Less than a month until legislative session

The next session of the Wyoming Legislature gets underway in just under a month. But those with strong opinions on various issues, whether budget-related or not — this is the biennial budget session — have already been loudly proclaiming their intentions to kill or support certain measures. 

I see our Perspectives columnist for last week, Pastor Shane Legler, has similar thoughts to mine on property taxes, although he has come up with a great way to show his opposition through biblical texts. 

Also last week we ran a story on a new Political Action Committee formed to protect public lands, which was one of the big stories of the last year at the national and state level. 

Certainly there are still a variety of views on the proposals that came down from Washington, D.C. last year on potentially selling off millions of acres of federal land, although polls have shown a preponderance of Wyomingites support keeping, if nothing else, the vast majority of public lands public.

As selling public lands most certainly has a financial aspect, legislation on the matter is certainly possible this session. 

One of the big issues a number of our local legislators will be pushing for this session is to secure an additional $5 million to fund the Wyoming State Shooting Complex, on top of the $10 million secured from state funds last session. 

While the project is already underway with plans for a spring 2027 grand opening, it’s a just under $20 million project in total. That means the $10 million already received and the donations already added — including most recently another $100,000 from Forward Cody and more than $60,000 more, including $10,000 from complex proponent Scott Weber — will need to be supplemented by another influx of cash to get the project past the finish line and start operations. 

At the last Wyoming State Shooting Complex Joint Powers Board meeting of 2025, Sen. Dan Laursen, R-Powell, a member of the legislative task force helping to oversee the project, told joint powers board members that a group of legislators will be pushing for money previously promised from the Wyoming Office of Tourism and Wyoming Game and Fish. That money was not included when legislators had to find a last minute solution to secure $10 million in funding. 

Last year’s supplemental budget request, after all, included $13.5 million, amounts that were previously supported by most legislators, but were set aside when the Legislature took the unusual step of setting aside the entire supplemental budget. 

Laursen tasked board members with helping him gather the information needed to win over enough legislators to get the additional funding through. 

“We need some numbers, just to encourage these people that we gotta have some more money,” he said. 

Laursen had noted some legislators were grumbling about the idea of more funding. 

That push from Laursen, fellow task force member Rep. Paul Hoeft, R-Powell, and others, will be interesting to watch in this short budget session, set to begin Feb. 9 in Cheyenne. 

And if you have the time and inclination, watching the session in the state Capitol is quite the experience. I urge anyone with any interest to get down to Cheyenne sometime to see it. 

It may be on the other corner of the state, but what will be decided down there in the next month will certainly impact people up here as much, if not more, than anywhere else in the state.