Cheyenne Roundup: Turning bills on a dime

With its newfound power, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus set out to pass its top five priorities within the first 10 days of the legislative session. WyoFile and Wyoming Public Radio break it down.

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With its newfound power, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus set out to pass its top five priorities within the first 10 days of the legislative session. The group says it hit the mark within eight days. WyoFile and Wyoming Public Radio break down what the caucus pushed through the House and how a couple of those bills veered away from the Freedom Caucus’ original aims.

Maggie Mullen: This the Cheyenne Roundup, a weekly look at Wyoming’s legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. I’m Maggie Mullen, WyoFile’s state government and politics reporter, and with me is Jordan Uplinger, Wyoming Public Radio’s digital statehouse reporter.

Jordan Uplinger: Glad to be back Maggie. We’re recording from the media room in the basement of the Capitol at 9 on Friday (Jan. 24) morning. Obviously, things might have moved around by the time you’re hearing this.

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MM: Things have been moving fast around here. The Freedom Caucus has been on a self-imposed deadline to accomplish its Five and Dime Plan, passing five key bills through the House in the first 10 days of the session. On Thursday, they said they’d done it in just eight days.

JU: To be clear, passing out of one chamber doesn’t make these bills a done deal. If legislation starts in the House, it then has to go through the same process in the Senate. That means getting another committee approval and passing three readings on the floor.

MM: Jordan, how about you remind us what’s in the Five and Dime Plan.

JU: Sure, so about two weeks back, the Freedom Caucus held a press conference where they laid out their five priorities – priorities the caucus says their voters voiced the most support for:

MM: Some of these bills had an easier time than others getting through the House.

JU: Let’s start with a pair of voting bills that sailed through committee hearings and House debates. These are the proof of residency and citizenship bills. They both came from Rep. John Bear (R-Gillette), former chair of the Freedom Caucus.

MM: Those have been in the works for a while. I’ve followed them previously. This session, Andrew Graham, my coworker at WyoFile, has been keeping an eye on them. He reported there was sparse lawmaker discussion, no changes and little engagement with public commenters. The House committee that handles election law easily passed these bills.

Secretary of State Chuck Gray has been pushing to establish a 30-day residency requirement for voting in Wyoming, and require proof of that residency and U.S. citizenship when registering to vote here. There isn’t evidence that Wyoming has a widespread problem with out-of-state residents or non-U.S. citizens voting,

JU: Former Sublette County Clerk Mary Lankford, who represents the County Clerks Association of Wyoming, told the committee that her organization had polled the state’s 23 county election clerks.

Mary Lankford: Statewide, there were only five people that were turned away as non-citizens that were prevented from voting in the general election, so those are the numbers we’re dealing with.

MM: For context, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that tracks cases of voter fraud, has identified four convictions for voter fraud in Wyoming in the last 40 years.

JU: That said, voting restrictions have been a major priority for the Freedom Caucus and other hard-line Republicans across the country.

A kind of related measure is a bill that would allow Wyoming to invalidate any form of driver’s license if the driver is confirmed to be not legally allowed in the U.S. The bill was debated contentiously. Lawmakers traded arguments on the purpose, function and the constitutionality of the bill.

The bill’s sponsor [Rep. Pepper Ottman (R-Riverton)] argued that any effort to achieve immigration accountability is worth it. But opponents questioned how the bill might affect truckers and how enforcement would work. And some lawmakers expressed confusion about what the bill is trying to achieve.

MM: The Freedom Caucus is framing this bill as resisting sanctuary states. It goes hand-in-hand with some of the executive orders coming down from Trump this week.

JU: Let’s move on to property taxes. When the Freedom Caucus first dropped its Five and Dime Plan, it said it wanted to “provide a 25% property tax cut to residential property owners with a backfill to local governments.” Lawmakers were close to doing this last year, but Gov. Mark Gordon vetoed it.

This year, there are a handful of similar bills trying again. One making progress is House Bill 169 that would cut residential property taxes by 50% for the first million of a home’s fair market value. It outlines how the state would backfill half of the tax revenue towns and counties would stand to lose. The bill, if passed, is expected to generate almost $200 million less revenue for the state. Importantly, it would only last two years. This House bill is sponsored by Rep. Tony Locke of Casper, who is aligned with the Freedom Caucus.

MM: Just to point out, this is not exactly what the caucus said it was going to do when it came to property taxes. The version the caucus initially earmarked is over in the Senate [SF 69]. But it’s moving more slowly and with more pushback. The Senate Revenue Committee passed the bill but amended it Monday to cut the section that would reimburse local governments for the revenue loss.

JU: You’ll hear lawmakers call that kind of reimbursement a backfill. Senate leadership told reporters last week that they do not support a backfill, because the goal overall is to cut taxes. Pushback happened with the House bill [169] too, but those efforts failed.

MM: In all of these property tax debates, backfill has become a sticking point for lawmakers. That’s because property taxes fund local governments — we’re talking roads, hospitals, schools, law enforcement — those kinds of basic services.

Some lawmakers continue to perpetuate the misconception that those tax dollars go to the state. They do not. Also worth mentioning that local governments have very limited ability to generate their own revenue. You can imagine that counties and municipalities get a little nervous when lawmakers are talking about cutting off one of their few revenue streams.

Another thing property taxes support are Wyoming’s community colleges. Erin Taylor, executive director for the Wyoming Association of Community College Trustees, testified that property tax reductions could mean an increase in the tuition and fees students have to pay.

Erin Taylor: So what does that mean, is that onus increases for those people that we’re really trying to help and who are supporting our workforce.

JU: Speaking of higher education, let’s move to a bill to ban DEI. Last spring, lawmakers axed a block grant to the University of Wyoming that funded its Office of DEI. That closed down last summer. Now, this bill they’re considering would build on that.

It would prohibit all government entities, from state all the way down to towns and counties, and schools from K-12 through community colleges and UW from having programs or policies that proponents of the bill say allow for classifying people based on race, sex, etc. It’s sponsored by current Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody). She says it restores the state to a “colorblind approach.”

MM: There’s some parallels at the federal level. On his first day in office, Pres. Donald Trump wrote an executive order along similar lines, directing the federal executive branch to eliminate DEI programs and jobs.

Donald Trump: My administration has taken action to abolish all discriminatory diversity equity and inclusion nonsense and these are policies that were absolute nonsense throughout the government and the

private sector. With the recent yet somewhat unexpected great Supreme Court decision just made, America will once again become a merit-based

country. You have to hear that word – merit-based country.

JU: Both Trump and the Wyoming Freedom Caucus talk about fighting wokeness, and that agenda is certainly at play in the final bill in the Five and Dime Plan. The bill to ban ESG investments. It’s a strategy to invest in alignment with certain values, for example curbing climate change by investing in renewable energy. But the Freedom Caucus sees ESG as a threat to Wyoming’s fossil fuel industry, hence the proposed ban.

MM: This bill saw a lot of debate and even pushback from the state’s money managers. Once again, I’ll lean on reporting from my fellow WyoFile reporter Andrew Graham. He’s been following the anti-ESG bill closely.

Blocking ESG investments already had broad support in the Capitol and is already reflected in state policies. But House Bill 80 wanted to give that approach some teeth, with hefty penalties for any firm caught putting the state’s money into an investment vehicle with environmental, social or governance goals.

State Treasurer Curt Meier and officials with the Wyoming Retirement System warned lawmakers that penalties would drive the best financial firms to drop the state as a client. Patrick Fleming is the chief investment officer for the state.

Patrick Fleming: You’re looking at about $5 billion loss in income over the next three years. To put that in perspective … our whole revenue for the state over the next three years is $367 million.

MM: The penalty led to fierce debate on the House floor. Some lawmakers reported a flood of messages from retired state employees who were really freaked out about eroded retirement funds and curtailed pension checks. On Thursday, we saw lawmakers amend the bill to drop the penalty before passing it on third reading.

Now, some say all that back and forth ended up defanging the bill and that without the penalties, it doesn’t look much different from the state’s current investment policies.

JU: So just to recap: As of Thursday night, the Freedom Caucus got all five priorities out of one chamber and onto the next.

MM: The Five and Dime Plan has gotten a lot of attention, but there’s an awful lot happening at the Capitol. As of Friday morning, over 400 bills have been entered into the WYO-LEDGE system.

Jordan: Lawmakers say they’ve set a record for House bills. Which means we’ve got our work cut out for us. Maggie, what’s on your radar?

MM: So I spent most of this week sitting in on the Joint Appropriations Committee as they marked up the budget book and prepared a budget. Altogether, that committee cut about $195 million out of what was proposed by the governor.

Next week I’m going to be digging into what exactly those cuts mean, so I’ll be preparing for that and, of course, keeping an eye on both chambers to see how things are moving along.

JU: I’m looking at House Bill 116 as it moves through the Senate. That’s the invalidation of driver’s licenses issued to undocumented immigrants. I’m curious to see if debate will be as fierce in a chamber where the Freedom Caucus doesn’t have that majority support, and really how that will affect all of their House bills as they begin to move through the Senate.

MM: Thanks for listening to the Cheyenne Roundup, your weekly look at what lawmakers are up to during the 2025 legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. New episodes drop every Friday throughout the session.

Editing and producing by Tennessee Watson and Nicky Ouellet. Follow our ongoing legislative coverage at wyomingpublicmedia.org and WyoFile.com. And thanks again for listening.

This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.

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