Following the world’s hottest year on record and a series of increasingly intense and damaging environmental disasters, including a historically bad year for wildfires in Wyoming, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday it is rolling back dozens of climate rules and fossil fuel regulations in an effort to “usher in the golden age of American success.”

The agency, as part of President Donald Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” initiative, will eliminate or otherwise “reconsider” the Clean Power Plan, along with the landmark 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases cause harm. Also on the chopping block are “Mercury and Air Toxics Standards” for coal-fired power plants, regulatory greenhouse gas reporting, a risk management program for oil and gas refineries and dozens of other federal pollution control measures.

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a prepared statement that was accompanied by a video message. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”

The actions have major implications in Wyoming, where both fossil fuel extraction and a large federal land footprint play major economic roles and touch almost every aspect of life in the state.

Many industry officials, conservation groups and politicos in Wyoming were still absorbing the possible implications Thursday, noting the sprawling actions trigger myriad legal and logistical questions.

Compounding those questions is general uncertainty and chaos surrounding the Elon Musk-led federal employee purge, Trump’s freeze on federal funding and grant programs, as well as an ever-evolving tariff war. Further complicating the EPA’s regulatory rollback: How Wyoming, which maintains primacy over many federal emissions programs and sometimes implements more stringent requirements, might respond to the new initiatives.

From Zeldin’s perspective, the EPA’s efforts to undo “flawed” and “suffocating rules” implemented under past Democratic administrations that “restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars” will make it “more affordable to purchase a car, heat homes, and operate a business.”

Asked whether oil and gas companies in Wyoming might respond by relaxing environmental mitigation efforts, Petroleum Association of Wyoming Vice President and Director of Communications Ryan McConnaughey said that’s not the intention of industry.

“If you look at the announcements that were made [this week] from their leadership, they did not say a word about the environment or protection of air or water or waste — nothing.”

John Burrows, Wyoming Outdoor Council

“Wyoming’s natural gas and oil producers have long been leaders in emissions reductions, and we have no intention of backing away from that commitment,” McConnaughey told WyoFile via email. “Throughout the Biden administration, PAW consistently sought to engage with the EPA, offering constructive feedback and voicing concerns that the regulatory approach could lead to unnecessary closures and significant increases in energy costs for American consumers.

“Unfortunately,” McConnaughey continued, “these concerns were repeatedly ignored. By ensuring regulations align with on-the-ground technological and economic realities, we can achieve emissions goals in a cost-effective and practical manner without imposing undue burdens on American businesses or households.”

Whatever the intention, the EPA’s regulatory rollbacks are sure to have negative impacts regarding the climate, as well as the health of Wyoming landscapes and wildlife, and “on people, ultimately,” Wyoming Outdoor Council Energy and Climate Policy Director John Burrows told WyoFile.

Zeldin’s announcement, Burrows said, appears to reveal a fundamental shift in mission at EPA, he added.

“The mission of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment — that is their mission,” Burrows said. “If you look at the announcements that were made [this week] from their leadership, they did not say a word about the environment or protection of air or water or waste — nothing.”

Reached for comment, Gov. Mark Gordon’s Communications Director Michael Pearlman lauded the rollback effort. Gordon has repeatedly sued the Biden administration over policies tied to the energy industry and climate change.

“These are highly impactful actions, particularly the endangerment finding, that could be extremely beneficial to Wyoming energy producers,” Pearlman said. “This is yet another step that the Trump administration has taken to relieve the stranglehold on industry created by the Biden administration’s regulations.”

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CHEYENNE—Rep. John Eklund thought back a half century, to an era when commercial sawmills processing Wyoming timber abounded and logging was the Equality State’s third-largest industry. 

“We should be able to get back to that,” the Cheyenne Republican said Tuesday morning in the Wyoming Capitol. 

It’d be a monumental recovery. 

Commercial logging in national forests around the country, including Wyoming, has fallen off dramatically from its heyday. Cut and sold timber has stagnated at a fraction of what it was from the 1950s through the 1980s for three decades running, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows. 

Eklund made the remarks during the Legislature’s annual “forest health briefing,” a gathering that convenes state and federal foresters with state lawmakers to discuss the status of Wyoming’s forests. There was talk of current events, like Wyoming’s largest wildfire year since 1988, but much of the discourse Tuesday revolved around the reeling state of the timber industry — and what the second Trump administration might be able to do about it. 

Sen. Bob Ide, a Casper Republican, who has qualms with the very concept of federal land, asked the foresters in the room what they thought of Trump’s executive order dropped over the weekend intended to stimulate logging. 

The order, titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” streamlines permitting processes and outlines steps that can “move projects on the ground faster,” Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris told Ide.

Among other steps, the order compels new Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to identify timber-cutting goals within 90 days for Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service property. Within 180 days, Burgum and Rollins are also on the hook to develop new “categorical exclusions” to the National Environmental Policy Act that could enable logging projects without time-consuming reviews of the impacts. 

Trump’s order isn’t the only prospective policy change afoot that could revitalize commercially cutting American forests. The “Fix Our Forests Act,” a measure from Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas and co-sponsored by Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and moved to the U.S. Senate. The bill, proving divisive in big commercial timber country, would further expedite environmental reviews — and could potentially have immediate impacts in Wyoming. 

“I’m optimistic that the Fix Our Forests Act is going to pass,” U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Troy Heithecker told lawmakers in attendance. “And we’re ready. We have projects lined up as soon as that bill passes.” 

Later, Heithecker pointed toward the Shoshone National Forest’s Dunoir area, which he called a “high-risk fireshed,” as an example.

“If Fix Our Forests [Act] goes through, all those high-risk firesheds have a whole bunch of exemptions where we can streamline work,” he said. “And we have funding through the Wildfire Crisis Strategy … to help fuel reductions in that fireshed.” 

Still, reviving Wyoming’s logging industry in a place like the Wind River basin faces big headwinds. Dubois’ timber mill has been closed for decades, and, out of necessity, the community has moved on economically. 

“It is more challenging in that part of the state, because the infrastructure is already lost,” Norris, the state forester, told lawmakers. 

Today, only two mills hang on in Wyoming: One in Saratoga, the other in Hulett. The farther geographically a timber-cutting project is from those mills, the tougher it is to pencil out.

Representatives for both Wyoming’s mills attended the Legislature’s forest health briefing on Tuesday. 

“I think all sawmills in [Forest Service] Region 2 are at a crossroads, at the tipping point,” testified Jim Neiman, president and CEO of a company that operates mills in the Black Hills region. “We can’t be arguing about how many trees we’re going to cut. We need to focus right now [on]: ‘Do we want to retain industry in Region 2, or not?”

Neiman, who’s the cousin of the Legislature’s speaker of the House, said he believes the industry’s hit the bottom and that “emergency action” is needed to keep mills running. Wyoming, he told WyoFile, once housed 11 or 12 sawmills and even the Black Hills region alone had seven as recently as the late 1990s. 

“Now we’re down to two, and they’re both running one shift,” he said. “Ponderosa [pine] has low value. You can’t survive on one shift. It’s got to run two shifts.”

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The Trump administration’s purge of “probationary”-status employees has not, to date, been felt as acutely within the Bureau of Land Management as it has in some other federal agencies that manage land and wildlife within Wyoming.  

As of Wednesday, the federal agency continued to withhold layoff numbers from the public. An inquiry to BLM-Wyoming’s office in Cheyenne was routed to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

“We do not have a comment on personnel matters, however, BLM reaffirms its unwavering commitment to both the American public and the lands we protect,” a spokesperson for the BLM’s national office wrote in an emailed statement. 

Although official channels are yielding no information about the status of an agency that manages over 18 million surface acres in Wyoming — nearly 30% of its land mass — several of BLM’s Wyoming employees told WyoFile that mandatory layoffs have not hit the bureau especially hard so far. 

“Just yesterday, I heard it was only six,” one of the federal agency’s Wyoming workers told WyoFile on Thursday. “Compared to the Forest Service, it’s nothing.” 

WyoFile is granting the person anonymity because of the potential for retaliation. 

Losing six positions would be a drop in BLM-Wyoming’s employee bucket — just 1% to 2% of its approximately 400 permanent full-time employees across the state. In addition to working out of the office’s Cheyenne headquarters, those employees are based all across the state’s 10 field offices. 

Notably, that figure does not include bureau staffers who may have taken the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-branded “Fork in the Road” resignation offer. Thousands of federal workers in Wyoming were presented with the offer, which promised pay and benefits through the end of September in exchange for voluntarily giving up their jobs. 

Subsequently, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, known by its acronym, DOGE, began mass firings that cut across divisions of the federal government. Nationally, as many as 2,300 U.S. Interior Department employees — including 800 Bureau of Land Management staffers — were let go, according to reporting by Reuters.  

Although BLM-Wyoming employees haven’t been given an explanation for why they’ve been spared relative to other federal land managers, many believe it is because of the trove of energy and mineral resources contained within the bureau’s property in the Equality State. Those holdings include, for example, behemoth natural gas fields like the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah fields and the Powder River Basin’s bountiful coal deposits. 

“The day that we thought we were going to get fired — on Friday, Valentine’s Day — we got the call from our supervisor that we were not going to be [fired],” said a different BLM-Wyoming employee whom WyoFile also granted anonymity. “We didn’t know why. But I was like, ‘it’s because oil and gas, for sure.’ That’s just an assumption I have.” 

Mary Jo Rugwell, a retiree who served as BLM-Wyoming’s state director under the first Trump administration, agreed with the premise. 

“If one of your primary goals is to unleash American energy, reducing BLM employees isn’t going to help,” Rugwell said. “Because they have to do the work.” 

One of President Donald Trump’s many actions during the first six weeks of his second term was the “unleashing American energy” executive order. Maximizing energy production on federal land requires significant planning and preparatory work to comply with federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. To punch a new energy-producing project through, many disciplines of specialists are required, said Rugwell, who chairs the BLM advocacy group the Public Lands Foundation. 

“It’s not just engineers, petroleum engineers and petroleum technicians that you need to get that work done,” she said. “You also need archaeologists, you need wildlife biologists, you need people that are engaged in planning. You need the entire team to get that work done, because we have to follow the law.” 

Changes to the BLM-Wyoming’s workforce to date have not been of concern to the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, Communications Director Ryan McConnaughey told WyoFile. 

“In regards to staffing at BLM, we have not heard anything specific at this point,” McConnaughey said. “We’re confident that the administration understands that the BLM, through its federal leasing program, is the only other revenue-generating department besides the IRS, and that it will make decisions appropriately.”

The Petroleum Association of Wyoming has not lobbied in favor of maintaining the BLM’s workforce, he said. 

“It’s like a fat person saying, ‘I need to lose weight.’ And in order to lose weight, they just start chopping their arms and legs off. It makes no sense.”

bureau of land management employee

Although mandatory BLM-Wyoming job losses so far have been slim, turmoil from the Trump administration’s actions and intimidation tactics have rattled many in the workforce, its employees have reported to WyoFile. 

“Our NEPA planners are starting to get kind of nervous,” one of the Wyoming staffers said. “They don’t know what [the administration change] means for NEPA or their job.” 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration published an interim final rule in the Federal Register that gives federal agencies more discretion in how to implement the nation’s bedrock environmental planning policy.

A different BLM-Wyoming employee described the Trump administration’s decision to spare their own agency, while deeply cutting others, as poorly planned and “weird.” The hard-hit Forest Service, the worker pointed out, also supports extractive industries and other economic drivers. 

“It’s like a fat person saying, ‘I need to lose weight,’” the federal government employee told WyoFile. “And in order to lose weight, they just start chopping their arms and legs off. It makes no sense. They just gut one agency and leave the other one.” 

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SARATOGA—”Chaos.”

That was the single word a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee landed on to describe what life and work have been like at the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery since an offer for “deferred resignation” landed in his and thousands of other Wyoming residents’ inboxes in early February.

One of the facilities that has enabled the federally endangered Wyoming toad to stave off extinction, the 110-year-old hatchery was already in a period of transition before the chaos set in. Its supervisory biologist, Lee Bender, had recently retired, so a newcomer took the lead rearing hordes of rainbow, brown and other types of trout bound for lakes in the Wind River River Indian Reservation and fishing ponds outside of Cheyenne’s F.E. Warren Air Force Base to entertain angling airmen.

The transition meant the new supervisor was in a “probationary” employment status with the federal government. Like an untold number of other Wyoming residents, the Saratoga hatchery’s supervisor became another casualty of the Trump administration’s embrace of billionaire Elon Musk’s aggressive downsizing initiative spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known by its acronym DOGE. It’s an effort to rapidly streamline the federal government through layoffs of tens of thousands of employees everywhere from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the National Park Service.

Within some Republican Party circles the purge has been celebrated, complete with chainsaw-wielding viral moments. Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis lauded Musk’s work in a speech at the statehouse on the same day that a wave of federal employees in Equality State lost their jobs.

But on the ground in Wyoming, the indiscriminate firings look like a Bridger-Teton National Forest staffer losing his post-retirement health insurance plan and, in Saratoga, a fish hatchery supervisor packing up and bidding new colleagues goodbye just two weeks into a new job and life in Carbon County.

“I feel sorry for him,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee in Saratoga said.

The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity, which WyoFile granted because of the potential for retribution.

Keeping the hatchery afloat

WyoFile visited the facility on Thursday, investigating a tip that the hatchery was losing its entire staff because of the federal government workforce turmoil. Multiple requests for information to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional office in the Denver metro area yielded no responses. After the reporting trip, a public affairs officer from that office reached out and asked for written questions, but no responses were received by the time this story was published.

Right now, two staffers and an intern are still trying to maintain the 120-acre Saratoga National Fish Hatchery site, which includes 10 buildings that house thousands of trout of various age classes in addition to a breeding facility for the imperiled Wyoming toad.

“We’re keeping things going, you know,” the Fish and Wildlife Service employee said. “Just trying to do the bare minimum to keep things going.”

Being fully staffed at times in the past has meant up to four full-time workers plus another part-timer. It’s unclear how long the Saratoga hatchery’s two remaining employees will last. One of them accepted Musk’s “Fork in the Road”-branded “deferred resignation” offer, which promised pay and benefits through the end of September in exchange for walking away from the job. As of last week, the employee still hadn’t received word on whether the government had accepted their resignation — and when they’d be totally done.

As many as 8,100 Wyoming residents — the state’s entire federal workforce — received the offer. It’s unclear if the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery’s other remaining employee took the deal, or is leaving for another reason.

“I think he did, but I really don’t know,” the Fish and Wildlife Service employee said.

Another federal worker who was on site Thursday at the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery declined an interview for this story.

Even if the other person stays on, running the hatchery with a single staffer assisted by an intern would be a great challenge, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service employee who did consent to an interview.

“They’re going to have to start taking shortcuts, and they’re going to have to start making decisions,” the worker said. “I don’t think it’s going to impact things right away, like fish stocking. But it’s hard to say.”

Steep losses

The turmoil and unintended consequences that Musk’s hastily launched DOGE is inflicting upon Wyoming cuts across agencies charged with stewarding land, water and wildlife spread across a state that’s nearly half owned and administered by the federal government.

“Clearly this direction is coming from somebody who doesn’t understand how government works,” said a different federal employee in Wyoming who’s employed by the U.S. Forest Service. “People [employees] are frustrated, dismayed, about the continual attacks.”

WyoFile agreed to grant the source anonymity.

Over the weekend, Musk threatened federal workers in Wyoming and nationwide would lose their jobs if they didn’t respond to an email demanding they list in bullet-point format five things they accomplished last week. Employees were given until the end of Monday to comply.

Wyoming’s federal government employees, the Forest Service staffer said, are “very concerned about losing public land and what that means for everybody: our permittees, people who recreate on the forest [and] everyone who gets products from the forest.”

Muzzled by the Trump administration’s leadership, federal agencies have not disclosed job-loss figures and are responding to media inquiries and questions with copy-and-pasted statements. But job losses within some agencies are setting up to be steep.

The 3.4-million-acre Bridger-Teton National Forest, which manages a land area roughly the size of Connecticut, has been forced to shed over 40 of its full-time staff, according to a Forest Service employee familiar with the losses. That’s just the latest blow to a federal land manager that’s watched its budget, staffing and infrastructure erode for more than a decade.

“People [employees] are frustrated, dismayed, about the continual attacks.”

U.S. Forest Service staffer

Some ranger districts within Wyoming’s seven national forests have been hit harder than others, and many have sustained losses that will inhibit their ability to function effectively and accomplish tasks like OK’ing permits.

In Saratoga, the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest’s Brush Creek/Hayden Ranger District oversees the Sierra Madre Range and west side of the Snowy Range. The district, which is staffed by a dozen or so non-fire staff, lost three or four full-time employees, including a wildlife biologist and a recreation specialist, according to a different U.S. Forest Service employee familiar with the cuts.

Economic consequences

The losses of federal jobs in the Carbon County town could reverberate economically. A Saratoga timber mill that’s dependent on Medicine-Bow commercial logging could have less cut timber to process because Musk’s effort has pushed out Forest Service staffers needed to OK sales under federal law.

“People from wildlife need to sign off on [a sale], for example,” the federal government employee familiar with the Medicine-Bow cuts said. “We can’t sell a timber sale or put it out to bid until we get those surveys done.”

Across the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which manages the Saratoga hatchery — approximately 370 employees were terminated during the initial thrust of layoffs, according to the National Wildlife Refuge Association.

“Losing this many dedicated employees all at once is an especially devastating blow to conservation efforts nationwide and an intentional dismantling of science,” Association President and CEO Desirée Sorenson-Groves said in a statement. “The National Wildlife Refuge System was already underfunded and understaffed. The people being fired today are the backbone of wildlife protection in this country.”

The Trump administration’s pick to helm the Fish and Wildlife Service, who will have to make do with the thinner workforce, is a Wyomingite: Brian Nesvik, the recently retired Wyoming Game and Fish Department director. To date, his former colleagues at Game and Fish have not been called in to assist with keeping the lights on and the fish alive at the Saratoga hatchery — but they’ll be at the ready, if it comes to it.

“I think that our folks, we’d help out any way we could if it becomes necessary,” Wyoming Game and Fish Department Fisheries Chief Alan Osterland told WyoFile. “The hatchery has been a part of that community for a long time, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.”

Angus M. Thuermer, Jr. contributed to this story.

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A legislative committee narrowly advanced a measure on Friday to repeal sales tax on electricity in the midst of rising electrical rates — a $43.4 million annual savings for ratepayers, according to the bill’s fiscal note.

But there’s a huge downside to Senate File 128, “Repeal of sales tax on electricity,” according to critics and even some supporters of the concept.

By far, Wyoming’s largest electrical consumers are industrial users: mines, oil and natural gas producers and refiners, and especially a booming data center industry in Laramie County. Many towns and counties rely on sales taxes from those industries — including from electricity — to support public services, including services those very industries necessitate.

For example, Evansville Police Chief Mike Thompson described the revenue base of his 2,700 person community as more industrial than residential. The Casper-adjacent town, home to an oil refinery and a multitude of other large industrial operations, is almost completely reliant on various sales taxes to support public services.

“It’s going to cripple our community,” Thompson said.

Likewise, Cheyenne has seen wild success in courting manufacturing and data facilities — enterprises whose primary net contribution to the city and county are taxes, Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins testified before the Senate Revenue Committee.

“I see data centers as our Jonah field,” Collins said, referencing Sublette County’s famed oil and gas development. “I see them as our Campbell County coal mines. We don’t have great mineral wealth here in Laramie County to fuel our economy, as many parts of our state do.”

Demand for electricity in and around Cheyenne is projected to increase from about 350 megawatts today to 1,200 megawatts by 2030, based on anticipated growth in manufacturing and data centers, according to Collins. “So in today’s dollars, that would cost Cheyenne about $4.4 million if we take the sales tax off electricity,” he said.

Those concerns were echoed by the Wyoming Association of Municipalities and Wyoming County Commissioners Association. They noted that proposed tax reductions for homeowners, as well as a wide range of pending tax reductions for extractive industries, will likely starve small governments of the revenue they need.

All of those anxieties might be assuaged, however, according to the bill’s proponents, including lead sponsor Republican Sen. Troy McKeown from Gillette. Lawmakers are working to partially negate the revenue loss from property tax relief for towns and counties McKeown said. Plus, according to Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, there are plans in the works to offset local governments’ losses from SF 128 with a new tax that taps electric utilities and their customers outside Wyoming.

“It’s going to cripple our community.”

Mike Thompson, Evansville Police Chief

“We would export a very large amount of tax burden and we would collect more than the sales tax we’re giving up,” Case said.

Lawmakers discussed such a strategy in April, noting Wyoming is particularly suited to shift the tax burden because it exports more electricity than it uses — although the volume of that export of electrons has been declining in recent years, according to Power Company of Wyoming Director of Communications and Government Relations Kara Choquette, who testified before the committee and participated in interim deliberations on the topic.

Nonetheless, a bill to implement a new tax to offset the revenue loss of SF 128 had yet to materialize by Friday afternoon.

“There’s a bill to be filed in the House that accomplishes — kind of looks at these things so they have to all fit together,” Case said. “It’s complicated.”

Underpinning that potential bill is a report by a legislative “electric tax subcommittee,” which was appropriated $50,000 to hire a law firm to analyse the legality of imposing taxes that extend beyond Wyoming’s borders. The Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, chaired by Case, met behind closed doors with the hired lawyers at the Capitol on Thursday to hear their analysis.

“The purpose of the briefing yesterday was to hear from our lawyers that we hired,” Case told the Revenue Committee on Friday. “So it was privileged lawyer communications.”

Based on that briefing, “It’s clear that we can do that,” Case added. “We absolutely can do that.”

Whether or not such a bill materializes in time to offset revenue losses from SF 128, a bevy of lobbyists, who regularly comment on legislation, said they emphatically support the bill, including those representing Wyoming rural electric co-ops, Wyoming agricultural industries, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming and Wyoming Mining Association. Monthly electricity bills are one of the top expenses for doing business, they testified.

“We have a far larger industrial load in Wyoming than you do residential — that’s not true for most states,” Jody Levin told lawmakers on behalf of the trona industry and the Wyoming Mining Association. “So the increases that we have seen in electricity have been borne largely by your industrial consumers.”

McKeown tested Evansville Police Chief Thompson’s claims regarding the potential impact to his community, and bristled at his pleas for more careful scrutiny of the measure. “It’s actually pretty simple. It just takes the sales [tax] off electricity,” McKeown murmured to a fellow committee member before asking for a vote.

The measure advanced with a 3-2 vote.

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CHEYENNE—A disagreement between Wyoming’s state and local election officials over ballot drop boxes came to a boil Wednesday at the Capitol as lawmakers debated prohibiting their use in state statute. 

Wyoming’s county clerks have utilized drop boxes for decades, long before they took on controversy in the 2020 election, thanks in large part to the film “2,000 Mules.”

The film largely rested on the premise that ballot drop boxes were used in widespread voter fraud. Since then, the film’s distributor apologized and pulled it from its platform, and Dinesh D’Souza, the film’s director, also apologized and admitted that part of the film’s analysis was “on the basis of inaccurate information.” 

Nevertheless, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray continues to push for an end to drop box use in Wyoming. 

“This should come as no surprise to anyone in the room, but I am a huge supporter of this bill,” Gray told the House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee on Wednesday as it considered House Bill 131, “Ballot drop boxes-prohibition.” 

Indeed, Gray ran for office in 2022 on a promise to ban ballot drop boxes. Wednesday he reminded the committee of that, harkening back to a “very, very vigorous primary,” wherein drop boxes were “the defining issue.”

Gray also reiterated his opinion Wednesday that state law does not allow for ballot drop boxes. 

According to state law, “Upon receipt, a qualified elector shall mark the ballot and sign the affidavit. The ballot shall then be sealed in the inner ballot envelope and mailed or delivered to the clerk.”

Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, responded to Gray’s comments with a question. 

“It sounded like you accused every county clerk who had drop boxes of breaking the law,” Yin said. “If that is the case, and you think that they diluted your power, because if that’s the case, why didn’t you file suit against them?”

Gray blamed Wyoming’s attorney general for declining “to take any action on it,” before Yin pressed him once more. 

“Just to make it very clear, your position is that the country clerks broke the law?” Yin asked. 

“I do not believe ballot drop boxes are authorized,” Gray responded.

Sixteen county clerks attended the meeting, including Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin, who serves as president for the County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming. 

“It’s unfortunate that the secretary would allude or insinuate that somehow these counties have violated the law or their oath,” Ervin told the committee. “That’s a serious insinuation.”

Ervin also pushed back on Gray’s repeated claims that the clerks’ interpretation of state law as being permissive to drop boxes was “strained” and only came about during the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“It’s ironic that the word gaslighting was used by the secretary, because that’s exactly what he’s trying to do to you here,” Ervin said. 

“He says the use of ballot drop boxes and this interpretation of the county clerks came about because of a strained interpretation in 2020,” Ervin said. “Despite [the clerks] having told the secretary that’s not true a number of times, he continues to propagate that untruth.”

The clerks association does not have a stance on the bill, Ervin added. 

“What we want to do is offer facts when you make that decision,” he said. 

Part of Gray’s argument against the drop boxes has been that it violates the section of the election code that requires uniformity. 

“If you have a different system for each county in these races, then you don’t have a uniform system,” Gray said. “And that is problematic in terms of running a uniform statewide election.”

The committee voted 11-1 to pass the bill with two amendments, one of which came at the request of the clerks. Yin was the lone opposing vote. 

How we got here

In June, Gray sent a letter to all 23 county clerks, urging them to ditch ballot drop boxes ahead of the absentee voting period, arguing Wyoming law does not permit them. Gray also announced in the letter he would rescind several directives issued by former Secretary of State Ed Buchanan related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the rescinded directives did not involve ballot drop boxes.

“We hold that the use of ballot drop boxes as a method of ballot delivery is safe, secure and statutorily authorized,” the clerks’ association wrote in its response to Gray. 

Ultimately, the seven counties — Albany, Carbon, Converse, Fremont, Laramie, Sweetwater and Teton — that provided ballot drop boxes in 2022 did so again in 2024. 

Gray announced his intent to ask lawmakers to ban ballot drop boxes in state law at a December press conference. 

Committee colloquy 

Rep. Chris Knapp, a Freedom Caucus Republican from Gillette, is the main sponsor of HB 131. 

“In our statute, there is no such thing as a drop box. It’s not defined in our statute, and so this bill basically makes it clear that returning a ballot gets hand delivered to the clerk,” Knapp told the committee. 

As lawmakers discussed the bill, Rep. Gary Brown, R-Cheyenne, asked the clerks what section of state statute “grants you the right to use the drop boxes?”

Ervin pointed to the election code that specifies ballots shall be “delivered to the clerk.”

“That’s been the interpretation of the county clerks for at least 30 years, if not longer, and that’s been shared by a number of secretaries, one of whom is now a district court judge,” Ervin said, referring to Buchanan. 

Several other clerks testified, including Lisa Smith of Carbon County, who described the security measures involved with her office’s drop box.

Since 2016, Smith said the drop box has provided a way for residents to drop off ballots as well as other items like treasurer payments. But her office is the only one that has a key or access to the inside of the drop box. 

“It’s adjacent to the building. We have four cameras with two separate security systems, and all recorded footage is reviewed daily,” Smith said. “So anything that is captured, it’s not a 24-hour running tape, it’s motion censored. So it’s recording when there’s motion, even if it’s a deer. So that footage is actually reviewed by the county clerk daily, and a log is kept.”

That footage is also backed up by the county’s IT department and the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office, Smith said. 

“We don’t even really advertise that a ballot drop box is available, but people are used to it because it’s been happening for quite some time,” Smith said. 

Converse County Clerk Karen Rimmer said her office’s decision to use a ballot drop box “was strictly for the benefit of the voters who live there, the people that elected me to be their county clerk and conduct the election on their behalf.”

Rimmer said she also sought the advice of her county attorney, who did not share Gray’s interpretation of state law. 

Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told the committee she previously emailed Gray, inviting him to Lander to see the county’s drop box for himself. 

Freese said she suggested they look at the security footage together and “collaborate on how to better do this if you think it isn’t adequate.

“I did not receive a response at all — at all. Not even ‘I don’t have time, I don’t want to see it.’ Nothing. Not one thing,” Freese said. 

Later in the meeting, Gray said he didn’t respond to Freese because he’s long maintained that he does not see the drop boxes as statutorily authorized.  

Rep. Steve Johnson, R-Cheyenne, asked Freese if she ever considered having the clerk’s office open 24/7 during the election in order to avoid having a drop box. 

“Clerks spent a lot of time at the courthouse. I will tell you that. That’s not very far off that we’re not almost there 24/7” Freese said. 

Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee provided some numbers for the committee to consider. 

Thirty-six percent of Laramie County voters in the 2024 general election, for example, cast their ballot by returning it to the clerk via drop box, Lee said. 

“To bring this a little closer to home, nearly a third of the 2024 general election ballots that were delivered in the drop box were from constituents of Representative Brown, Johnson and Lucas,” Lee added. 

The three Cheyenne lawmakers are members of the committee.  

When Rep. Ann Lucas asked how many ballots were delivered late by the United States Postal Service, Lee said “they’re still coming in.”

Amendments

While the clerks’ association did not take a position on the bill, Ervin said there were six areas in the bill where the clerks could use clarification. 

If a ballot is hand delivered to another county office, for example, could the clerk’s office accept the ballot? Would a drop box within the clerk’s office be permissible? If a ballot is dropped into a clerk’s general business box, would there be a remedy available to the clerks to contact that voter? Can a private courier, such as FedEx, be used to mail an absentee ballot? Would the prohibition apply to mail ballot elections for special districts? 

And can a ballot be hand delivered to a sworn election judge?

The committee addressed just one of those concerns by specifying that only USPS could be used to mail absentee ballots. 

Lawmakers also amended the bill to allow voters to hand deliver ballots to municipal clerks, as suggested to the committee by Joey Correnti, a podcaster and executive director of Rural Wyoming Matters. 

The bill will now be debated by the entire House.

The post Wyoming county clerks push back against Gray’s ballot drop box stance appeared first on WyoFile .

Wyoming has for decades incarcerated juvenile offenders at the highest rates in the nation. 

The state’s multi-year efforts to reduce those numbers have been hampered, in part, by an unclear picture of why kids enter the justice system and whether incarceration seems to help. A bill to strengthen data and information sharing about state-supervised youth, including those in the juvenile justice system, died without debate in the House Judiciary Committee last week. 

The five no votes came from freshman lawmakers aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, a 12-year veteran of the House, led the effort to craft the measure. He took the bill’s failure as evidence more could have been done to communicate the backstory behind the need for more data.

“We didn’t just come up with this on a Saturday night while we were eating popcorn,” Larsen said of the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee-sponsored legislation. “We’ve gone through two interims of looking at this.” 

Why it matters 

While many of Wyoming’s neighboring states have decreased their use of juvenile incarceration, the Equality State once again posted the highest rate in the nation, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2021, Wyoming courts removed adjudicated delinquents — juvenile justice-specific terminology for young people convicted of crimes — from their homes and placed them in public and private facilities at over three times the national average. The majority of the offenses were non-violent, and 13% were technical violations — in other words, kids failing to comply with the terms of their probation, be it missing a drug test or poor academic performance. 

Research has found juvenile incarceration does not significantly deter delinquent behavior or improve public safety while leading to poor outcomes for young people — from lower academic performance to higher suicide rates. Instead, studies show that community-based programs, which address the root causes of delinquent behavior while keeping kids close to home, lead to better outcomes and do so with a smaller price tag for the state. 

Five years after South Dakota implemented juvenile justice reform — investing $6.1 million in expanded community-based programs in 2015 — the state cut the number of incarcerated youth in half and reduced its juvenile corrections budget.

The fiscal implications of Wyoming’s high juvenile incarceration rate have not been lost on lawmakers here. In 2021, the Joint Judiciary Committee agreed to study Wyoming’s juvenile justice system during the legislative off-season, acknowledging that “youth confinement is one of the largest expenditures for the Department of Family Services.” 

House Bill 48, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments,” which died in the House Judiciary Committee last week, was seen as an important step in a multi-year effort to understand what’s driving Wyoming’s heavy, and expensive, reliance on juvenile incarceration. 

How we got here

Back in 2021, when the Joint Judiciary Committee set out to study juvenile justice, the panel’s members quickly realized the first problem they would need to tackle was a lack of consistent data.

That’s in part because Wyoming doesn’t have a statewide juvenile justice system. Instead of sending all juvenile cases to juvenile court, county attorneys have discretion — a policy known as single point of entry — and each county takes a different approach. Some will funnel juvenile cases to municipal and circuit courts, some rely on juvenile courts and others routinely use all three. There are also counties with diversion programs designed to keep juvenile offenders out of court altogether and others that rely heavily on juvenile probation programs. 

But no matter what a county decides to do, once a court orders a young person into custody, the state pays the bill. And for decades the state had no way of assessing what was happening at the county level to drive up, or drive down, juvenile incarceration rates, or whether money spent to confine kids was having the desired effect. 

Wyoming didn’t know high school graduation rates or recidivism rates for juvenile offenders, or how often they reoffend as adults. 

Acknowledging it’s hard to manage what you can’t measure, the Wyoming Legislature passed a Joint Judiciary Committee-sponsored bill in 2022 mandating the Department of Family Services set up the Juvenile Justice Information System. 

While DFS oversees out-of-home placements and juvenile incarceration, the agency quickly realized that pre-existing privacy laws would make it hard to fulfill the Legislature’s mandate for a comprehensive system tracking how kids enter the system or what happens after. That’s because DFS, the Wyoming Department of Health, the Wyoming Department of Education, the Wyoming Department of Corrections and the court system, which all hold pieces of the puzzle, are limited in what information they can exchange.

Solving that problem was a top priority of the Legislature’s Mental Health and Vulnerable Adult Task Force, which convened over the last two years. House Bill 48 was the fruit of that labor. 

Larsen, the Lander representative who co-chaired the task force, said enhanced data sharing is about helping state agencies better serve constituents and operate more effectively and cost-efficiently. 

“I think data really helps us identify what programs are needed and what programs aren’t,” Larsen told WyoFile.

Balancing the state’s desire to evaluate programs with privacy and confidentiality was a focus of the task force, Larsen said, given the vulnerability of the families DFS serves. 

“We should always be nervous about privacy,” Larsen said, which is why so much time went into “House Bill 48 which really addresses a very delicate, sensitive issue.”  

Those concerns were also on DFS Director Korin Schmidt’s mind when she testified to the House Judiciary Committee about the need for HB 48. 

“We take seriously the confidentiality of the information that we gather,” Schmidt said. “However, the confidentiality statutes, in large part … were created in the ‘70s, and they didn’t contemplate a time where maybe we could help these families a little bit earlier, a little bit more effectively, while also being good stewards of the dollar, while also ensuring efficiencies across our systems, both internally and externally.”  

State agencies are simply unable to answer many fundamental questions about juvenile justice, Schmidt told the committee. 

“We have frequently been asked the question: How many kids that you serve in your juvenile justice system go into the Department of Corrections system? We can’t answer that question,” Schmidt said. “And one of the reasons we can’t answer that question is because of our confidentiality statutes.”

House Bill 48 would give the DFS director authority to initiate changes in how data is shared between state agencies through a rules-changing process requiring public and legislative input. 

That ensures “the general public also knows what it is that we are doing in a very transparent way,” Schmidt said.  

Those guardrails did not persuade the majority of the House Judiciary Committee — the bill died on a 5-4 vote. Reps. Laurie Bratten from Sheridan and Marlene Brady from Rock Springs, briefly mentioned privacy concerns before casting no votes, along with Republican Reps. Tom Kelly from Sheridan, Jayme Lien from Casper and Joe Webb from Lyman.

What now? 

Juvenile justice data sharing was just one piece of HB 48. The bill would also have enhanced DFS’ ability to evaluate its other programs — helping abuse and neglect victims, for example — and opened up opportunities for cross-agency referrals between DFS case workers, public health nurses and mental health providers. 

While HB 48 died in committee, Larsen said, that doesn’t mean solutions are off the table this session. He suggested individual lawmakers may bring their own versions of the bill. 

Lawmakers have until Jan. 29 to introduce bills in the Senate and Feb. 3 in the House. 

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Learn more: Listen to Juvenile (in)justice from Reveal.

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