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.?