Former Laramie City Council candidate Paul Montoya professed his innocence to Cowboy State Daily on Monday despite pleading no contest to disabling Wyoming Public Radio’s transmitters late last month.
“I felt that it was not worth the time and expense to proceed to a hearing to defend my case,” Montoya said. “A plea agreement was best for me and my family.”
Light Sentence
After originally being charged with two felonies for allegedly disabling Wyoming Public Radio’s transmitters and their remote access while he worked at the station in 2022, Montoya received a much lower punishment at his sentencing Nov. 18.
One of the felonies Montoya was facing was dropped shortly after the case began and the other was reduced to a misdemeanor charge of computer trespassing on Nov. 11.
Montoya walked away with a relative slap on the wrist compared to his initial charges, ending up with a year of unsupervised probation, no fine and $370 in court fees after pleading no contest to the charge.
Montoya was able to make this plea under Wyoming’s first offender statute, which allows someone to be found guilty by a court while avoiding a conviction on their record.
His plea agreement represents a much lower sentence than the up to three years in prison and $3,000 in fines he could have received under the felony he was facing for committing crimes against computer users.
According to a University of Wyoming Police affidavit, Montoya had been “severely angry with WPR in the past, been subject to many complaints and had a deteriorating relationship with WPR administration at the time of the incident.”
Montoya had been Wyoming Public Media’s director of engineering and a radio host on WPR’s “Wyoming Sounds” at the time of the crime, the former a job he held from 2015 to 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also was the owner and general manager of KJJL and KWY radio in Cheyenne from 1994 to 2005, which included hosting morning shows.
He was accused of remotely logging into a computer that operates Wyoming Public Radio’s transmissions, “including radio towers, broadcasting technology and equipment, and other Wyoming Public Radio related functions” and disabling them in October 2022.
Eight days later Montoya allegedly struck again, entering Wyoming Public Radio’s radio tower east of Laramie at Pilot Hill and disabling the tower and access to it.
Montoya said the accusations made against him were based on a personal feud between he and a former supervisor at the University of Wyoming, where the station is located, and were only presented to the UW police department to harm his reputation.
Election Impact
Montoya believes the ongoing case did impact his run for city council this fall despite getting enough votes in the primary election to qualify for the general.
“I feel that did cast a shadow of suspicion with anyone going to the polls, so it naturally fulfilled the goal of my accusers,” he said.
In the general election, Montoya finished third out of four candidates for Ward 1 in the city council race, edged out for a seat by second place finisher William Bowling, who beat Montoya by 291 votes.
But Montoya still got 1,746 people to vote for him despite his ongoing felony case, more people than voted for Albany County GOP Chair Roxie Hensley.
Laramie resident Brett Glass, who unsuccessfully ran in Ward 2, said he believes the case brought against Montoya did have some impact on the election result.
A big factor in the race, Glass said, were partisan influencers who he said tried to exploit the criminal charges against Montoya and his Republican affiliation to help their preferred candidates beat him in the nonpartisan race.
“Various people were treating him like he was guilty because he was aligned with the Republican Party,” Glass said. “They were treating him like he was guilty before he had the actual trial. I thought that was unfair.”
Glass, who works in internet services, said he doesn’t believe Montoya committed the crimes he was accused of. Even amateur hackers, Glass said, would know to cover up their tracks to hide the IP address they are hacking from, a step Montoya didn’t take.
Montoya had said he wasn’t trying to hack into or hinder Public Radio’s operations and was merely doing the day-to-day duties of his job.
“It didn’t seem like someone as tech savvy as Paul wouldn’t know to cover up their tracks,” Glass said.
Montoya’s felony was reduced to a misdemeanor two days after the election.
If Montoya had been elected and found guilty of the felony charge, it would have created a difficult situation where he would have had to be removed from the council shortly after being elected. In Wyoming, people convicted of a felony cannot hold office.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
