paying for it by shifting funds previously appropriated for work towards building an expanded Capitol government complex in Cheyenne.

The Senate committee, though, voted against funding the bill, 5-0. That could mean that property tax relief – now headed for the budget bill conference negotiations – could be in trouble.

It’s been unclear from the start whether this is the populist issue that proponents like Gov. Dave Freudenthal and House Speaker Colin Simpson (R-Cody) seem to think it is. Harrison Ford, after all, didn’t even show up to plead his case.

Education issues have slipped quietly through the 60th legislature, because most of the heavy lifting of recent years – on issues like raising teacher salaries, building new schools, and the Hathaway higher education scholarships – is completed and underway. But there is some fine tuning going on, and anyone interested in education might want to attend those early morning committee meetings where decisions are made. You are bound to encounter a bill or two by Rep. Steve Harshman (R-Casper), who has his hands in almost anything having to do with public schools.

For instance, ‘instructional facilitators’. When I was on a school board a few years ago, I was skeptical about these new state-funded positions when they appeared in my district’s budget. It was a fashionable new idea in education circles – ‘master teachers’ who would show struggling under-performers how to improve, without a penalizing evaluation. But it might also be seen as a way to pad school budgets with new positions, rather than just putting more and better teachers in the classrooms. (Journalists are trained to be skeptical – you might want to keep them off school boards…)

Among Harshman’s many bills this year is one to ‘fine tune’ the facilitator program, upping the qualifications for the position (more teaching experience, masters degrees, national certification) and evaluating results. “The days when I started, teaches were sole practitioners,” Harshman told the senators. Now, if testing shows students in a class aren’t “gaining”, in will come the facilitators to coach. “Where kids aren’t growing, we’re going to help those teachers grow.”

Chairman Hank Coe (R-Cody) called the facilitators “very successful. We all like it.”

But when we asked Mary Kay Hill, Director of Administration for the Wyoming Department of Education, whether the program was “very successful”, she said there was as yet no quantified evidence of that in a program only two years old. Districts like it – not surprisingly – but the evidence of success is purely anecdotal. Education officials, she said, are still working on tools for evaluating.

Nevertheless, even a skeptical former school trustee/journalist can tolerate Harshman’s bill, which passed the committee 5-1 this morning, since it costs nothing, ups the qualifications for facilitators, makes sure they are not used by districts for other purposes, and attempts to measure results.

A recurring theme in legislative debates is about keeping the evil federal government off the backs of Wyoming citizens. Whether it’s clean water, or wolf management, or energy industry practices, it comes up again and again.

Now they’re even trying to get their hands on our drivers licenses. Bad federal government.

Wyoming is wrestling with whether to modify its drivers licenses to comply with standards issued by the Department of Homeland Security establishing what’s called the REAL ID so they can be accepted as identification for boarding airline flights, visiting federal buildings, or stopping in at nuclear power plants (one of our favorite vacation destinations). Though DHS set a deadline of 2008 for compliance, all 50 states have been granted extensions.

When a Senate-passed bill to move Wyoming into compliance came before the House yesterday, there were the usual complaints. “It’s the federal government once again coming in and telling us what to do,” growled Rep. Matt Teeters (R-Lingle).

But Rep. Roy Cohee (R-Casper) said Wyomingites might prefer complying to the alternative when they board a commercial flight. “If you think it’s onerous to have to take half your clothes off now,” said Cohee, “wait until you don’t have a REAL ID card – they will be examining places you don’t want them to.”

With imaginations running wild, the House passed the REAL ID bill on first reading.

One objective of this blog – and of the television program, Capitol Outlook – is to find those important bills that might sneak by under the radar, never noticed by the mainstream media. Sometimes, a bill that appears as innocent as, say, a butterfly, might flutter by unnoticed if we didn’t let the public know.

Take S.F. 16. While other journalists slept through the hearings, or missed the scintillating floor debate, Wyoming PBS has closely followed the controversial effort to elevate the Sheridan’s green hairstreak butterfly to the level of, well, the triceratops (our state dinosaur) and Western wheatgrass (our state grass). We’ve asked the hard questions: was this butterfly REALLY born in Wyoming? Are these kids who’ve lobbied for it REALLY students at Big Horn School, or just cleverly disguised midgets hired by the insect lobby? And, does the hairstreak make messes on garden furniture?

The bill has made it through the Senate and out of House committee. But on the House floor, opposition stiffened.

Rep. Tim Stubson (R-Casper) declared himself “shocked” by the power grab of the Big Horn School kids. He noted that this butterfly was found in only 11 of the state’s counties, and suggested the bill go to interim study while entymologists search for a more statewide bug that could be seen by “every child who walks out of his door.”

Rep. Jeb Steward (R-Encampment) worried that the designation could lead to some sort of protections, and then, “What would happen if I found one on the front grill of my pickup truck?”

And Rep. George Bagby (D-Rawlins) caused some deep thinking before votes were cast when he pointed out that if the bill passed, the wife of the principle Senate sponsor, Sen. Bruce Burns (R-Sheridan) could insist on being addressed as “Madame Butterfly.”

Nevertheless, in a very close unanimous vote, the bill today passed first reading in the House.

Obscure bills worked in the far-off corners of the state Capitol by small committees – that’s where, sometimes, a debate of real weight erupts.

For instance, in the Senate Revenue Committee yesterday. They were considering legislation that would drop the premium tax paid on annuity investments. (People who purchase annuities pay a premium and at a later time receive fixed payments from the annuity. Though it might be considered a form of insurance, the term “annuity” is generally defined as income.) The tax revenue from the premium tax amounts to only $750,000 to the state, and critics think it should be eliminated to encourage more investment in such instruments.

“We don’t do income tax in Wyoming,” said Sen. Grant Larson (R-Jackson).

Chairman John Schiffer (R-Kaycee) disagreed. “Every time we eliminate one of these we become more dependent on the mineral industry,” he said. Referring to studies of government that suggest the revenue support of a three-legged stool – property, mineral severance, and income taxes – Schiffer added, “We have a two-legged stool and a straw holding up the tax system.”

“It’s a disguised income tax,” Larson insisted, adamant that despite the recommendations of studies like “Tax Reform 2000”, it was a Wyoming principle that there be no income tax. “You may want to go there, I don’t,” he told Schiffer.

It was a minor bill and an easy-going committee session that suddenly turned serious, touching an issue that has troubled Wyoming for decades – its dependence on tax revenue from the mineral industry, and the ‘free ride’ individual taxpayers get on the income side. The two former Senate presidents fought to a draw Wednesday – the committee deadlocked on a 2-2 vote. They’ll take it up again next week when they have a fifth member present.

“This is far from over.”

So said Rep. Kermit Brown (R-Laramie) Wednesday of Wyoming’s struggle with the federal government over management of wolves reintroduced in the state by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

But it’s over for this legislative session.

After hours of testimony and debate on five different wolf bills, the House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife, and Cultural Resources Committee reported out only one (HB 32), which would continue to classify wolves as predators in much of the state but made other concessions to courts and federal agencies, including an effort to keep interstate routes open so diverse wolf populations can breed. (As Brown said: “We might interfere with a wolf that’s on its way to a genetic connectivity event.”)

Some legislators still wanted to make a point of defying the federal approach to wolf management. Others, led by Rep. Keith Ginghery (R-Jackson), wanted to end the endless brouhaha by passing a bill that largely gave the feds and the courts what they wanted, especially trophy game status for wolves statewide. In the end, though, solons seemed to conclude that it would be easier to shoot a wolf on the run than hit the moving target of federal wolf policy, especially with a new administration.

Brown, who has emerged as the leading spokesman for the legislature on wolf issues, said he had given up the thought that Wyoming could “lead the parade” on wolf management, because he couldn’t get constituent groups – from ranchers to wildlife advocates – to reconcile. For instance, there was no clarity on when ranchers would be allowed to shoot a wolf in defending livestock: “Biting is too high a threshold, even chasing is to high a threshold, but just hanging around is too low a threshold.”

So Brown urged the House to defeat the bill he’d championed, and they did, soundly. Wyoming’s current management plan – which was first supported and then rejected by FWS, and negated by a federal judge in Montana – remains in place but inoperative, and the FWS is in charge.

A massive water development proposal for the Gillette area is quietly trickling through the legislature. The city’s massive population growth – from 19,000 population in 2000 to 31,000 residents in 2009 – and its location on the dry high plains are converging into a major drinking water shortage in the near future. The proposed solution is a 42-inch pipeline from a cluster of Madison Formation wells to be drilled north of Moorcroft. And the pricetag is $226 million.

That’s a chunk of change in a year when the state’s budget surpluses are shrinking, though the down payment this year is smaller. Two young members of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Dan Zwonitzer (R-Cheyenne) and Rep. Seth Carson (D-Laramie) raised questions about the state making a long-term commitment to cover 67 percent of the cost. It was noted that while other areas of the state struggle to fund smaller water projects or impose conservation, Campbell County is building recreation centers and big new firehouses, and then coming to the state to fund this big project. Carson did some math and figured this was an investment of about $7,000 per resident in Gillette.

Mike Purcell, head of the state Water Development Commission, admitted the Gillette Madision Pipeline Project was “a big gulp”; it requires a fat pipe traveling 42 miles and there is no way to do it cheaply in an area with no nearby rivers or mountains to provide water.

This year’s bill will provide only $16 million of the total cost, and the funds would be pulled from the budget reserve account. That will cover design, rights-of-way procurement, and groundwater exploration. The state would also loan the City of Gillette $5.5 million at 4 percent for 30 years so it could make it’s 33 percent match.

But that’s just the first installment on a project that would eventually cost the state at least $140 million. Chances of passage in these belt-tightening times? Well, it’s passed the Senate and came out of the House Ag committee by a unanimous vote this morning. And, the sponsor is Senate President John Hines (R-Gillette).

Monday was the day of the dead for bills – a bill has to pass its “first reading” in either the House or Senate at that mid-point in the session, or it’s finished. (A bill must then survive two more votes before it gets out of either the House or Senate – then it goes over to the other side and runs the same gauntlet – three votes – again.)

So, what died on Monday? Well, lots of things, particularly in the House. A few big ones never got to Monday – restrictions on outdoor lighting and the Defense of Marriage bills perished in dramatic floor votes Friday, and committees snuffed various wolf management bills, a ban on cell phone use while driving, and others. But dozens of bills hovered on the brink of extinction as the deadline neared, with solons working until after 8 p.m. but couldn’t get all the way down the long list.

Here are a few obituaries for curious bills you’ve probably never heard of:

• The so-called “lottery for education” bill (HB 170) was voted down by the full House, 35-25
• yet another failed attempt to introduce commercial gaming to the state outside the Wind River Indian Reservation. This time revenue would have gone toward Hathaway education scholarships; and there would have been video gaming machines at the Wyoming Downs racetrack in Evanston, which Rep. Michael Madden (R-Buffalo) likened to “the heroin of gambling machines.”
• Junkyard dealers avoided the heavy hand of regulation when a bill to regulate scrap metal sales (SF 128) died. The bill would have required detailed records of metal and rubber goods sold or bought, no cash sales over $250, and the dealer keeping a copy of the seller’s photo i.d. Sen. Curt Meier (R-LaGrange) said it was prompted by thefts in the telecommunications industry.
• A bill died that would have made it a crime for criminal street gangs (five or more persons with a common name or symbol engaging in crime) to intimidate or do graffiti (HB 159), which had some legislators fearing for their own artistic kids with spray cans, failed to garner a gang of votes.
• A bill that would have required doctors to show women requesting an abortion an ultrasound image of the fetus (HB 151) was defeated in House after an emotional debate in which one opposed and angry legislator mentioned that she had had an abortion, while calling the bill “an insult.”
• New and renovated government facilities, schools and community colleges (the University of Wyoming was exempted) would have been required to include art in their construction budgets under a Senate bill (SF 20), which went nowhere.

As the House and Senate begin work today on the supplemental budget bill – which emerges from the Joint Appropriations Committee with a $165 million price tag – memos are circulating suggesting that the projected budget surplus for the upcoming year may have to be downsized further.

That certainly puts a damper on the efforts usually made at this time to add pet spending items to the budget bill on the House and Senate floor. It also doesn’t bode well for numerous other bills with price tags – the running total is about $79 million as of this morning – waiting in the wings.

The budget surplus of $259 million was concocted in January by the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, a team of state officials, projecting revenues from sales and use taxes, severance taxes, and other sources. But the CREG based its estimate on natural gas and oil prices higher than what the market is now producing.

Here are a few areas where the spending debate may heat up:

• Highway funding. The governor reduced his request for general fund highway money to $50 million in his revised supplemental budget, and the JAC cut it out altogether. Highway money is popular because road-building generates jobs and, well, highways.
• The payroll for employees at the new prison in Torrington is $20 million. Legislators knew when they funded prison construction that it would be more expensive to keep prisoners here than to pay other states to warehouse them, as Wyoming has done in recent years. But they’re somewhat trapped in this expensive solution – the prison is built, after all, and not likely to be left empty;
• There were a lot of proposals to provide Wyomingites with property tax relief, and two bills are still alive – one to expand the Homestead Exemption, and another limiting the rise in assessed valuation. The total price tag on the two bills is $64 million – by far the most expensive legislation outside the appropriations bill. While there are certain parts of the state where property taxes have risen sharply, it’s not clear citizens all over the state are clamoring for this relief. Will one or both survive?

As debate began on the Supplemental Budget bill in the Senate, Sen. Curt Meier (R-LaGrange) noted that it included a reduction of two positions in the Governor’s office, but this would not mean less staff for the executive branch, since these were tribal liaisons for the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation who were being paid by the state to lobby the state for “more money from us” to the tribes.

Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) was angered by Meier’s “pejorative” characterization, noting that the liaisons connected tribal and state governments, and that tribal members were Wyoming citizens who were only now starting to get benefits provided to other state citizens.

Meier stood his ground, noting that he was only paraphrasing the Governor’s letter dismissing the positions, which noted that the liaisons advocated for the tribes and spent more time on the reservation than they did in Cheyenne.

Though the expectation is that the liaisons would continue – currently Eddie Wadda represents the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and Gary Collins represents the Northern Arapaho Tribe – there was no confirmation that the tribes would pick up their contracts.

It’s easy for journalists to get caught up in the full-press schedule of the legislature just the way the legislators do – you rush to your first committee before dawn, and often debate the bills into the night…even if that debate is sometimes over a brew. You follow dozens of bills and report on dozens of meetings. It’s all you can do to keep up.

But journalists and legislators alike would be wise to look up from their busy desks every now and then. Bigger stories are bearing down on them. Here are a few (which I can’t take credit for – but I can’t name my sources, either):

• Budget surplus estimates were trimmed in January, and the legislators have shown restraint, trying to keep spending above the existing biennium budget within the anticipated $259 million surplus. But the economy keeps worsening, and energy consumption keeps slackening, and prices for natural gas – which, along with coal, is a huge source of state severance tax revenues – have fallen below the price used for the estimates budgeteers rely on. In other words, the legislators may STILL be over-spending. Worse economic news is coming, and it will arrive in this biennium.

• The number of workers dying in recent years in the oil and gas drilling fields – including three deaths already in 2009 – has led to a close look at the state’s Workers’ Compensation program, and legislation to raise the compensation to injured workers and their families, as well as an effort to broaden the opportunities for lawsuits by victims. But little attention has been paid to actual safety regulation on the rigs, which is handled by Occupational Health and Safety in the Wyoming Department of Employment (in many other states, dangerous worksites are regulated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration). The department has a small staff and levies fines of no more than $7,000 for infractions – not a big incentive to fix the dangerous conditions that can lead to death on a rig. Improvements in Workers Comp are getting support from all sides; but will the dangers diminish if safety regulation remains inadequate?

• There are a couple of federal ‘gorillas’ in the room that the legislature pretty much ignores: the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which has put wolf management programs in limbo – particularly Wyoming’s controversial ‘predator’ approach; and the massive federal economic stimulus program, which will begin raining down dollars as soon as the new President can get it through the U.S. Congress. Where will those dollars go, and how should that affect decisions about spending the state’s diminishing funds? Whether it goes to railroads or power lines or broadband internet, it would seem we ought to be thinking ahead to making adjustments in state spending when we find out which programs are going to be flooded with federal dollars. Regardless, we are mulling more wolf legislation and churning through a supplemental budget bill. How about a special session to make adjustments when the word comes from D.C.?