GILLETTE — Gov. Mark Gordon dug his heels in at a town hall meeting in the coal capital of the United States on Tuesday, telling a rather subdued crowd of blue-collared miners, educators and public officials that he is not rolling over on a federal push to limit energy mining in the Cowboy State.
“What I heard today was a lot of concern about the future of families,” Gordon told Cowboy State Daily in response to a question after the event.
Gordon also vowed a legal fight to halt an aggressive federal overreach positioning against Wyoming.
“That’s unfortunately the tool that we have left, and it’s one that we’ve got to engage in,” Gordon said.
“They don’t want to engage with us,” said Gordon of the Biden administration’s defensive leaders within the Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management.
As an example, Gordon disclosed at the town hall meeting that the state has placed an $800,000 down payment on a big-time law firm with extensive experience in “federal administrative law” to confront a “no leasing” option on public lands that would end coal mining in the Powder River Basin.
“I need not tell you that since January we have seen an absolute blizzard of new regulations in energy, and schools, and you name it — health — just about everything you can imagine,” he said. “There has been a strategy to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hope some of it sticks. It’s our job to make sure that those walls are clean.”
House That Coal Built
In remarks at the town hall meeting held at the Gillette College Technical Education Center, Gordon said that Wyoming at last count is participating in 58 legal actions designed to push back on overreach by the federal government to curtail or end the state’s right to mine and produce energy.
The trade school, which trains students how to become diesel mechanics, electricians and welders, welcomed a packed crowd of more than 200 people to the town hall meeting.
Plaques hung at the front door of the school that greeted them from benefactors in the coal community, such as Arch Resources Inc. and Peabody Coal Inc., the largest operators in the region’s Powder River Basin.
Big Law Firm
In a Cowboy State Daily interview following the town hall meeting, Gordon disclosed that Wyoming Attorney General Bridget Hill had retained the influential Arlington, Virginia-based law firm of Consovoy McCarthy to help fight a new Bureau of Land Management rule that would end coal production in Wyoming’s energy-rich PRB by 2041.
The May 16 order from the Biden administration came out of the BLM’s Buffalo Field Office following a 2022 order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana in Billings.
Lawyers at Consovoy McCarthy have argued multiple appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a landmark case last year that ended affirmative action in college admissions.
Butch Knutson, Campbell County commissioner, questions Gov. Mark Gordon and a panel at the Campbell County Federal Overreach Town Hall in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
Jack Clary was among a crowd that packed a town hall meeting with Gov. Mark Gordon in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
Gov. Mark Gordon talks to a full house as part of a panel discussion for the Campbell County Federal Overreach Town Hall in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis were part of a panel at a Campbell County Federal Overreach Town Hall in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
State Rep. Reuban Tarver asks a question during Tuesday’s town hall meeting with Gov. Mark Gordon in Gillette. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
Todd Parfitt, Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality director, speaks at the Campbell County Federal Overreach Town Hall in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) 
Campbell County Commission Chairman Del Shelstad talks about government overreach during a packed town hall meeting in Gillette on June 25, 2024. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily)
No Justice
Also at the town hall, U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, echoed Gordon’s remarks.
She said that the federal government has overstepped its powers in Wyoming to regulate energy policies.
“They no longer govern justly,” Lummis said. “And we we do not consent to be governed like this.”
She also worries that the Biden administration is sidestepping what is fair.
“The onslaught of federal regulations that are working their way through the system during the next 12 months, are designed to take effect before a new president takes office,” she said. “So, if it is not President [Joe] Biden succeeding himself, then the next administration will be stuck with unraveling the mess that this administration is creating. And it is a mess.”
During the town hall meeting, only about 30 minutes of time were left in the two-hour-long gathering for the audience to ask questions of Gordon, Lummis and others about federal overreach.
Why The Veto?
Campbell County Commissioner Butch Knutson asked Gordon why he vetoed a bill that would have carved out $75 million for the Wyoming Legislature to initiate legal action to fight federal overreach.
“All this money was voted on and approved in the House and Senate (in Wyoming),” he said. “But it went on to the governor and was vetoed.”
The governor responded that the Legislature added within the biennial budget $1.8 million to the state’s federal natural resources policy account, which can be used for various mineral and environmental litigation.
“We’ll continue to work on that. When you have two people representing one client, it gets complicated in court,’ Gordon said in response to Knutson’s question. “We are 100% there and we’re well funded, and we’re going to take every action we can to protect that.”
Gordon did file three lawsuits in May challenging controversial federal environmental rules that could economically cripple the Cowboy State’s coal and natural gas-fired power plants and possibly push the relevance of coal as a revenue stream to the backburner in America.
The action came in response to an Environmental Protection Agency rule issued in April designed to regulate coal and natural gas-fired power plants out of existence over the next decade.
Earlier this month, the Wyoming Energy Authority opened a request for proposals from “companies, organizations and individuals” to secure services to support suing over the EPA’s recent proposal that could result in the early retirement of Wyoming-based power plants.
WEA Director Rob Creager told Cowboy State Daily at the Wyoming Mining Association’s annual conference June 7 that the state’s chief legal officer, Hill, had tapped $300,000 from the natural resources litigation fund to fight Washington’s efforts to reduce the electrical grid’s dependency on fossil fuels for power-generating plants.
Why Carbon Capture?
Jeff Clary, another audience member, asked why Gordon supported projects to add expensive carbon capture equipment to power plants for cleaning up the air when they “lead to higher rates for the citizens of Campbell County.”
Gordon said that he remains committed to carbon capture projects because the U.S. will eventually repower electricity-producing plants in 28 states where PBR coal is burned.
These fossil-fueled power plants are given new life with carbon capture equipment, he said.
“I want to make sure that, when those companies start to rebuild their plants, which they will be doing over the next few years, that they say coal is still a very important part of our portfolio,” he said. “I think we should be able to generate across the spectrum, and we need to have all sorts of energy, including uranium.”
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
