Although Secretary of State Chuck Gray has been a frequent critic of Gov. Mark Gordon, State Treasuer Curt Meier hadn’t — until now.
At Saturday’s Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meeting in Douglas, Meier criticized the governor for opposing a proposal that could give his office more power over the state’s investments and that he’s tired of “taking his shit.”
“He just blindsided me yesterday,” Meier said about Gordon. “He’s not going to work with me, he’s not going to work with Chuck (Gray), he’s just worried about himself.”
Meier got a standing ovation.
What’s It For?
Meier’s frustration boiled over because of a Friday Capital Financing Committee meeting, where a staffer for the governor’s office proposed that the treasurer shouldn’t have a unilateral say in managing the state’s alternative investment funds and hiring its investment managers.
The State Loan and Investment Board (SLIB), made up by the state’s top five elected officials — including Meier — determines the investment policy for the state and has to give approval before investing in alternative funds and hiring investment managers.
Gordon’s office declined to directly respond to Meier’s comments, but Betsy Anderson, the governor’s general counsel and deputy chief of staff, explained to the committee Friday that Gordon is concerned the proposal amounted to putting too much power in one man’s hand.
“You put a lot of authority in one person,” Anderson said.
Although she commended Meier’s work and said the governor’s concerns aren’t directed at him personally, she said there’s no guarantee that Wyoming won’t have a less-than-scrupulous treasurer at some point in the future, mentioning how other states have had state treasurers who received criminal charges.
“You have to think about that when you’re thinking … this is not the people that are sitting at the table right now here, it could be a whole different set of people,” she said.
Meier told Cowboy State Daily he felt sandbagged by these comments because the governor hadn’t reached out to him to express his concerns.
Anderson’s comments came in opposition to a proposal that could have moved the authority to hire the state’s investment managers away from the SLIB to the treasurer’s office, as well as give the treasurer authority to manage the state’s roughly $5 billion portfolio of alternative investments.
All of these changes still could only happen with a majority vote from the Investment Funds Committee, of which Meier is the chair.
But changing this power, Meier told Cowboy State Daily, would allow the state to hire investment managers about three months quicker but SLIB can already call a special meeting to speed up the hiring process.
“We sure in the hell don’t need the governor telling the treasurer that, ‘Wait a minute boy, I can be that important because I’m the governor,’” Meier told Cowboy State Daily. “’But the elected officials, they actually work for me.’ That’s the guy is saying. I do not work for the governor, we work for the people of Wyoming.”
Why It Could Work
Meier sees the proposal as a way to take the politics out of supervising the investment managers that mirrors the current process used for the Wyoming Retirement System (WRS).
But Anderson countered this point Friday, saying there are structural differences in the WRS system in that the people running this program are hired based on being qualified for the job, rather than simply being elected by the voters.
“People vote on elected officials for a lot of different reasons,” she said. “You don’t know that you’re necessarily going to get a treasurer who has extensive experience and extensive expertise in the investment world.”
Meier found this insinuation insulting and hypocritical, and said if anything ever went wrong in the process, SLIB could remove his powers anyway.
“It’s OK with Mark to have a bureaucrat who’s unelected in their Wyoming Retirement System make the decision on managers, but it’s not OK for him to have an elected public official make that decision,” Meier told Cowboy State Daily, who said the same problem occurs within the federal government. “What Governor Gordon is trying to do is mirror what’s going on in Washington, D.C., and that’s to take all elected public officials out of the process.”
Anderson also pointed out that the state’s investment managers don’t only oversee the state’s alternative investments, but also most of the state’s roughly $30 billion portfolio.
Looking over the state’s money, Meier said, should be his main jurisdiction.
“It’s time to push back and push back hard because I’m tired of the way this damn state is going around the constitutional provision that protects the other elected official’s offices,” he said.
Larger Lesson
Meier used this situation Saturday to explain to the state GOP his argument that Republicans should be voting in members of their party that vote in alignment with the party platform. Meier was pleased at the success of the farther right Wyoming Freedom Caucus in the primary election, which is nearly guaranteed to take over a majority of state House seats.
“I’m tired of what’s been going on and we’ve got an opportunity here with the momentum that we’ve got,” he said.
Meier also wants the state to implement constitutional controls on state spending.
“We keep spending the way that we’re spending, I can’t make money,” Meier said.
Gordon, Meier’s predecessor, was state treasurer before he ran for governor in 2018. Anderson said Gordon would not have supported the proposal when he was treasurer.
Meier believes the governor still wants to be the treasurer today and worries that he might try to defund his department.
He also told a story on Saturday from very early on in his administration, when after his office made some asset allocation revisions for the state that Gordon hadn’t taken action on as treasurer, Gordon questioned the optics of the move.
Meier also accused Gordon of previously trying to make the treasurer job ceremonial and overstepping his authority into Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder’s purview.
“It’s not about power of the office or power of the person, it’s about having power to the people,” Meier said.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
