The Wyoming House of Representatives is in for a long night Tuesday after it declined 26-35 to revert the state’s two-year budget back to the governor’s $11 billion recommendation – a proposed restoration of around $300 million.
By denying the amendment, the House preserved the controversial edits the legislative Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) made to the draft budget after four weeks of discussion in December and January.
The move also puts the House on track to hear and debate around 80 amendments to the budget bill Tuesday that it would not have heard otherwise, for a total of 120 amendments.
Even if it spends just 10 minutes on each amendment, that could make for an all-nighter, Rep. Steve Harshman, R-Casper, told the House.
Meanwhile in the state Senate, lawmakers adopted 20-11 an amendment to their version of the budget that would restore most of the governor’s budget – and undo most of the JAC’s work of this winter.
That's what Gov. Mark Gordon asked lawmakers to do during his Feb. 9 state of the state address.
Some noteworthy changes the JAC’s draft budget contains are:
- A $40 million cut to the University of Wyoming,
- A near-complete defunding of the Wyoming Business Council that would save the state $53 million,
- Numerous denials to the Wyoming Department of Health’s budget request but an increase to some services, like the developmental disabilities waiver program;
- The defunding of Wyoming Public Media;
- And the denial of across-the-board state employee raises, offset by the inclusion of targeted raises to some state mental health nurses, to snowplow drivers, many Wyoming Highway Patrol troopers, and prosecutors.
Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, brought the “governor’s-recommendation” amendment to the House on Tuesday.
He called it the “One Big Beautiful Amendment,” which House Appropriations Chair John Bear, R-Gillette, called a misnomer.
It generally mirrored the budget the governor recommended in November, except that it would not send $250 million from the state’s checking account, the general fund, into permanent savings accounts because a separate piece of legislation funding capital construction now pulls from the checking account.
Yin said he doesn’t support the governor’s recommended budget altogether, but considers it a better starting point for the House’s work than the draft the JAC advanced.
People can still tweak the budget later this week, Yin noted.
“If you don’t like the Business Council, or you don’t like the University over the hill,” said Yin, “we can debate those as third reading amendments.”
Bear parried that Yin’s amendment was big: “beautiful it is not.”
He emphasized the Wyoming Constitution’s mandate of three separate branches of government, and said simply reverting to the governor’s recommendation would erode that.
“We are not doing our work if we just abdicate to the executive and let their budget department decide how we’re going to (do things),” said Bear. “We have to make the decisions.”
Bear said he’s disappointed in the Senate for reverting to the governor’s budget, moments prior and down the hall.
As House debate unfolded, multiple representatives indicated they don’t trust the Joint Appropriations Committee’s methods.
On the one hand, Bear noted the JAC meetings had three times as many YouTube viewers as the committee’s 2024 meetings. The budget captured numerous news headlines as well – another oddity.
On the other hand, some representatives pointed to the JAC’s frequent pauses during its budget-planning meetings, during which members had secret conversations out of public view. Others said the committee members didn’t engage enough with the agencies for which they were cutting or denying money.
“It’s the lack of transparency that bothers me,” Rep. Martha Lawley, R-Worland, told the House.
Rep. Rob Geringer, R-Cheyenne, said he watched the meetings.
“(There were) multiple times where a break had to be called so discussions could go on outside of the microphone,” he said.
But, Rep. Clarence Styvar, R-Cheyenne, had noted, the Legislature holds an unspoken tradition of giving added deference to committee actions, since committees are tasked with up-close vetting of bills they handle.
Getting Heated
The conversation grew heated.
Yin called his and others’ lack of trust in the JAC’s draft the “core of the argument.”
For example, said Yin, the committee’s denial of a Wyoming Department of Health spending authorization of $58 million in federal money for tribal health clinics could have cost Wyoming extra money from its own pockets.
When tribal leaders demanded an explanation, Bear told the committee hosting them that there’d been an accounting error, Yin recounted.
“If I can’t trust the chair of the JAC with that one bit, how can I trust him on the whole budget markup?” asked Yin, becoming animated.
For Rep. Tony Locke, R-Casper, that was too far.
“We’ve had enough of people standing up and disparaging the committee,” said Locke.
Yin said the argument depended on the nature of that trust. He started making knife and cutting gestures, saying “Should it be (a budget) where we’ve cut in half bits and pieces over here and then we take the knife and we stab the university and we stab the business council?”
Neiman said the conversation was too charged.
“Keep it on the script,” Neiman said. “We’ve got to come up with a budget – ain’t nobody stabbing nobody around here.”
Across-The-Board
When former House Appropriations Chair Bob Nicholas, R-Cheyenne, urged the House to support Yin’s amendment, Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne voiced shock.
For 10 years, said Brown, “I’d watch that former chair of appropriations absolutely defend to the teeth his motions on reducing the budget.”
Brown cast that as support for Yin’s amendment. For one thing, he said, he disagreed with the JAC funding some state technology provisions for one year instead of two.
He also voiced support for across-the-board pay raises.
The governor’s budget “does not pit our highway patrol and snowplow drivers against our Department of Corrections employees,” he said.
Before Lunch
Some members criticized Nicholas for saying they could “go home before lunch” if they passed the amendment.
That comment may have been hyperbole. Multiple committees were still slated to meet over lunch, regardless of what happened with the budget.
Rep. Joel Guggenmos, R-Riverton, responded to other lawmakers saying their constituents were upset about the cuts.
“I have never talked with my constituents and had them tell me they want the state to spend more money,” said Guggenmos. “In fact it’s the opposite. And they’re tired of big spending.”
Senate Recap
Meanwhile, Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, led a successful charge to replace the JAC's spending plan with a budget draft matching Gov. Mark Gordon's recommendation.
"This amendment, folks, is the BBA — the Beautiful Budget Amendment," Driskill told the chamber. “This takes us back to the governor's rec (recommended), and you know, from my end I'm going to tell you I sat on the ropes as we went through it. The governor handed us a budget that was balanced, that went across the board, and was well thought out.”
Driskill framed the vote as a policy decision about whether Wyoming would "look in a forward light and try to build on what is there, or try to cut in time of wealth."
Supporters of the amendment argued the Appropriations Committee had issued harsh denials or cuts in four key areas: technology funding across state agencies, state employee salaries, the University of Wyoming budget and the Wyoming Business Council.
"The people of Wyoming have spoken," said Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne. "And they said: fund our future. And they said: fund our only state university. They said these cuts feel punitive and retaliatory. That's what my constituents said and that's what I heard."
Nethercott called the governor's recommendation "a conservative budget" and said the amendment "reflects the will of the people and an investment in Wyoming's future."
Driskill told colleagues the amendment addressed roughly $4 million in technology cuts the committee had made across state government, and restored salary increases for state employees that he said had been pegged to pay scales five or six years old.
"I did not, in good faith, be able to look employees in the eye and say, 'We think you should be paid on five-year-ago pay scales,'" Driskill said.
Sen. Gary Crum, R-Laramie, said the amendment "gets us in the right spot" after calling the committee's version cumbersome.
"It restores funding to the University of Wyoming. It corrects the technology issues out there that give us the ability to keep up in technology for safety, security, for efficiencies," Crum said.
Opponents of the amendment argued the full Senate was undermining the deliberative work of a committee that had spent four weeks in December and January scrutinizing agency budgets line by line.
"What we forget to acknowledge is that the budget is decided on jointly between two bodies and they worked really hard for two months trying to make decisions as far as what is best for the state of Wyoming," said Sen. Laura Pearson, R-Kemmerer. "So for this body just to decide a different way, I think it doesn't look good on our body, but it also doesn't look good to the taxpayers who paid for the Joint Appropriations Committee to meet for two months."
Appropriations Chairman Sen. Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, while acknowledging the body's right to reshape the budget, said he would vote no and fight for the committee's positions on specific issues — particularly regarding the Wyoming Business Council, which he has long targeted for cuts.
"I can be accommodating. I'm flexible, but there are certain things that I do not believe in," Salazar said. "I knew from day one that we were going to, that the budget bill was going to be changed. I knew that. The question is how much?"
Sen. Bob Ide, R-Casper, offered a concise dissent, reminding colleagues of the fiscal tradeoff: "When the state spends, they get a larger fraction of the economy and the citizens get a smaller fraction."
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com and David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
