It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, February 16th. I’m Mac Watson.
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Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak tells Cowboy State Daily that his agency is investigating last week’s incident in which a Teton County GOP leader handed checks to lawmakers on the state House floor after adjournment. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the sheriff’s investigation is different from the House’s decision to launch their own examination.
“There's an important distinction here, because when the House on Thursday was talking about launching its own internal investigation for possible legislative misconduct, bribery, that was an administrative, non-criminal act, and that that seven person committee is going to be convening sometime during the session, and it'll have four days to just put something together and send it on to the House. But when they were debating forming that panel, it was Representative Chris Knapp who said, ‘Maybe this is something that we should forward to a criminal agency, that we should ask the AG about.” And even though the House didn't take him up on that, that is more the nature of what Sheriff Kozak is doing, is looking for criminal probable cause, or as he put it, ‘to clear the names of the innocent wherever the investigation leads.’”
The controversy erupted on Wednesday when Rep. Mike Yin of Jackson urged his colleagues not to vote for introduction of a bill Rebecca Bextel championed that seeks to curb affordable housing mitigation policies like those prevalent in Teton County and its seat of Jackson.
Read the full story HERE.
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Speaking of the legislature, lawmakers get back to work and start the second week of the Budget Session. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that this week, it’s all about amendments and funding.
“So what we can expect are amendments on the budget starting next week. And now they're going to roll up their sleeves, and they're going to maybe have a tug of war with the joint appropriations committee and some of the changes it made, and then hopefully each chamber gets a budget that is satisfied with before both chambers try to reconcile the budget with one another. The other big thing that's going on is they're trying to recalibrate education, which means they're trying to do a full scale reassessment on what we pay for education.”
Even though a court order for education recalibration is on pause right now, the Senate is taking it up by introducing a recalibration bill unanimously.
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For decades, the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne wasn't just a hotel; it was the most powerful spot in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Zak Sonntag reports that nearly every legislator stayed there and that's where deals were finalized.
“What made it special was the people in the management and the way that they went out of their way to really cultivate a culture there…in hindsight, pretty fascinating to consider that you had virtually an entire legislature all bunking at the same place during the session…and there would be receptions, seven nights a week, dinner parties. People were having conversations at the bar late in the night, and it was kind of like the way they described it. It was always about law making. You were always working on fixing some problem with some bill, but the atmosphere was so much more congenial and personable at the Hitching Post than it was up at the Capitol, and so they were able to move things just in an entirely different way.”
It was not just local politicians who stayed at “The Hitch.” Spiro Agnew, the U.S. vice president to Richard Nixon, stayed at the historic inn. A fire brought the historic inn down in 2010.
Read the full story HERE.
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Work is quickly progressing just outside Kemmerer at TerraPower’s first-of-its-kind nuclear power project. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that the 167-foot-tall facility will stress-test massive Natrium reactor components.
“It's really just a giant mechanic shop. And what they're going to do is they're going to test these because this is the first one ever, right? And this will be the only test and fill facility that they do.They're going to bring these gigantic pieces of the Natrium reactor in. They're going to test them. This will be the place that they test these in the sodium, molten sodium environment to figure out if everything works the way they think it will work…the scale of it is just amazing. 167 feet, and some of the equipment that's going to be coming in is too large. It's physically too large to bring by rail. They're right there by the railroad. They could build a rail spur, but it's too large to transport that way until that will not be the way the equipment is being brought to the natrium site. It will be oversized loads going down I-80.”
Backed by billionaire Bill Gates, the novel 345-megawatt nuclear power plant being built near Kemmerer will be much smaller and much cheaper than the hulking reactors of old.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll be back with more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily news continues now…
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Just one search and rescue mission last year took nearly 1,800 manpower hours and 220 flights. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports that with nearly 9 million visitors coming to Wyoming, the cost of helping stranded people is breaking the bank.
“Search and rescue teams are funded through the county and they're run by the county sheriff offices. The bulk of that money comes from the county commissioners who allot them money for infrastructure in basically equipment. However, the problem is this money is woefully inadequate based on the types of rescues they're now having to conduct. For example, Grant Gardner, who disappeared while hiking Cloud Peak Mountain last year, and unfortunately, was found deceased. But the cost for his search, because everything is volunteer, and they were able to get so many volunteers, was about $65,000. However, if they didn't have those volunteers, if they didn't have all those people who donated, that rescue might have been $1.7 million.”
To help fund Search and Rescue teams, the Wyoming Department of Transportation is now selling a specialty Search and Rescue license plate. The initial cost is $180 with $150 going to the state-wide fund with a $50 annual renewal fee.
Read the full story HERE.
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Many Wyoming ranchers stick to the traditional way of doing things when feeding livestock in the winter, including working a team of workhorses and a sleigh loaded with hay. Cowboy State Daily’s Kate Meadows reports that one rancher says with horses, he doesn’t have to worry about the engine not starting.
“Modern day ranching doesn't necessarily mean modern day technology. A lot of Wyoming ranchers still use an old fashioned method of horse drawn slay to deliver feed to their livestock. So the rancher will hook up a team of horses and go out into the field, use a pitchfork, or sometimes their bare hands, and just toss the hay or whatever the feed is out to their livestock, and we're talking about cattle, sheep in some cases. so some of these high rural places in Wyoming can get 65 inches of snow or more a year, and these work horses can power through that snow easily. So you already have the work horses. Why go out and pay $50,000 for a high tech tractor that could do the same thing.”
Feeding with a horse team has some drawbacks. For one thing, it’s a slow process. One rancher tells Cowboy State Daily that a typical feeding cycle might take three to four hours with a horse team.
Read the full story HERE.
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Back in the early 1900s, when Wyoming men outnumbered women 10-1, they formed matrimonial clubs to bring out mail-order brides from back East. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that historians say many fourth- and fifth-generation Wyoming families may trace their roots to these “imported wives.”
“So they're called mail order brides, because that's pretty much how the whole thing was facilitated. Was ads through the mail, but it's not the modern connotation of mail order brides. This was just basically, it was like modern day dating acts, apps and personal ads, except it was through newspapers back in the late 1800s and early 1900s…I spoke to Robyn Cutter the Park County archives, and she said there's not a lot of first hand documentation of these arrangements, because it's kind of an awkward thing to bring up in hindsight. But based on what she's seen from the correspondences that she's been able to read, the women were looking for a sense of adventure. They talk about being unhappy back on the East Coast, they had restrictive family lives, and they found a sense of freedom in coming out to the West, and if a strong, young, handsome cowboy came with it, that was all the better.”
Park County Archives director, Robyn Cutter tells Cowboy State Daily that she found evidence of matrimonial clubs functioning, in some capacity, as late as the 1960s.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
