It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Tuesday, February 17th. I’m Mac Watson.
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The state Senate advanced a bill Monday that would rescue the Wyoming Business Council by rebuilding the controversial agency. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports it also would freeze its work while lawmakers and others reevaluate the council.
“So there's three bills. Two of them are twins, right? One the twins are kind of a soft freeze. One of those is still moving on the House side. One of those is paused on the Senate side. But what the Senate minerals committee advanced Monday was the hard freeze. Stop everything for a year like no new projects, no expansions, while we evaluate you and see what the heck what you're all about, right? And Senator Chris Rothfuss gutted half the bill in an amendment that the Senate gets to vote on, but he gutted half the bill saying we don't need to describe this big task force, we the minerals committee can just do this ourselves and appoint a subcommittee if we see fit, but he did keep the year long pause.”
Wyoming Business Council CEO Josh Dorrell voiced optimism Monday, telling the Senate Materials Committee that he’s excited about the intention, the effort, and the interest into diving deep into what the Business Council does.
Read the full story HERE.
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Former Wyoming lawmakers say someone distributing checks on the House floor was “brazen,” “shocking,” and “unprecedented.” Cowboy State Daily’s Zak Sonntag reports that one former lawmaker says when it comes to ethics violations, he doesn’t recall anything of this magnitude.
“I spoke with Representative, former representative, Ron Micheli, Uinta County Republican, served for 16 years in the legislature, and that was both in the House and the Senate. And when I asked him, Have you ever seen any kind of ethics scandal like this before? And his response was instant. He said, I have never, in all of my time, seen or even heard of something of this magnitude. He said it was unprecedented, and he made some interesting points, because one of the reps who accepted a check on the floor said, ‘Well, look, the optics are bad, but it stops at optics.’ And Ron Micheli said, ‘Look, optics are everything. Sometimes the perception of impropriety is just as bad or worse as actual impropriety, and the damage it does to the institution is hard to understate.’ He also made the point responding to Bextel’s comments that these were legitimate campaign contributions. And he asked himself, ‘Well, I think that is begging some questions.’ And he said, ‘I think it's actually dodging the point to call them campaign contributions, because none of these members are candidates at the moment, they have not filed for office because that time comes in May. And so he asked, if these are not candidates, then what is the money for?’”
Rebecca Bextel has said publicly that she was distributing lawful campaign checks on behalf of a Teton County donor, and that she did so in person because she knew she’d be in Cheyenne.
said former Rep. Ron Micheli.
Read the full story HERE.
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Speaking of Rebecca Bextel, the Teton County Republican Party is condemning her handing out checks on the House floor. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the Wyoming Republican Party distanced itself too, saying she was not representing the party.
“Kat Ruckert, Chair of the Teton County Republican Party, was like, “We joined the Senate in condemning this act, but let's not conflate the issues either.’ She was saying, still important to defend private property, which was the function of the contested bill, but she emphasized that the party had no knowledge of this plan, and that Bextel still acted alone, and the state Republican Party, also said, yes, she was not doing this for us. The reason that matters is because these major political parties in Wyoming are barred from spending money on candidates until after the primary election. That's because the primary election is a hot mess of all Republicans going to contest against one another, and the party doesn't get to back its favorite until the people actually have their Republican nominee.”
The state GOP chair one day later emphasized that Bextel was not on the House floor on behalf of the state party and that matters because Wyoming law bars major political parties from giving financial support to candidates before a primary election.
Read the full story HERE.
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Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon announced on Monday that the state is petitioning a federal legislative panel to reverse its decision to kill the $17.85 billion, 3,500-well Jonah Field expansion. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that the governor says the ruling “is a direct assault on Wyoming’s economy.”
“It's anticipated to be a nearly $18 billion dollar revenue project. It's going to mean a couple of billion and severance taxes for the state, another 600 million for schools, 900 jobs. It's a huge, huge project that has been in the works. It took eight and a half years to get approved. It finally was approved eight years ago, 2018 almost eight years ago, it was approved, and now this panel says, ‘Nope, you can't do it.’ It's halted. And what the governor says is, ‘Look, it's really overreach’…On Friday, there was some movement from us, Department of the Interior, Doug Burgum, the head of the interior, who said, Hey, we're going to look at this. So that legislative panel was under his agency, though, so there might be something that he could do to reverse this as well.”
Jonah Energy’s Vice President, Paul Ulrich, tells Cowboy State Daily that the NPL project is its future in Wyoming and the state’s interest in getting it moving again is encouraging.
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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About midmorning on Sunday, as the temperature crept above freezing, the ice sheet on Boysen Reservoir started making sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that scientists say the otherworldly noises come from ice cracking under warming temperatures.
“Sound experts say, basically, if ice cracks on the reservoir somewhere, and you're far enough away, the high frequency sounds produced by that crack will eventually outpace the low frequency sounds. By the time it gets to your location, the sound wave spectrum is split, and so it sounds really weird. ice will crack, and then the sound spectrum will separate over distance. And if you're far enough away, it's going to sound really weird, because the full spectrum of sound is arriving all at once.”
Famed Wyoming photographer Dave Bell told Cowboy State Daily that “Water is a superconductor of sound. As the ice cracks or shifts, either freezing or thawing, it makes sounds from those events. It’s the ice doing its thing.”
Read the full story HERE.
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U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis told the Wyoming Senate on Monday that Kraken, the cryptocurrency exchange that moved its global headquarters to Cheyenne last year, will sponsor Trump $1,000 Accounts for every child born in Wyoming in 2026. Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that Lummis described the Trump Account sponsorship as Kraken rewarding Wyoming for its leadership in making the state a good place to set up a digital asset business.
“They love the regulatory and legal environment in Wyoming and leaders like Lummis, who has really gone out of her way to facilitate businesses like Kraken and she was pretty explicit. She said as a thank you to Wyoming that Kraken has pledged $1,000 per kid born in 2026 so attention, pregnant parents out there, if you have a child due in Wyoming in 2026 you could benefit from this $1,000 donation into what is called a Trump account, and that is a savings mechanism that the President has promoted, an investment mechanism the President has promoted. He characterizes it as buying into the American dream and investing in our kids.”
Kraken is a nearly $3 billion cryptocurrency exchange and was Wyoming's first Special Purpose Depository Institution. A key milestone, Lummis said, was Kraken gaining access to a master account with the Federal Reserve.
Read the full story HERE.
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The future of Wyoming’s NCAR’s supercomputer is uncertain after the National Science Foundation announced plans to shift operations to a third party. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports this leaves state and university leaders seeking to preserve its local role.
“The Trump administration had said that they were going to unravel NCAR, basically do away with it, because it's a source of climate alarmism, and they don't want to deal with that anymore. What I was able to determine is there are discussions ongoing about the fate of the building. The mayor of Cheyenne, Patrick Collins, told me he's aware of these discussions going on. Basically they are trying to, you know, keep that center open, keep it here.”
Among its many accomplishments, NCAR was instrumental in solving unexplained weather events that caused multiple airplane crashes in the 1980s. It also modeled wildfire-generated weather to help determine the safest locations for firefighters.
Read the full story HERE.
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First responders saved a young driver after he hit a cow on a dark Sheridan county road Friday night. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that emergency personnel are crediting an app, which sent an emergency alert to the driver's parents and first responders.
“That was the Life360 app, which apparently is used by a lot of families. It's an app that families can subscribe to that provides location tracking and emergency alerts in the event that somebody's injured in a car accident, and that's what happened in this case, the notification that first responders got didn't come from the traditional 911 call. It was an emergency notification sent from the app to another phone in an area where service is kind of hit and miss. It’'s a great layer of protection in the event you are in a remote area and something like this does happen to you, your phone can notify emergency services before you even have the time. Your phone can notify emergency services before you even call 911.”
Josh McKinley, fire chief of the Clearmont Fire District, tells Cowboy State Daily that while the driver wasn't seriously hurt, the cow wasn't as fortunate and died at the scene.
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.
