Sorted by date Results 351 - 375 of 526
CHEYENNE — With money expected to run out by next summer for the state’s emergency communications system, known as WyoLink, lawmakers discussed potential ways to fund the radio system during a committee meeting Tuesday. First established in 2005, WyoLink connects more than 500 local agencies via communications towers, allowing public safety officials to coordinate rescue missions and other emergency responses across the rural landscape of Wyoming. However, with its funding largely coming from local governments’ share of mineral royalties, its c...
CHEYENNE — U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., was among a handful of GOP senators who met at the White House on Thursday to discuss President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, and he was encouraged that the president could be willing to scale down his spending package. “Today’s meeting was a positive step forward,” Barrasso said in a statement to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle late Thursday. “The president understands Senate Republicans will not support tax increases or hundreds of billions of dollars for the Green New Deal, envir...
CASPER — The Eastern Shoshone General Council met Saturday at Rocky Mountain Hall in Fort Washakie to vote on legalizing medical marijuana on the Wind River Reservation but did not meet quorum. Still, several resolutions were passed — resolutions are law on the reservation — including the authority to move forward with a medical marijuana commission to regulate, oversee and operate tribal-owned cultivation and extraction facilities for cannabis-related products under the Fort Bridger Treaties of 1863 and 1868. Meanwhile the Northern Arapaho Tri...
Within minutes of Wednesday’s vote to oust Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her House Republican Conference leadership position, a handful of her Republican colleagues, including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Ken Buck of Colorado — released statements supportive of Cheney. Others, like disgraced New York Republican Congressman Tom Reed, expressed dismay over the vote and what it stood for. Namely, the party’s unwavering loyalty to Trump, and general concern of the direction of the Republican Party, which demoted Cheney for her criti...
CHEYENNE — With Wyoming facing an annual funding shortfall worth roughly $300 million for its K-12 education system, lawmakers on the Joint Revenue Committee spent much of their meeting Monday reviewing how the state pays for its services, as well as how its economic lynchpins have changed over the past decade. Wyoming, which has long relied on coal, oil and natural gas industries to pay the lion’s share of taxes in the state, has seen a substantial decline in revenues over the last decade. From the 2013-14 biennium to the 2017-18 bie...
GILLETTE — A Campbell County High School graduate and U.S. Army veteran is running for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House of Representatives seat in 2022. Denton Knapp, a 1983 CCHS grad who served for 30 years in the U.S. Army, has announced that he will challenge Republican Rep. Liz Cheney. Knapp, who now lives in California but is moving back to Gillette, said he’s wanted to go into public service since high school and that “now is a good time to do it.” Knapp joins other Republicans in state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, state Rep. Chuck Gray, Bryan Kel...
CASPER — Rep. Liz Cheney and President Donald Trump’s feud continued Monday, with Wyoming’s lone congresswoman pushing back on Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. Monday saw three public exchanges between Cheney and the former president. Trump issued a statement Monday morning that read, “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” Around an hour later, Rep. Liz Cheney responded. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it...
Hunters shot at least 874 greater sage grouse hens in Wyoming last year, prompting a state grouse team member to question the wisdom of allowing a hunt of the imperiled species. The state’s Sage Grouse Implementation Team meets Wednesday to address Brian Rutledge’s concerns. Rutledge is director of the National Audubon Society’s Sagebrush Ecosystem Initiative and a SGIT member. His question looms as greater sage grouse numbers are down an estimated 81% nationwide in the last 53 years. “What I’m asking for is a sit-down,” Rutledge said. “I wa...
The historic revenue crisis facing Wyoming’s state, county and municipal governments is threatening to claim yet another casualty: universally available ambulance service. The state-wide problem is perhaps most acute in Fremont County, where a five-year-old cost-saving plan has unraveled, leaving the nearly Vermont-sized region without a single outfit interested in providing service beyond June. Amid an economic downturn and significant budget cuts, Fremont County Commissioners opted to privatize the county’s ambulance service in March 201...
POWELL — After years of diligently manning aquatic invasive species checkpoints with trained inspectors, testing water systems and preparing for the worst, invasive zebra mussels were delivered to Wyoming via first class mail. For more than a decade, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department has been actively planning and gearing up to keep damaging invasive species of mussels out of the state. It was once one of six states in the lower 48 proud to be mussel-free. That is, until this spring. Invasive zebra mussels were found in aquarium moss purchas...
RIVERTON — A woman accused of killing her husband with a knife in their Pavillion home on Christmas Eve has asked to have her confession removed from trial evidence. Through her attorney, Bennilee Strock argued Tuesday that she had asked for a lawyer prior to her confession but didn’t get one. According to arguments made during a Tuesday suppression hearing in Fremont County District Court, the following discussion occurred between Strock and Fremont County Sheriff’s Office detective Anthony Armstrong after the latter allowed her to revie...
PINEDALE — Community members spoke out at its April meeting against the Sublette County School District No. 1 Board of Trustees’ March 11 vote to defy state public health orders mandating masks in schools when social distancing is not possible. The trustees voted 4-2 to pass a motion in March eliminating school SMART Start Plans and replacing them with the minimum guidelines set out by the state. The motion made an exception for public health orders on masks in schools and lifted those requirements for students and staff in the district. Gov...
SHERIDAN — A Wyoming Retirement System plan currently serving 273 retirees and their beneficiaries, including 25 from Sheridan, will likely be exhausted sometime in 2026, according to the Wyoming Retirement System. A fix is still possible, according to the city of Sheridan’s Human Resources Manager Heather Doke, but it will require the state and contributing cities and counties to provide millions of dollars in funding over the next 15 to 20 years. Doke said the city is willing to pay that price to keep its commitment to the city’s employees an...
The Wyoming Legislature entered the 2021 legislative session with a lofty agenda to cut education spending, stall revenue declines and guide a Wyoming economy battered by COVID-19 to a sustainable future. But in one of the longest legislative sessions in history, lawmakers accomplished few of those goals. While ratifying significant cuts to government previously proposed by Gov. Mark Gordon, they killed numerous proposals to raise revenues to offset those cuts. And with education funding a top priority, an education funding reform bill died on...
CHEYENNE — During the final days of the 2021 legislative session, Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow expressed both praise for an imminent K-12 school funding deal and concern for the long-term future of the state’s school funding model. “With the fall of coal and the political attack on domestic oil and gas production, our mineral revenue- dependent education system is seriously just several biennia away from collapse,” Balow said Friday afternoon. She was attending the first in-person monthly luncheon of the Gre...
GILLETTE — Fossil fuels have been targeted by environmental groups and political policy for years, and things could get worse as President Joe Biden’s administration works through its priorities. That’s why it’s important that lawmakers, the state of Wyoming and fossil fuel industries work together and push back. That was the message Republican U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Bruce Westerman, who represents Arkansas’ 4th Congressional District, had for representatives from the energy sector during a roundtable discussion at the Integrated Test Cent...
CHEYENNE - A bill that would have authorized a long-term plan to set up an Interstate 80 tolling program was tabled by a legislative committee Tuesday, meaning the proposal will not be considered on the House floor during the remainder of the Legislature's general session. Senate File 73, which won narrow final approval from the Senate last week, would have set in motion the development of a master I-80 tolling plan from the Wyoming Department of Transportation, which faces annually unmet needs...
Jon Conrad was done with sitting on the sidelines. The Evanston resident had been engaged at the state level for decades. Conrad had served under former Govs. Matt Mead and Dave Freudenthal, as chair of the Wyoming Workforce Development Council and as vice chair of the Wyoming Board of Parole. For the last two years, he’s worked as the governmental affairs officer for his company, Tata Chemicals. He had been civic-minded at home as well, closely involved in economic development activities across Uinta County. On paper, Conrad looked like the m...
CHEYENNE — During a monthly weather briefing last week, Cheyenne National Weather Service Meteorologist Jared Allen talked about the “welcome moisture” last weekend’s record-breaking snowstorm had on Wyoming’s drought. “We had quite a weekend,” Allen said. “A significant winter snow event, with Wyoming on the cold side of the storm getting wet, heavy snow.” This impact of this moisture, he said, helped push fire season back a couple of weeks across the region – it normally starts at the beginning of March, then kicks into high gear between m...
CHEYENNE – What can cash-strapped Wyoming do with $1.3 billion from the federal government? Plenty, if you ask members of the Wyoming Legislature. Yet lawmakers are hesitant to say such a windfall can solve the current budget crisis. It will take time to fully understand the restrictions on spending, they say, and could be months before the specifics are understood well enough to act on — a delay that may necessitate a special legislative session this spring or summer, according to Speaker of the House Eric Barlow (R-Gillette). On March 11,...
CHEYENNE — With about a week and a half left in the Wyoming Legislature’s general session, a slew of bills addressing everything from marijuana to seat belt use failed due to them not being considered by Monday night, their swift deaths brought about by a procedural deadline. Monday was the final day for bills to gain initial approval in their chamber of origin, and more than two dozen pieces of legislation that had gained committee approval were not heard by that deadline. The list of bills brought before the bodies is typically det...
CASPER — Vaccines headed for Wyoming will be delayed as residents emerge from a record-setting winter storm that dumped more than two feet of snow on parts of the state this weekend. Federal officials halted shipments of the vaccine into Wyoming until the storm clears, though it remains up in the air when those shipments will arrive, Wyoming Department of Health spokeswoman Kim Deti said via email. “They aren’t going to send us shipments when airports may be closed or when roads are closed,” Deti said. “We know our shipments into the state thi...
CHEYENNE — After two days without meeting due to the historic winter storm that hit southeast Wyoming last weekend, state lawmakers will return to the Capitol Wednesday with a divide between the House and Senate budget proposals that the bodies will attempt to resolve in the coming weeks. Last Friday, lawmakers in their respective chambers finalized their versions of the state’s supplemental budget, which would cut between $400 million and $450 million in general funds from the state’s two-year budget approved last year, after consi...
LARAMIE – A study conducted by the University of Wyoming found that Wyomingites are open to renewable energy and diversifying the economy. However, they realize they’ll have to make trade-offs, and they want their leaders to have realistic conversations about these decisions. In a study titled “Social License for Wyoming’s Energy Future: What Do Residents Want?” Jessica Western, a research scientist at the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, explored the perspectives, values and visions of Wyoming residents when it comes to...
CASPER — Wyoming was pummeled with one of the biggest snowstorms in the state’s history this weekend. The storm dropped more than two feet of snow in many parts of the state, leading to power outages, stalled travel and shuttered schools. What caused this weekend’s massive storm? Local meteorologists said a low pressure system brought a significant amount of tropical moisture up into the high plains. That high level of moisture, pulled in from the southwest, meant the snow had a lot of water content. High wind gusts mixed with heavy moist...
