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I covered the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees for six years in the 1990s, through turbulent times that included academic and athletic program eliminations, proposed facility closures and controversies over academic freedom. Those challenges of yesteryear all pale compared to the recent bungled firing of UW President Laurie Nichols. The board chose not to renew the three-year contract of Nichols, who took the job in the wake of turmoil. The South Dakota native came to UW when the institution was facing a serious financial crisis. She...
A lot of blood, sweat and years went into the fight to remove state sales taxes from groceries in Wyoming. It finally happened in 2006. Former State Rep. Ann Robinson (D-Casper) spent eight years bringing bill after bill to the Wyoming House before finally seeing the food tax exemption pass as a state budget amendment. This session, though, the exemption faces its first serious threat in 13 years, and she’s not happy about it. “It’s a bad idea,” she said, correctly in my view. “It doesn’t speak well of the Legislature that they would even...
Sometimes a politician is fortunate enough to hold the right office at the time when their service is needed the most. Such is the case with Rep. Steve Harshman, R-Casper, the outgoing and incoming House speaker. Traditionally, the leader of the House serves one two-year term and then retires from politics altogether or takes a break before running for Senate. But a majority of Harshman’s Republican colleagues were savvy enough to realize a week ago that it would be for the good of the chamber, and the state, for him to remain the speaker. H...
Voters in three conservative Western states overruled their elected officials in the midterm elections and expanded Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of low-income people via ballot initiatives. “The GOP has been bashing the [Affordable Care Act] for nearly a decade, and voters in the reddest states in the country just rejected that message,” Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project, told ABC News. “It’s a repudiation and a tectonic shift in health care in this country.” It’s a fair assessment of what happened, b...
Don’t look now, but Wyoming just dodged a fiscal bullet. The smart thing to do would be to count ourselves lucky, then get out of the line of fire before the next round comes flying down range. But if history is any guide, I expect our Legislature will keep the state right where it is. Wyoming state government has once again been delivered from a huge budget deficit, this time by a combination of unexpectedly higher oil prices and investment returns. That’s obviously good news, but in the long-term it will likely postpone (again) a serious rev...
Every year brings new attacks on the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered in Wyoming. I’m sick and tired of it. Wyoming claims it’s the “Equality State,” a place where people value individualism and respect the rights of others to live their lives as they please, unencumbered by the state or by their neighbors. I’d love to live in that Wyoming, but it doesn’t exist. I live in a state where voters keep re-electing legislators who try to pass bills that curtail the rights of the LGBTQ population. It’s a state where lawmake...
When Republican state legislators caucus, they convene the numbers and the power to determine Wyoming law, and they do so behind closed doors. That is a choice. They could, if they wanted, allow the public to observe the deliberations that de facto determine the public’s business. But, in my 40-year career as a Wyoming journalist, I can’t recall a single instance of them opting to caucus anywhere other than the proverbial smoke-filled backroom. And their penchant for privacy is getting worse. I’m probably the outsider who has come the close... 
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A few days after we moved to Casper from Cheyenne in 1999, my 12-year-old son asked me something I’d been wondering myself: “Dad, where are all the black people?” Wyoming’s capital city can’t be described as even remotely diverse, with an African-American population of about 3.6 percent. But it still tops Casper, which can only claim a 1.9 percent black citizenry, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. African Americans make up less than 1 percent of the entire state’s population, helping make Wyoming the ninth whitest state in the nation....
Watching state legislators debate Medicaid expansion during the budget session was like seeing a driver head full-speed toward a cliff and refuse to hit the brakes. The fully anticipated plunge adds to the financial pressures faced by many Wyoming hospitals and played a role in Wyoming Medical Center laying off 58 employees in Casper last week. During the past four years literally everyone who testified before the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee told the panel what would happen if lawmakers did not expand Medicaid. If they...
