Committee bills crowded out by hot-topic national issues

CHEYENNE — With a high volume of individually sponsored bills filed for the Wyoming legislative session this year — several of which were filed by first-time lawmakers — veteran legislators said there was a noticeable shift from state problems to hot-button national issues.

Committee bills are discussed during the Legislature’s off-season, formally known as the interim. This is a time when lawmakers meet, conduct research and hear hours of public testimony as they draft bills for the upcoming session. These bills are a result of Wyoming stakeholders coming together to find a solution to Wyoming problems.

Typically, around 20% of committee bills filed each session fail to become law, said Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, who has served in the Legislature since 2013. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle calculated that about 40% of committee bills in this legislative session failed to make it to the finish line this year.

“I would not disagree that we’ve, over the last two sessions, seen more committee bills not be considered in committee, or die in committee,” Larsen said.

A majority of individual- sponsored bills filed this legislative session focused on election security, restricting abortion access, protecting gun rights, targeting the transgender community, and ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the state.

Wyoming recently made national headlines as the first state to have a legislative chamber controlled by the Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline Republicans.

Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, said politics were at play as members of the Freedom Caucus in the House seemed more concerned about passing their “Five and Dime” plan than any legislation that would actually help Wyoming constituents.

“We chose to take individual bills from the Freedom Caucus, (people) wrote them, and no one had ever seen them,” Driskill said. “We brought them in on the first day of the session, their Five and Dime plan, and they left committee bills that were vetted by both the House and Senate, had all kinds of public comment, (on the table).”

That, he said, has been his “real heartburn this session.”

“We’ve dealt with national social issues that came out of D.C., from the Freedom Caucus handlers, rather than looking at ourselves and saying, ‘How can we keep our economy going, build highways, have good jobs?’” Driskill said. “Instead, we are worried about regulating people’s lives. … This session is probably going to go down as the Freedom Caucus session. You know, what did we accomplish? Abortion. Guns. Election bills.

“What do any of those have to do with the long-term future of my kids?” Driskill said.

Committee bills

In December, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus released its Five and Dime plan, saying the goal was to push five bills through within the first 10 days of the session.

These bills included the following: requiring proof of Wyoming residency and U.S. citizenship in voter registration; invalidating driver’s licenses issued by other states to those who came into the country illegally; banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education; ending investment of state money in environmental, social and governance funds, and reintroducing a vetoed property tax bill from last year’s budget session.

Wyoming Freedom Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Rachel Rodriguez- Williams, R-Cody, told members of the media during a pre-session news conference at the Capitol the plan “came about from a poll that was taken statewide.”

“The ideas are based on priorities that came from the people throughout the state of Wyoming, in which the Freedom Caucus is prepared to carry out in the House,” Rodriguez- Williams said at the time.

None of these bills were committee- sponsored, and all passed easily through the House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, several committee bills, including ones that addressed affordable housing and regulated Wyoming’s billion- dollar gaming industry, failed to push through the finish line.

In 2024, legislative leadership budgeted between $50,000 to $65,000 for each interim committee, according to a Legislative Service Office annual report. If a committee met six times on a $60,000 budget, each meeting cost around $10,000, according to LSO.

Historically speaking, committee bills are first on the list to be heard in committee of the whole (the first floor reading) in each chamber.

“We didn’t see that this year,” Larsen said. “There were a lot of other bills, personal bills, that were brought up and debated. On the House side, we struggled, for a variety of reasons, getting through bills.”

Larsen said he’d never seen so many personal bills filed in a session that failed to help move the state forward, and he attributed this to the majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives who were only in their first or second term.

Affordable housing

Many bills related to the issue of affordable housing — some that had been vetted through both the Regulatory Reduction Task Force, which cannot sponsor legislation, and a committee that did sponsor the work — did not make it to the finish line this session.

A measure to expand affordable housing development qualifications for tax increment financing, a change supported by Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins, did not make it past a House committee.

Two other measures that were vetted in both the Regulatory Reduction Task Force and sponsored by committees — one to limit property development exaction and mitigation fees and another to allow for multi-family dwellings to have single stairwells — were barely debated this session.

Gaming bills

Gambling has exploded into a billion-dollar industry in Wyoming after the state legalized new forms of gaming in the last several years. Lawmakers decided last year it was time for legislators to step in and review existing regulations.

“The Legislature has been responding to the growth of gaming in the state now for about six years,” Larsen said. “We’ve never been out in front of it.”

After roughly 18 hours of committee meetings, working group sessions and a statewide comprehensive study of the gambling industry, the Joint Appropriations Committee sponsored five bills for the general session that aimed to improve the state’s gaming laws.

Among these were clean-up legislation to make current gaming laws more uniform and a bill that allowed national betting on Wyoming horse races. Former Rep. Tom Walters, R-Casper, who chaired the working group, told the WTE this bill would have generated revenue for the state.

“Horse racing tracks around the country are closing on a regular basis,” Walters said. “But Wyoming’s opening tracks, and our market is growing. … It makes a lot more money for the state of Wyoming, because now you have a larger wagering pool.”

However, four of these bills never made it out of the House speaker’s drawer.

The bill that made the best progress was House Bill 85, “Local approval for simulcasting,” which gave city and town governments the ability to approve or deny simulcasting permits for historic horse racing machines — a power currently reserved at the county level.

Walters said his constituents always brought up the issue of pop-up gaming machines in their favorite bars at the end of every legislative session.

Collins, who supported HB 85, previously told the WTE he’s been frustrated with the approval process.

“We have 10 approved casinos inside the city limits, and our governing body had no input on their approval,” Collins said. “We’re the governing body closest to the people living in Cheyenne, and I think we should have had the responsibility for making that decision.”

This bill made it all the way through the House of Representatives before dying in the Senate president’s drawer.

This story was published on March 6, 2025.