Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"The day Stubby gave up auto body repair……"}]

Darwin 6 2 26

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Darwin: Tuesday, June 2, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The day Stubby gave up auto body repair……

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, June 2, 2026

 The day Stubby gave up auto body repair……

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's general assignment reporter, Clair McFarland.

Clair McFarland

Government & Politics

Politics

counties on Thursday that a 4% cap on yearly increases in residential property taxes is unconstitutional, and the counties shouldn’t let taxpayers have that exemption.

The State Equalization Board will refuse to certify this year’s property tax assessment figures if counties keep that cap on them, the report says.

The board’s two-person majority — Chair Jayne Mockler and Vice-Chair Marty Hardscog — wrote in the Thursday report that the 4% increase cap for residential property taxes has arbitrary impacts across the state. 

It also disproportionately insulates high-end homes, and disfavors homeowners in more sluggish market areas, the report asserts.

But the report’s main point, and conclusion from the past two years’ tax data, is that the 4% cap violates the Wyoming Constitution’s call for equal and uniform property taxes within each class of property.

The board hasn’t yet issued an order requiring Wyoming’s county assessors to rework their pending tax bills without the cap.

But it expects to do so in the coming weeks after working with counties, Mockler told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday phone interview.

“We issued this report today that says if that cap doesn’t come off, Marty and I can’t vote to certify residential property taxes. Because they’re not uniform,” said Mockler. “It’ll be followed with an order ... (and) our goal is ultimately to remove the cap.”  

Mockler noted that the board isn’t targeting the other, narrower exemptions with this report — like the 25% property tax cut passed in 2025 or the long-term homeowner exemption.

More than half of the state’s residential property tax values fall under the 4% increase cap, the report says.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"But We Don’t Get A Tax Free Year"}]

This kind of push from the state board is unprecedented, Converse County Assessor Dixie Huxtable told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.

But Wyomingites shouldn’t expect a tax-free year over the maneuver, she said.

“Everyone’s in agreement there will be residential property taxes for 2026,” she said. “This … is just a step in the process of getting different values the board feels is appropriate.”

The pending mandate leaves Wyoming counties somewhere between following the 4% cap requirement in state law and following another state law that tells assessors to obey the state board, she said.  

“You’re asking us to go against the law? Under the law we have to apply the 4% cap and you’re saying we can’t,” she reflected from the report.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It’s so bizarre it’s funny,” Huxtable added. "}]

She said she was digesting the report Thursday afternoon, and had just been to a phone meeting with the board officials, assessors, and county attorneys.

Two days earlier on Tuesday, Huxtable had just urged the Legislature’s Joint Revenue Committee to approach more changes to the state’s property tax law with caution, because assessors are always trying to keep up with the many changes lawmakers have brought in recent years.

Assessors are at the mercy of state law and are working hard to follow it, she’d said.  

Reflecting on the board’s Thursday report, Huxtable told Cowboy State Daily that assessors are now trying to gain clarification on what to do in the coming weeks.

“We’re on standby,” she said, adding that from her meeting with the board, her impression is, “They’d be tickled pink to go to court” on this issue.

Wyoming Attorney General Keith Kautz said Thursday that he doesn’t know of any litigation on this currently, “but if there is a challenge, we will support what the Legislature did.”

Rep. Barry Crago, R-Buffalo, who has since become a state senator, was the sponsor on the main bill the board’s Thursday report derides as unconstitutional.

Crago did not return a Thursday afternoon voicemail request for comment by publication.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Different Homes, Different Taxes"}]

The board’s report points to inconsistencies across the Wyoming property tax structure.

People who upgrade their homes by changing the footprint of those homes lose the cap exemption to a reset that year, while people who upgrade only the interior do not, says the report.

It says some homes have had their tax bills so thoroughly capped, they’re paying less than half of the state-mandated property tax rate.

“The caps, by design, generate highly disparate tax consequences for 

It accuses the law of discriminating arbitrarily between different homeowners across Wyoming.

“The demarcation between taxpayers receiving a tax windfall, versus those who do not, serves no rational basis,” the document adds.

Rep. Liz Storer, D-Jackson, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that she had voted for the 4% tax cap during the tax hikes of 2024. But she views the law as more of a short-term fix. 

"It was a tourniquet; it was a short-term fix," she said. "Butif you leave the tourniquet on, you damage the body." 

Storer's home region of Teton County accounts for huge property tax revenues in Wyoming. She has tried over the years to get lawmakers to stop applying property tax breaks to people's secondary homes. 

Of the $860.2 million in exemptions the 4% cap is expected to cause this year, Teton County accounts for $507.9 million, says a Department of Revenue memo Storer sent to Cowboy State Daily. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Lawsuit That Wasn’t"}]

The board warned lawmakers before the 4% cap bill’s passage that board members believed it’s unconstitutional.

 “the die was cast,” says the report.

The board examined the residential assessment values and looked for inverted valuations, that is where higher-valued properties were assessed at lower taxable values than other, similarly situated properties.

The board during the 2025 tax calculation process had just two members, Mockler and Hardscog. They voted that year to certify the tax values, but said that those values were probably invalid. Still, they wanted to gather one more year of data to be sure, the report says.

They also planned to release a Nov. 13, 2025, order requiring assessors to stop giving the exemption.

Gov. Mark Gordon’s office asked the board not to issue that order, the report says.

In November and early December, the governor’s office and Wyoming Attorney General’s Office met with Hardscog and Mockler to talk about filing an action asking a court to judge the issue.

The governor’s office and AG’s office agreed the state board should file that court action, the report says.

The litigation was slated to be filed Jan. 20. Gordon’s office asked for multiple delays, at first to communicate the lawsuit with legislative leaders. 

When Gordon’s office asked for another delay two days later, Hardscog and Mockler said they wouldn’t certify the property tax values after the June tax calculation process, “without a working resolution of their constitutional concerns,” says the report.

Property tax chyenne 1 6 11 26

<title>Wyoming Tax Board Says 4% Cap On Property Tax Is Unconstitutional, Won't Accept It | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming’s state-level property tax board told counties on Thursday that a 4% cap on yearly increases in residential property taxes is unconstitutional and it will refuse to certify this year's property tax assessment figures if the cap remains.

Wyoming Tax Board Says 4% Cap On Property Tax Is Unconstitutional, Won't Accept It

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily political columnist, Rod Miller.

Rod Miller

Opinion

CSD Columnists

I returned to the ID ranch where I grew up. My family (the blood) joined me, as did Carbon County Sheriff Alex Bakken (the heat). 

Here’s what went down in a country widely considered to be the original site of the Garden of Eden.

First – why the sheriff? Alex Bakken wears the same badge that my great-grandfather, I.C. Miller wore as territorial sheriff in Carbon County. So I’ve kept an eye on Sheriff Bakken, and I’ve been impressed with how he handles himself wearing that badge. 

I’m sure my patriarch would agree, had they ever met.

I called Alex and asked if he would like to see the ranch that I.C. put together. Alex had bow-hunted in the Seminoe Mountains, but hadn’t seen the rest of the outfit, or the headquarters with the massive 140-year-old stone buildings. He is also an avid history buff and jumped at the chance.

Since my third-born son, Kirk, was visiting from the City of Angels, this would be a great opportunity to gather the clan so they could revisit the place they had spent their childhood years. My former wife, Linda joined us, and had the chance to see the ID again, where she had spent years in the solitude, wind and rattlesnakes, 40 miles from town, raising our sons. 

I owe Linda an un-repayable debt for her maternal excellence. This sojourn was an installment.

I also invited family friend and videographer extraordinaire, Mike Vanata, to join us. I owe Vanata a debt for doing several thousand bucks worth of primo video work for my 2018 run for Congress and, when the campaign ran out of money, accepting my beloved AK-47 as payment. 

Another road trip with Vanata was a side benefit to this particular journey back in time.

My second-born, Isaac had to stay back in Cheyenne to take Pippi the Wonder Dog to the vet for a canine emergency, so he missed out. But Pippi lives! 

Vic, my youngest son, served as Chief of Security for the pilgrimage through Outlaw country, and kept us safe from the brigands that, 150 years earlier, he would have led. 

The youngest Miller, grandson Dayton, came with my eldest son Tommy, to share the driving chores, peel a bronc and catch his first fish. For a 4-year-old, Dayton pulled his weight and then some. 

Rounding out the party of backtrackers were my brother, Mark, and cousin, Bill Shaffer, who grew up with me on the ID. We share indelible memories of that place that cannot be put into words.

We met at Su Casa, in Sinclair (the best Mexican food north of the Nueces River) for lunch, where Vanata proceeded to mortify everyone by ordering a chicken fried steak (but that’s a topic for a future column), and then we drove north on Memory Lane to the ID headquarters. 

Given our statewide drought, I expected to see the countryside clad in a pale beige duster, but she must have known we were coming, because she wore her prettiest green sundress. The ID looks splendid!

Inside the big stone barn, it’s always cool in summer. The heavy door still bears the carved initials of long-dead cowboys and old brands. Outside in the corral, Dayton got his first horseback ride. His mount was a sleek bay mare named Clementine. They bonded in that sacred and mysterious ritual known only to kids and horses.

Sheriff Bakken got a good look at where his predecessor lived, and he seemed to enjoy it.

Then we drove up to the base of Bradley Peak, to the high divide between the Hurt Creek and Deweese Creek drainages, so I could show my kids where I expect them to scatter my ashes at the appropriate time. 

Sure, I had planned earlier for my sons divvy up my cremains and sneak them into the pepper shakers in Taco Johns all over the Big Empty. They all said they’d do it, but the Bradley Peak plan seems a bit healthier all around.

Dayton then caught his first fish, a mini-brookie, in the same place on Hurt Creek that his dad caught his first fish. That seems symmetrical and correct to me. It’s the gold in the brown and gold of Wyoming.

Kirk, a runner, skipped fishing to run five miles back toward headquarters to frolic in the wind-shifting dunes that will, in time, bury my first home.

With these living folks I retraced my steps through the country of my ghosts. The ticks and snakes spared us out of respect. 

The youngest of my bloodline experienced his first horsey ride and first fish. The new sheriff met our old country. 

It was a good day on the backtrail. And I’m tickled to be back in the Cowboy State Daily stable!

Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com

Rod miller headshot scaled

<title>Rod Miller: Backtracking Part Two - Blood and Heat At The ID Ranch | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Columnist Rod Miller writes: "So I took my family (the blood) and Carbon County Sheriff Alex Bakken (the heat), to the old ranch country where I expect my kids to scatter my ashes. Here’s what went down."

Rod Miller: Backtracking Part Two - Blood and Heat At The ID Ranch

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Cheyenne railfan and sculptor Carey Moose Hosterman wasn’t planning to see a rocket train. 

He was just driving home from Home Depot with a bag of sculpting tools last week when a strange-looking locomotive rolled out of Cheyenne’s historic depot onto the main line.

He wasn’t sure at the time exactly what he was seeing, but he didn’t hesitate to hit his blinker and pull over to watch it go by.

“I was like, ‘Wow, that is a really cool-looking car or engine on that train there,’” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s got an American flag on it and it looks really different.”

Only later would he learn that No. 4547 was passing through Wyoming on June 2 on its first mission hauling the final solid rocket booster segments for NASA’s Artemis III rocket to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In late 2027, four members of the crew for Artemis III will launch aboard an Orion spacecraft. 

It's a demonstration flight in a low Earth orbit that will test rendezvous and docking operations between Orion and test versions of the Human Landing System being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX.

The Artemis IV will be the first crewed lunar landing mission of the Artemis program, scheduled for 2028.

Hosterman has spent years watching all kinds of trains roll through Cheyenne. 

He’s seen trains with tanks and armor, and wind turbine blades so long they need two flat cars just to make the curves. 

A rocket train, though, was a first, and it was rolling through Cheyenne without fanfare or warning.

The lead engine, he would later learn, was Union Pacific No. 4547, a commemorative locomotive that celebrates President Donald Trump, painted with a fluttering American flag all along its length. 

Behind it was the equally colorful No. 1616, a red locomotive that honors Abraham Lincoln for signing the Pacific Railway Act in 1862.

Then came the cars that really puzzled Hosterman — a square, yellow car surrounded by rings of white pipes, followed by a chain of white round cars alternating with square yellow ones.

“They were just these weird-looking, covered capsule-looking things,” Hosterman said. “And my wife and I have been so excited with the Big Boy train, we really pay attention to what’s going around on the tracks. 

"So we got to talking about that train, too, and wondering what was in it.”

They wouldn’t solve the mystery until the next day, when they saw a news story about segments of Artemis III being delivered to Florida. 

That’s when the strange white capsules and square yellow cars suddenly made sense.

“I wish now I would have taken a picture,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “From now on, when the senses are going off, ‘Hey, you know, this is kind of cool. We should snap a picture.’”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"First Steps To The Moon"}]

The rocket train carried the final eight of Northrop Grumman’s twin solid rocket-booster motor segments, manufactured in Utah. The parts will be joined to previously delivered segments shipped in April. 

The solid rocket boosters will generate 7.2 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, according to Northrop, and will be among the first pieces of hardware assembled on the mobile launch platform.

Artemis III is the third in a series of missions aiming to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. 

It’s one of several steps along the way to eventually establishing a permanent base on the moon and then sending astronauts to Mars. 

Artemis III builds on the success of the prior Artemis II mission in April, which sent four astronauts on a 10-day flyby of the moon. 

The overall mission involved testing NASA’s Orion spacecraft for maneuverability, including docking with a lunar lander. 

Wyoming manufacturer L&H Industrial in Gillette had a hand in 

helping build mission-critical hardware for Artemis II

That included upgrades to the huge crawler transporter that takes rockets to the launching pad, traveling at 1 mph. 

It also included flame detector plates, which help to deflect the searing heat caused by 9 million pounds of thrust that comes out of a rocket all at once during launch.

For those who missed Artemis III’s passage through Wyoming, retired railroad man Stan Blake said rocket parts have passed through Wyoming before, and will likely do so again for future Artemis missions.

Wyoming has some advantages when it comes to hauling such things, thanks to its many wide open spaces. 

Many times for extra-wide loads, trains will stop at a certain point on the rail line where things are wider, allowing that extra wide load to pass by without delay.

“I’m sure they are very heavy,” Blake said. “Instead of the normal two axles under each end of the railroad car, they might have three, maybe four axles, kind of like when you see a semi hauling something heavy. They have extra sets of axles and tires.”

Military tanks, meanwhile, typically travel in a special car built for heavier loads.

“There are probably also armed guards in a caboose or in the locomotive,” Blake added. “They do that when they haul nuclear waste. Usually, they’ll have a caboose with armed guards.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Front-Row Seat To History"}]

Cheyenne is an essential hub for the United States, Hosterman said. That has him constantly looking anytime he passes by the depot, to see if something cool is headed through Wyoming.

“That makes Cheyenne unique, because a whole lot of new things are coming through the tracks that you just don’t know what they are,” he said. “Sometimes you get to see some neat rail cars with military stuff on it.”

As a sculptor, Hosterman appreciates the odd forms that sometimes pass by. He also likes some of the artwork painted on the train cars.

“I’m an artist, so I do kind of admire some of the artwork that goes by,” he said. “Some of it is pretty good, actually.”

After seeing a rocket train roll through Cheyenne, it’s one more reason to keep looking at what’s passing through the depot. 

You just never know when the next quiet train rolling through town will be another piece of history.

Artemis III locomotive Artemis II Is final rocket booster segments traveled through Wyoming recently on their way to Kennedy Space Center 6 11 26

<title>New Trump Locomotive No. 4547 Rolls Through Wyoming Carrying Artemis III Rocket | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The first job for Union Pacific’s new Trump-themed locomotive No. 4547 took it through Wyoming carrying the Artemis III rocket. Nobody except railroad watchers noticed. “They were just these weird-looking, covered capsule-looking things,” one said.

New Trump Locomotive No. 4547 Rolls Through Wyoming Carrying Artemis III Rocket

Business & Tourism

Business

CHEYENNE — There was a seismic shift months ago behind the scenes with Wyoming’s largest data center development, Project Jade. 

Crusoe, the company that was constructing the buildings for the massive 2.7-gigawatt data center, packed up its stuff and left.

The exit happened quickly and quietly, without the fanfare of press releases and company statements that had preceded the project, which at buildout would use nearly triple the power consumption of the entire state of Wyoming. 

Crusoe’s about face was so quiet, in fact, that few people outside the project even realized anything had happened at all.

That was until Tuesday, when the company was quoted in passing in a Bloomberg article saying that its data center client had asked Crusoe to pause construction of Project Jade, even as the company announced another 5 gigawatts worth of data center infrastructure for Crusoe Cloud. 

Crusoe’s statement made it seem as though Project Jade itself might be on hold or looking for a new partner, but nothing could be further from reality, officials for partner Tallgrass Energy told Cowboy State Daily on background. 

Work on Project Jade never stopped — not even for a minute — following Crusoe’s exit roughly two months ago, Cowboy State Daily was told Wednesday morning. 

Tallgrass officials are now working directly with the data center client and have been “full steam ahead” since Crusoe’s exit.

Black Hills Corp., the parent company of Black Hills Energy, meanwhile released a statement to the same effect, saying that the data center project has not been on pause.

“We remain committed to supporting the project’s data center customer and delivering the infrastructure necessary to meet their long-term energy needs,” President and CEO Linn Evans said. “The project has not been paused and continues to represent a significant opportunity for the company. Our efforts remain fully directed toward successfully delivering the project.”

Black Hills Corp’s statement added that its Wyoming subsidiary, Black Hills Energy, agreed in April to procure long lead-time generation equipment with the prospective customer to support the project, which will be served under Wyoming’s large-load tariff. 

“The customer has provided over $200 million in refundable contributions in aid of construction to date in support of milestone payments to secure generation equipment,” the statement says. “Additionally, the company executed a substation agreement with the large-load customer, and filed a CPCN (Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity) for a substation to support the project in January 2026.”

Project Jade, located in the Switchgrass Industrial Park along Highway 85 south of Cheyenne, is the largest data center yet announced in Wyoming and has received widespread attention because of that. 

Initially, the data center was announced as a 1.8-gigawatt facility. Later, during a Laramie County Commission meeting, company officials said the 

 — almost three times what the entire state of Wyoming uses when it comes to power. 

The facility can ultimately scale to 10 gigawatts of capacity.

Project Jade has always planned to build its own power, which company officials said avoids burdening the local power grid. It will also use a closed-loop system to cool its servers to minimize water use.

The closed-loop system will take an initial 20 households worth of water to fill, company officials have told Laramie County commissioners, and will come from aquifers far below those that supply water to residents of Laramie County and Cheyenne. 

Annual water use will be around three households, once the closed-loop system is filled.

Project plans show five buildings of up to 800,000 square feet. These will have their own onsite wastewater treatment and septic systems.

The company’s efforts to mitigate impact to the community do not stop at water and power. It also included building new roads into its facility to relieve pressure on existing routes, as well as a $2.9 million commitment to help the city of Cheyenne build affordable housing.

The company doesn’t plan to use man camps to house construction workers. Instead, it plans to use a range of local housing, including long- and short-term rentals, hotels and motels, RV accommodations, and other solutions. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Three Projects In One"}]

What the public has been calling Project Jade has actually always been three distinct but intertwined projects, Tallgrass officials said.

There was the power plant itself, a natural-gas-fired facility that includes large turbine generators and fuel-cell systems, which is what Tallgrass is developing. 

That is now being referred to by the company as the Cheyenne Power Hub. 

There are the data center buildings, which are essentially warehouse-like shells that will one day hold the racks of computing power for the unnamed data center client. 

That was in Crusoe’s court as the data center client who will eventually use all the computing capacity that’s built out in the data center.

Crusoe’s exit, which happened early this year, changes just one thing in all of that, Tallgrass officials said — the eventual sign on the buildings.

Everything else has stayed functionally the same, including the client. 

Dirt work at the site has already begun, Tallgrass officials say, leading up to construction of the power plant itself, which is the longest lead-time item. 

Work on the power generators is expected to ramp up this summer and will be brought on in phases. The first available phase is expected to begin operating sometime in 2027.

Service to the data center client is targeted for early 2028, after which the project is expected to create more than 100 permanent jobs.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Who Is Tallgrass"}]

Tallgrass has long operated large-scale, multi-commodity infrastructure, including more than 10,000 miles of pipeline and energy-related assets across 14 states.

The company has been in Wyoming for the past 10 years, where it has its third largest employee base at more than 200 existing employees. It operates more than 3,000 miles of natural gas, crude oil, water, and carbon dioxide pipelines.

Some of its infrastructure includes carbon dioxide wells for carbon capture, including some assets that are in the vicinity of Project Jade. The carbon capture capabilities have been touted as a vital element of building out the data center.

In the last three years, Tallgrass has invested almost a billion dollars into Wyoming’s economy. Its investment on Project Jade dwarfs that at $7 billion.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Crusoe Still Busy"}]

No one is saying publicly why Crusoe left the project, or whether the data center client is the one who asked them to leave.

Crusoe did not respond to Cowboy State Daily inquiries about its exit, and Tallgrass officials said they learned of Crusoe’s public statements the same way everyone else did — by reading about it in Bloomberg’s article.

While the reasons Crusoe exited the project remain unclear, one thing that isn’t unclear is just how busy Crusoe is right now.

Even after stepping away from Project Jade, Crusoe has more than 40 gigawatts worth of projects either in its total development pipeline or under active negotiation, according to its website. 

Its Bloomberg comments, meanwhile, came with an announcement of 5 more gigawatts for the Crusoe Cloud.

The company is widely expected by industry experts to go public and has been actively working on a pre-IPO funding round north of $10 billion.

Carson Kearl, a data center analyst for energy data analyst Enverus, said more dance steps are ahead for the data center space.

“There are a bunch of these Crusoe-like developers across the Lower 48 with announced projects of significant scale and capacity,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I would say a majority of them do not have a publicly disclosed tenant or an off taker. 

"Our view is the reason they don’t have those disclosed is because they don’t have them, period.”

Kearl has been tracking data center capacity in various stages of discussion across the nation and said he expects as much as 80% to 85% of the projects to get canceled purely as a function of "supply chain constraints on the data center side of things, like how many chips are actually available between now and about 2030.”

Wyoming, as a state with lots of wide-open space and abundant energy, meanwhile, is well-positioned, to capture the real projects, Kearl added. 

In the race to build out data centers and capture market share first, Wyoming offers exactly what these companies want. 

Crusoe, a founding partner in the huge 2.7-gigawatt Project Jade data center near Cheyenne, quietly pulled out months ago. That hasn’t slowed the project, which is going “full steam ahead,” remaining partner Tallgrass Energy told Cowboy State Daily.

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, June 2, 2026

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