A Weston County effort to add two seats to solely represent their county in the Wyoming Legislature is moving forward.
The Weston County Republican Party on Wednesday selected three candidates each for a new state Senate and a House seat that the Weston County commission is attempting to create for the upcoming 2025 legislative session.
This exceeds their legal authority as it is the responsibility of the Legislature to draw legislative districts and create seats, but the commission is making its play based on a clause in the Wyoming Constitution, which Weston County leaders say entitles every county to its own senators and representatives.
The Weston County commission plans to choose from the six total nominees at a special meeting early next week, commissioner Garrett Borton told Cowboy State Daily.
“It’s being supported pretty strongly right now,” Borton said. “People across the state are supporting exactly what we’re supporting.”
A majority of the Weston County commissioners believe that the current way legislative districts are drawn in Wyoming is in conflict with the state Constitution. Currently, these districts are not aligned with county borders and are proportionally based on the population for a given area. As a result, Weston is represented by two House and two Senate seats that cover sections of the county in addition to parts of a few other counties.
The commission argues that this violates Article 3, Section 3 of the Wyoming Constitution, which says that each county is entitled to its own senator and representative. There’s also a footnote in the constitution stemming from a 1991 federal court lawsuit that determined that the Wyoming Legislature may disregard this stipulation when it redistricts because it’s inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution’s concept of one man one vote.
In the unlikely circumstance that a lawsuit isn't filed to block Weston's effort, it's not clear what will happen to the people chosen by the county and whether they’ll go down to the Legislature in January and attempt to claim a legislative desk.
Eathorne’s View
In an email obtained by Cowboy State Daily on Thursday, Wyoming GOP Chair Frank Eathorne said he supports the effort to give each county their own senators and representatives and plans to have the state party work on the issue statewide.
“Our current gerrymandered ‘districts’ are ridiculous and unauthorized,” he writes.
Currently, Weston is one of eight Wyoming counties that lacks sole representation in the Legislature.
But Eathorne stopped short in his email of giving an outright endorsement for the way the Weston commission is going about this process, which he said is where some disagreement exists. Eathorne said the process the commission is using isn’t covered by state law.
Although the commissioners followed the normal process for declaring a political vacancy in Wyoming, they strayed from law because of the fact they’re creating the new seats by themselves.
“While the WYGOP is familiar with and conducts somewhat regular title 22 vacancy processes, it is unclear how and in what manner the WYGOP can or should proceed in this particular case,” Eathorne writes.
Some Opposition
Weston County Commissioner Nathan Todd doesn’t support the way his commission is going about this process, which was initiated on a 3-2 vote this spring that Todd opposed. Although he wants Weston to have its own lawmakers, he believes the process should be initiated by working with the Legislature or bringing forward a Constitutional amendment.
“It all just seems nuts to me,” Todd said. “I think reasonable people in Cheyenne will recognize that we’re upset. I don’t agree with the path we’re taking.”
Todd believes Weston is setting itself up for a lawsuit by engaging in this effort, which he would expect to lose at the federal level.
Former House Speaker Doug Chamberlain said the county representation issue has been significant in Wyoming ever since the change to proportional representation was made in 1992.
“Those people aren’t crazy. They may not be going about the issue the right way, but in my opinion they’re in the right,” Chamberlain said.
Chamberlain, a Goshen County resident, filed a lawsuit in 1991 in an effort to block the change. The main reason he said the federal court rejected his case at that time was because he was coming at it from the perspective of representing an individual county rather than the state as a whole in his legal argument.
Bob Bonnar, the longtime publisher of the Newcastle News Letter Journal newspaper who now lives in Durango, Colorado, commends the commissioners for what they’re doing. He pointed out that “one man one vote” isn’t applied to the U.S. Senate, where each of the 50 states gets the same allotment of two senators.
“These folks have done their homework,” Bonnar said. “They’re asking for the Wyoming government to address what’s wrong.
“Hooray for these groups bringing these issues to the front.”
Bonnar was covering the Weston County commission as a reporter back in 2012 when the second most recent redistricting took place. At that time, there already was a strong desire to resolve the county representation issue. Former Weston County commissioner Tracy Hunt even filed a lawsuit about it around this time.
After getting stonewalled again in 2022, Bonnar believes the commission was left with very few other avenues than the process it’s using right now.
“The county commission at that time said let’s work with these people,” Bonnar said. “They waited 10 years and then had the exact same thing happen in 2022. These people, they were patient. They waited 10 years.”
One of the people nominated by the party on Wednesday was current commissioner chair Don Taylor. Taylor will likely have to recuse himself from voting on his own nomination.
Taylor lost his reelection bid in the Republican primary and his commissioner term will expire at the end of the year. He did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment.
How They Voted
Taylor, Borton and Commissioner Vera Huber supported the original proposal to create new legislative seats, while Todd and Commissioner Ed Wagoner voted against it.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
