It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Tuesday, September 15th. I’m Mac Watson.
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The women suing Kappa Kappa Gamma for inducting a transgender member went back to court Monday, arguing the sorority betrayed them. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the sorority says its council can interpret the bylaws, regardless of what 'woman' meant historically.
“At one point, one of the judges got into a back and forth with the sorority's attorney, and he was saying, ‘Okay, so the sorority's council members can interpret terms that are in the bylaws.’ They have that authority. And this was a point that the attorney for the sorority really hammered, like, ‘Yes, they're just interpreting the word 'woman.’ It wasn't defined in the bylaws, and the judge comes back and says, ‘But you're arguing for an interpretation that could include biological males.’ The attorney countered, saying, ‘We're arguing for an interpretation that includes people born male that identify as female, and so they came to kind of an impasse that really circled around the definition of the word woman.’”
Kappa Kappa Gamma’s attorney Natalie McLaughlin maintained that the case revolves around a private organization’s ability to govern itself, and she pointed to Ohio laws’ deference toward governors of private groups. Kappa is incorporated in Ohio.
Read the full story HERE.
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Pavillion 17-year-old Elizabeth "Lizzy" Barrett has been missing for a week since climbing out her bedroom window the night of Sept. 8th. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports she took some clothes and a backpack, but left her active cellphone.
“Although under sheriff Mike Hutchinson said it's always dangerous when a juvenile is somewhere that they don't know. At this point, it's been a week since she's been gone. Barrett is five foot four inches tall. She's about 135 pounds. She was last seen wearing jeans and a hoodie. She has brown hair and brown eyes. If anyone knows about her whereabouts, please contact the Fremont County Sheriff's Office or the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations.”
Lizzie’s father, Charles “CJ” Barrett, tells Cowboy State Daily she has never done anything like this before.
Read the full story HERE.
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Yellowstone National Park's staff recovered more than 20,000 pieces of trash from thermal basins this summer. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that among the items were AirPods, Polaroid pictures, a single snowshoe, and over 280 hats that will be donated to local organizations.
“Obviously nobody wants to see a bunch of trash on Yellowstone's thermal basins, but you can't go out and retrieve your items yourself because you could cause irreparable damage. So the geology folks out there, while they're monitoring the thermal basins, they go out and collect the hair scrunchies and the Invisalign retainers and the hats and the Lego stormtroopers and the Uno cards and the Pokemon cards and all the other myriad of things that end up on the thermal basins. And just while people are listening, if you do drop something out there, don't go out to get it. Report it to a ranger, and they'll handle it. If it's something that's valuable, that's your loss, unfortunately.”
And the strangest items? According to Yellowstone staff, their picks were Polaroid pictures of people posing next to Yellowstone's thermal features and a two-inch copy of The Vampire Diaries.
Read the full story HERE.
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Monday’s blockbuster EPA move to repeal most of the Biden-era limits on power plant emissions removes a federal mandate that impacted coal production in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Emma Jane Jackson reports that EPA regional administrator Cyrus Western says, “The war on coal is over.”
“What this does is it repeals the bulk of the Biden administration's 2024 carbon pollution standards, including requirements that coal plants install carbon capture technology and that gas and oil plants meet new emission limits. The executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association called this a return to sanity and says it's a really positive step for coal production in the state, which he said is going to be an essential part of meeting rising electricity demands as technology like data centers and artificial intelligence continues to develop.”
The agency estimates the repeal will save the power sector billions of dollars in compliance costs through 2047.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily News continues now….
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Former Game and Fish commissioner Mike Schmid said the organization's looming financial crisis could be because of unnecessary spending and he's skeptical of a trust fund. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports Schmid says he doesn’t understand why they are spending so much on buildings.
“From his perspective, Game and Fish kind of dug their own hole by doing things like building really big new expensive office complexes in places like Laramie. As far as the trust fund? He said it might work, but he's also highly skeptical because depending on who puts money into that trust fund, is some gonna somebody gonna have some kind of hold over Game and Fish? But Mike, kind of being who Mike is, said it out loud today. That hey, if an NGO, throws money in this account, how do you prevent that from saying, ‘well, we gave you money.’”
Schmid said when he served on the commission he was baffled by the amount of money spent on office buildings, employee housing, and other such projects.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Campbell County woman accused of attaching signs to a utility pole on her property — including one stating “Campbell County Sheriff’s Office is Lazy" — faces a rarely-prosecuted charge. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports “I haven’t seen that one ever,” said a retired law officer.
“Both the Campbell County Sheriff's Office and a retired career police officer told me that hey, that's not the case. In this case, they didn't go looking for it. There was a reporting party. Somebody reported and said, ‘Hey, I saw them putting it on hold.’ So they had to respond to somebody reporting something, and that they didn't, at least according to that, they would make a lot of attempts to reach the person to talk to her. Never got a call back or anything. Went over to the house, wasn't able to get to the house to try to talk to her.”
Bethany Hodges faces a single misdemeanor charge of affixing posters to telephone/utility poles for allegedly illegally putting up a number of signs critical of the local sheriff’s office.
Read the full story HERE.
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A former Department of Defense insider who wrote a book calling for government transparency about UFOs is suing his Buffalo, Wyoming, business partner. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that Luis “Lue” Elizondo accuses his partner of cheating and trying to threaten him out of their vintage military-themed bar.
“Things unraveled pretty quickly. Elizondo is, you know, he's alleging that Alder was trying to transfer money out and kind of keeping Elizondo in the dark and maybe threatening him to oust him out of the business. UFO whistleblowers don't always have gravitas, but this one does. As a former Department of Defense staffer, a testifier before Congress and a best-selling author urging transparency in this space.”
Elizondo’s book, “Imminent: Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs,” hit the New York Times bestseller list. He’s become a frequent public speaker and a witness before Congress.
Read the full story HERE.
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Fans of the famous Yellowstone grizzly Snow gave her a motorcade escort Sunday to save her from being hit on a highway on the park's east side. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports that Snow ambled behind and in front of flashing hazard lights for roughly a mile before heading into the woods.
“She's kind of the bear in Yellowstone, and she on Sunday night, last night after dark, she started walking down the highway, and some people took it upon themselves to kind of form an escort for one. One photographer put her car in front of snow with the hazard lights on. Another guy put his truck behind snow with the hazard lights on, and so snow kind of got this motorcade escort up this really windy section of highway, in the dark on a moonless night, kind of for her safety, and that's no small thing because you know we've seen a lot of wildlife get struck and hit and killed by vehicles.”
Snow eventually peeled off nonchalantly and safely headed into the trees.
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.
