A collared pronghorn took her last breath on Feb. 16. The adult doe’s remains were found on the south end of the Pinedale Mesa.

Another marked-and-tracked doe died a couple days later, just 500 yards away. A week later the third adult female went, her final resting place a mile or so north of her migratory compatriots.

With that, every collared animal that traveled the celebrated Path of the Pronghorn in 2022 was dead.

It was a grim sign for a migratory pronghorn population that has thrived in recent years. Now, following the deadliest winter on record in which a disease outbreak compounded fatalities, the fate of the long-distance travelers that winter in the Green River basin but sojourn for the summer in Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge and along the Gros Ventre River is unclear. Wildlife scientists aren’t sure how many remain.

“Anything’s possible, right?” Brandon Scurlock, a regional wildlife coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said. “But I would have to think that some of those animals made it and will make that migration.”

But the outlook is grim, with the large majority of animals from the larger Sublette Herd likely dead, according to Scurlock. Pronghorn in the herd were being closely studied as the state considers whether to recognize and protect a route that remains undesignated due to political pressure from industry groups. The monitoring effort tracked 83 does throughout the herd as recently as December. By Tuesday, when Scurlock spoke to WyoFile, just 21 of them were still alive — including zero of the Jackson Hole migrants.

“We lost 75% of our collared animals,” he said. “It’s erroneous to [extrapolate] that 75% to the entire herd, but that’s our best indication of survival. If we did have 400 or 500 [Jackson Hole migrants], our best guess is that 75% of those might be gone.”

In Jackson Hole pronghorns’ favor is that the migratory population has thrived of late. Counts in 2020 and 2021 were the highest on record.

If the so-called Path of the Pronghorn does live on, it’s all but assured that drastically fewer animals will make the journey, which cuts through gas fields, skirts coming-soon subdivisions and treads over a mountain pass.

Lost before 

An archaeological site along the migration route at Trappers Point holds evidence that humans have hunted pronghorn along the path as long as 6,000 years ago.

But even within that long history, the Path of the Pronghorn has faded before.

Joel Berger, a Wildlife Conservation Society researcher and former Jackson Hole resident, was part of the multi-agency research team around the turn of the century that first mapped the route. The science led to the Bridger-Teton National Forest amending its management plan, in essence creating the first federally designated migration corridor in the United States. The southern reaches remain undesignated — to the chagrin of some wildlife advocates.

“Early reports were a couple of thousand around the turn of the century, then they went extinct locally in Jackson,” Berger said.

The migration route was lost, he estimated, between about 1910 and the 1950s.

“The pronghorn were just all shot out,” Berger said, “because we didn’t have good conservation in those days.”

Green River basin pronghorn evidently learned the ancient route into modern day Teton County again some four decades later. Berger likened them finding their way back to a pinball player’s inevitable outcome.

“What happens? Ultimately, the ball ends up in the hole, right?” Berger said. “From our GPS data we know they were bouncing all over, but the only access into Jackson was the single route.”

Fast forward to the present, and management of the pronghorn herd is much more deliberate and science-based.

Game and Fish and the National Park Service not only survey the Jackson segment annually, the state agency keeps close tabs on numbers within the entire herd, which spans western Wyoming from Green River to northern Grand Teton National Park. The population breached 60,000 in the early 2000s but was last estimated at 43,000, Scurlock said.

In past bad winters over the last couple decades the herd has fared OK.

“We know we did lose some pronghorn in ‘16-’17, but this winter was unprecedented in terms of the number of days below zero and the depth of the snow on the winter range. ” Scurlock said. “We just didn’t see these large foci of carcasses [in ‘16-’17].”

In the wake of winter 2022-’23, there are conspicuous concentrations of death scattered throughout the region. Motorists can see them without leaving their vehicle in places like the East Fork hill, located on the east side of Highway 191 between Farson and Boulder.

“We’re seeing these clusters of animals on the landscape that are now dead,” Scurlock said. “Rock Springs to Boulder, over to Big Piney, down by Kemmerer.”

Outbreaks of mycoplasma bovis, a new affliction in the Green River basin that causes a deadly respiratory disease, have been observed in the hardest-hit areas, he said. The carcass of the first Jackson Hole migrant that died this winter was shipped to a Laramie laboratory and tested positive for the disease.

The verdict

There are a few bright spots better for survival along the southern fringes of the Sublette Herd’s high desert home, Scurlock said. Those areas, he said, include the Red Desert between the Killpecker Sand Dunes and the town of Superior and the bluffy country overlooking Interstate 80 near James Town.

Although it’s an open question what remains of the Jackson Hole segment, answers should come through in the next couple weeks.

“In a nutshell, we won’t know until they show up in June,” Game and Fish wildlife biologist Aly Courtemanch said.

State and federal agencies will partner to do a more-thorough census of what’s left later in the summer. Game and Fish has drastically reduced hunting opportunities to give the herd its best shot at recovery. Doe and fawn hunting — which has the most impact on populations — has been eliminated in all hunt areas roamed by the herd, Scurlock said.

“They are fairly fecund, and they can bounce back pretty quick just because they have twins as the norm,” he said. “Our plan is to give the herd the maximum opportunity to bounce back by eliminating that reproductive harvest.”

Still, the population’s starting point will likely be significantly lower than wildlife managers have seen in their lifetimes. They’re beginning to see what that looks like.

Game and Fish biologist Gary Fralick’s territory doesn’t cover the Sublette Pronghorn Herd, but he drove through a swath of its habitat on Monday on his way to take a look at what’s left of the Wyoming Range Mule Deer Herd.

“Since I’ve been around, in that country it’s always the pronghorn leading the deer. And they’re not there.”

Gary Fralick

Typically there’d be “several hundred” pronghorn foraging this time of year on pastureland and in the sagebrush from the Hoback Rim down to Daniel Junction, he said.

Fralick, a 30-year veteran at his biologist post, saw only 11 animals. Their absence, he said, isn’t because of a delayed migration. It’s because they’re dead.

“Since I’ve been around, in that country it’s always the pronghorn leading the deer,” Fralick said. “And they’re not there.”

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GILLETTE—Sandra Lane has been to the emergency room about eight times this year, she said. The 62-year-old has had multiple falls, struggled with balance and tremors and experienced severe swelling in her legs.

A paramedic recently arrived at her doorstep again, but this time it wasn’t for an emergency. Jason Frye was there for a home visit as part of a new community paramedicine program.

Frye showed up in an SUV, not an ambulance. He carried a large black medical bag into Lane’s mobile home, which is on the eastern edge of the city, across from open fields and train tracks that snake between the region’s massive open-pit coal mines. Lane sat in an armchair as Frye took her blood pressure, measured her pulse and hooked her up to a heart-monitoring machine.

“What matters to you in terms of health goals?” Frye asked.

Lane said she wants to become healthy enough to work, garden and ride her motorcycle again.

Frye, a 44-year-old Navy veteran and former oil field worker, promised to help Lane sign up for physical therapy and offered to find an anti-slip grab bar for her shower.

Community paramedicine allows paramedics to use their skills outside of emergency settings. The goal is to help patients access care, maintain or improve their health and reduce their dependence on costly ambulance rides and ER visits.

Such programs are expanding across the country, including in rural areas, as health care providers, insurers and state governments recognize the potential benefits to patients, ambulance services and hospitals.

Filling access needs

Gary Wingrove, a Florida-based leader in community paramedicine, said the concept took off in the early 2000s and now includes hundreds of sites. A 2017 survey of 129 programs found that 55% operated in “rural” or “super rural” areas.

Community medicine can be helpful in rural areas where people have less access to health care, said Wingrove, chair of the International Roundtable on Community Paramedicine. “If we can get a community paramedic to their house,” he said, “then we can keep them connected to primary health care and all of the other services that they need.”

Frye works at Campbell County Health, a health care system based in Gillette, a city of about 33,000 in northeastern Wyoming. Leaders of the community paramedicine program plan to expand it into two adjacent, largely rural counties dotted with ranches and coal mines on the rolling prairie that stretches more than 100 miles from the Black Hills to the Bighorn Mountains.

Gillette serves as a medical hub for the region but has shortages of primary care doctors, specialists and mental health services, according to a community needs assessment. People who live outside the city face additional barriers.

“A lot of them, especially older people, don’t want to come into town. And basically, those tiny communities don’t usually have health care,” Lane said. “I think it’s just kind of a pain for them to drive all the way into town, and unless they have a serious problem, I think they tend to just figure, ‘Well, it’ll work itself out.’”

Community paramedicine programs are customized to the needs and resources of each community.

“It’s not just a cookie-cutter-type operation. It’s like you can really mold it to wherever you need to mold it to,” Frye said.

Most community paramedicine programs rely on paramedics, but some also use emergency medicine technicians, nurses, social workers and other professionals, according to the 2017 survey. Programs can offer home visits, phone check-ins or transportation to nonemergency destinations, such as urgent care clinics and mental health centers.

Many programs support people with chronic illnesses, patients recovering from surgeries or hospital stays or frequent users of 911 and the ER. Other programs focus on public health, behavioral health, hospice care or post-overdose response.

Community paramedics can provide in-home vaccinations, wound care, ultrasounds and blood tests.

They can offer exercise and nutrition tips, teach patients how to monitor their symptoms and help with housing, economic and social needs that can affect people’s health. For example, paramedics might inspect homes for safety hazards, provide a list of food banks or connect lonely patients with a senior center.

Paramedics and patients said some rural residents struggle to access health care because of long distances, cost, lack of transportation or dangerous weather. Some hesitate to seek help out of pride or because they don’t want to be a burden to others. Some limit trips to town during ranching and farming crunch times, such as calving and harvesting seasons.

Delayed care can let health problems fester until they become an emergency.

Advocates say providing in-home care, resources and education can help patients reduce such crises and associated costs. Fewer emergencies mean fewer ambulance runs and hospital patients. That could help ambulance services and hospitals reduce costs and the time patients wait for help.

A 2022 scholarly review found that more studies are needed but that data so far suggests these programs reduce costs. It also found links to improved health outcomes and decreased use of ambulances and hospitals.

For example, a pilot program in Fort Worth, Texas, saw a 61% reduction in ambulance rides, according to an academic study of 64 patients. MedStar, the operator, made the effort permanent and says its 904 participants needed 48% fewer ambulance trips, saving an estimated $8.5 million over eight years.

But rural ambulance services, especially volunteer ones, can struggle to staff and fund community paramedicine programs.

Challenges

Kesa Copps, a co-worker of Frye’s, previously worked as an emergency medical technician in Powder River County, Montana, which has fewer than 2,000 residents. Some people there must drive more than an hour to reach the nearest hospital. The area’s volunteer ambulance service started a community paramedicine program in 2019.

Copps said the program reduced hospital readmissions and extended some elderly patients’ ability to live at home before being admitted to a nursing facility. She visited patients between ambulance runs and had to leave early when a 911 call came in. That’s different from the Campbell County Health model, in which community paramedicine is a full-time position, not split with emergency work.

Adam Johnson, director of the Powder River ambulance service, said the community paramedicine program shut down in 2021 after everyone with the necessary training left the area. Johnson said paramedics are signing up for training to restart the program.

States are increasingly recognizing and regulating community paramedicine, and some require licensed paramedics to obtain extra training to work in the field.

Some ambulance services and health care organizations have piloted community paramedicine programs with the help of state or federal grants. If they find the service saves money, they may decide to continue the program and fund it themselves.

Private insurance companies are increasingly covering community paramedicine, Wingrove said. Wyoming and several other states allow operators to bill Medicaid for the services.

Advocates are now pushing Medicare to expand its limited coverage of community paramedicine, Wingrove said. That would benefit Medicare patients and could spur more private insurers to offer coverage.

The Campbell County Health program’s home visits cost up to $240 per hour and are billed to Medicaid or Medicare, Frye said. That compares with more than $1,300 for an ambulance ride and thousands of dollars for a visit to a hospital ER.

Community paramedicine may soon expand in neighboring South Dakota, another largely rural state.

South Dakota ambulance services have experimented with community paramedicine and lawmakers recently voted to authorize and regulate it.

Eric Emery, the state representative who introduced the bill, plans to start a program on the sprawling, rural Rosebud Indian Reservation, where he works as a paramedic. He said the operation will focus on diabetes and mental health care.

Emery, a Democrat, said some people struggle to pick up their medication and attend appointments because they lack vehicles or gas money and there’s no public transportation to the hospital. He said some parents and grandparents raising children also struggle to find time to drive to appointments.

“They’re putting the needs of the younger generation or their grandkids before their own,” Emery said.

Back in Gillette, Frye also checked in on Linda Gwitt, a 78-year-old facing diabetes, depression and a lack of social support after her husband was hospitalized with dementia. Gwitt said her husband was her walking buddy and helped care for her.

“I had him to wait on me, and now I have nobody,” Gwitt said.

Frye said he would see if he could help start a senior walking group that Gwitt could join. He told her socializing can improve health.

“You’re not alone,” Frye told Gwitt.

This story was originally published on KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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As a wave of legislation restricting transgender rights swept through statehouses across the country this year, Wyoming broke with what some say is a decades-long tradition of blocking anti-LGBTQ bills.

Activists deployed a strategy, they say, that worked for decades: aligning LGBTQ rights with the core Republican principle that government should sparingly intervene in citizens’ private decisions.

In 1977 state lawmakers defined marriage as a civil contract between a male and a female, a blow to LGBTQ rights. But since then, “every single bill that would limit the civil rights of LGBTQ people in Wyoming has been defeated,” said Sara Burlingame, a former legislator and executive director of Wyoming Equality, an advocacy group. “This was the year that changed,” she said.

Burlingame was referencing a new law that will prohibit transgender girls from competing in middle- and high-school girls sports events. Asserting it is about fairness and not restriction, lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for Senate File 133 – Student eligibility in interscholastic sports during the 2023 general session. And while Gov. Mark Gordon called it “overly draconian,” he let the bill become law without his signature. It is set to go into effect in July.

“It is difficult for me to sign legislation into law that knowingly will cost the state and taxpayers money to litigate and may be challenged under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause,” Gordon wrote in his letter to lawmakers. Wyoming Equality is in fact planning a legal challenge, and the U.S. Department of Education announced earlier this month a proposed change to Title IX that would make it illegal for schools to “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.”

If a court challenge pauses Wyoming’s ban, the legislation would then require the governor to appoint a five-member commission to determine the eligibility of a student in interscholastic sports.

There were also victories for LGBTQ advocates in the 2023 session, including the defeat of two bills to limit gender-affirming care for minors and one that closely mirrored Florida’s restrictions on what can be discussed in public schools. But advocates like Burlingame expect those bills to return to the statehouse, and there’s concern that the sports ban’s passage marks a turning point for LGBTQ rights in Wyoming and the strategy used to protect them.

Background

The same year the Legislature defined marriage between a male and a female, lawmakers also repealed Wyoming’s anti-sodomy law.

“All of that happens in 1977,” Burlingame said. “So it’s this really banner year where the Wyoming Legislature … looks at gay rights and opens the door in one direction and sets a boundary in another direction.”

In 1982, Wyoming dropped common law crimes from its statutes, which legalized all sexual activity between consenting adults. But an impasse largely characterized the decades that followed, in which both protections for and restrictions of LGBTQ rights failed to get adequate support to become law.

For same-sex marriage, it was the courts, not the Legislature, that ultimately budged the needle. A federal district court ruling in 2014 made same-sex marriage legal in Wyoming the year before the United States Supreme Court made it constitutionally guaranteed nationwide.

After the high court settled the law, another stalemate came back into focus — a hate-crime law. Since the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1999, hate-crime legislation has failed repeatedly to get enough votes from lawmakers. Most recently, the Joint Judiciary Committee voted down legislation in 2021 that would have updated statutory language to create a de facto hate crime law. However, whether Wyoming already has bias-motivated statutes on the books depends on who you ask, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming and the U.S. Justice Department holding different views on a little-known state law, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

In 2017, lawmakers introduced legislation to criminalize people using public restrooms that do not correspond with the gender assigned to them at birth. The bill was dead on arrival, failing to meet an initial deadline, but was the first legislation of its kind in Wyoming. At the time, former Republican Gov. Matt Mead said bills dealing with public restrooms would undermine the state’s nickname of “the Equality State.” A task force convened by Mead to devise a plan to diversify the state’s economy identified a statewide non-discrimination law as a key recommendation in its 2018 report.

“Recruiting, hiring, and retaining high-quality talent is essential to growing successful businesses in a global economy,” according the report. “It is important that Wyoming residents and visitors are treated with equality.”

While the state has yet to take such action, several local governments have addressed the issue, adopting non-discrimination ordinances.

Changing tides 

The Legislature has steadily moved farther to the right in recent years. In 2022, Republicans picked up four seats previously held by other parties. But that swelling conservative supermajority hasn’t necessarily brought a deeper commitment to a small-government mindset that has helped LGBTQ advocates in the past, Burlingame said. With the rise of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which has grown its membership and its position in the statehouse, Burlingame said the body’s adherence to core Republican principles like limited government, equality and liberty has waned, making way for bills that previously wouldn’t have passed.

“We want people to truly recognize the full dignity and worth of LGBTQ Wyomingites,” Burlingame said. “But in the past, we’ve won not because people have strong feelings for the LGBTQ [community] but [because] they had strong feelings about the role of government.”

That’s become a less reliable strategy; Republican lawmakers butted heads over the proper scope of government during the 2023 session with several Freedom Caucus members arguing for a top-down approach in some cases.

“Local government is merely political subdivisions of this state,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody) said on the House floor in response to colleagues’ criticisms that one of her bills eroded local control in favor of state power.

Several other factors facilitated the sports ban’s passage, Rep. Dan Zwonitzer (R-Cheyenne) said.

“I just think it was an emerging issue in the constituency and it dealt with kids,” he said, which differentiates it in his view from an adult issue. Zwonitzer is now the only openly gay member of the Wyoming Legislature, because Cathy Connolly — the first openly gay legislator in state history — did not seek re-election after 13 years in the House, and Burlingame and Chad Banks of Rock Springs lost their respective races in 2022.

Connolly was candid during her keynote address at The Democracy Lab Symposium hosted at the Albany County Public Library on Saturday. She told attendees that when Rep. Wendy Schuler (R-Evanston) first brought legislation to limit trans girls’ participation in school sports, in 2022, the two had agreed the “bill was a sledgehammer that codified discrimination to appease an angry mob.”

“I have the greatest respect for [Connolly], but I don’t remember saying that at all,” Schuler told WyoFile. Schuler also rejected the idea put forth by Connolly that the bill was about scoring “Republican street cred” to counter some of her more moderate views. Schuler is not part of the Freedom Caucus, and was challenged by one of its former members, Bob Wharff, in the 2022 election.

“I don’t go digging around to see what’s happening at the national level that might interest me,” Schuler said, adding that she relies on what she hears from constituents to draft legislation.

As to whether the ban is at odds with Wyoming’s proclivity for small government, Schuler said “there’s some truth to that,” adding that government intervention should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

“Sometimes, we as Republicans, we really don’t want the government in our business,” she said. “But then if we think we’ve got to right a wrong, then we do want them in our business.”

An analysis by The Washington Post found that more bills targeting LGBTQ rights — particularly transgender rights — have been introduced and become law in 2023 than at any other time in U.S. history. Disruptive opposition to that surge in other states has led to arrests and the barring of one transgender lawmaker from her own chamber.

Zwonitzer said he believes Wyoming’s sports ban is a more “reasonable approach, especially compared to a lot of other states [that] have gone a bit overboard when it comes to these issues.” Zwonitzer, who was one of six Republicans to break with party lines and vote against the ban, pointed to an amendment to exclude training or practicing with a team from the ban as a reasonable piece of it. Zwonitzer also puts stock in the intentions of the bill’s main sponsor, Schuler.

“I don’t think it was brought as a bill to attack the LGBT community, like a lot of the other bills in the past,” Zwonitzer said. “This is truly about fairness in women’s sports. So I think that’s why it passed.”

Strategy

A longtime athlete and coach, Schuler got her start in sports in the early days of Title IX. Enacted in 1972, the federal civil rights law prohibits sex discrimination at education institutions that receive federal funding in primary, secondary and higher education — effectively ensuring that everyone would have the same opportunities in school sports, regardless of their sex.

“I’ve been an advocate for girls and their sports opportunities ever since, because I was on the other end and saw how unfortunate it was that so many of us had to sit on the sidelines,” Schuler said. She first brought a bill to sideline transgender athletes in the 2022 budget session after she’d been approached by some constituents.

“Their kids had gone over and competed in Utah, and they’d [encountered] a couple of transgender athletes over there who just overwhelmed these gals,” Schuler said. She went back to the drawing board after the 2022 version of the bill died. Those efforts included working with Burlingame, who Schuler said has been a friend since they both started in the Legislature in 2019.

“I visited with her, talked with other people. Of course, she wanted me to just take away the ban completely, and I just said, ‘No, I can’t do that,’” Schuler said.

Instead, Schuler removed collegiate athletics from the bill and added language to create the commission, which largely resembles the one in Utah. Utah’s commission was activated last year after a judge reversed the state’s ban on the basis that it violated equal rights and due process under the state’s constitution. And similar to Utah’s commission, Wyoming’s law prescribes that the committee consist of certain persons — including a mental health professional and a parent of a current student — and that the committee’s work not be subject to public records law.

“She obviously thinks I’m very wrongheaded in my support for all transgender athletes, and I believe that her bill has potentially fatal consequences for children,” Burlingame said. One social worker told lawmakers during the 2023 session that Wyoming families with transgender children were in crisis on account of the bill, with most of those children being on suicide watch.

With such high stakes, Burlingame said some of her organization’s national partners have at times encouraged her to take a less compromising approach and to break relationships with lawmakers who don’t fully support LGBTQ rights.

“And we have to say, that doesn’t work and we don’t believe it,” Burlingame said. Still, Burlingame said she wants people to understand that the next chapter will require effort and it’s not just LGBTQ rights on the line.

“Government doesn’t exist to limit anyone’s civil rights and the Freedom Caucus is just destroying that concept,” Burlingame said. “Like they’re just taking an ax to it, and it will change the whole character of Wyoming.”

People, she continued, “will have to do something that costs them something, they’ll have to do something that puts them in a place of moral courage.”

The post Law marks turning point for LGBTQ rights in Wyoming. How did we get here? appeared first on WyoFile.

In recent years Wyoming workers have died falling from roofs, getting crushed by machinery, being killed on roadways and, on one occasion, falling through ice during a rescue attempt, according to state and federal data.

One “fatal alert” posted at the Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s website summarizes a 2022 mowing incident in just 68 words and lists as a factor, “It took approximately 20 minutes for anyone to notice the employee was in need of assistance.”

Wyoming improved its year-over-year per-capita fatality rate in 2021 — the most recent year for which complete data is available — seeing 23% fewer on-the-job fatalities, according to state and National Safety Council data. Even with the improvement, Wyoming ranked worst in the nation.

Wyoming also ranked worst-in-the-nation in 2020, according to an AFL-CIO report, with 13 workplace fatalities per 100,000 workers compared to second-worst Alaska with 10.7.

“If you want to know why we don’t have an adequate workforce in Wyoming, look at our [per-capita on-the-job] death rate,” Wyoming AFL-CIO Executive Director Tammy Johnson said. “If you want to know why we don’t have a workforce in Wyoming, look at the policies we have to protect workers. We don’t have any.”

Johnson will join other worker advocates at an AFL-CIO-organized commemoration at the State Capitol today in recognition of Workers’ Memorial Day. The annual event honors those who went to work to earn a paycheck only to be killed on the job, including the 27 workers who died in Wyoming in 2021 and the 35 workers who died in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Figures are not yet publicly available for 2022.

Johnson said she and other worker advocates in Wyoming are tired of excuses offered to explain the state’s deadly workplace track record — explanations that include driving long distances, remote workplaces far from medical care, inclement weather and a lack of safety knowledge among employees.

“It’s time for this state to take action and make employers responsible for job safety,” Johnson said. “[Employers] need to be held accountable for [on-the-job fatalities], not fined. Held accountable.”

The AFL-CIO worries that workplace safety isn’t a national priority. The union organization’s new “Death on the Job” report shows that agriculture, transportation, mining and construction — which all contribute significantly to Wyoming’s economy — still ranked among the deadliest jobs in the nation in 2021. It also found that Black and Latino workers are most likely to get killed on the job.

“Over the years, the progress has become more challenging as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified,” the AFL-CIO stated in the report’s executive summary.

Oversight limitations

There’s much room for improvement when it comes to workplace safety, Wyoming OSHA Program Manager Karen J. Bebensee said. But she discounts Wyoming’s 2021 worst-in-the-nation workplace fatality rate status for its inclusion of workers who don’t reside in the state and employers that are not based in Wyoming.

“Statistics are tricky, to be quite honest,” Bebensee said. “Any loss-of-life is a tragedy, but a lot of those are actually motor-vehicle accidents because we have huge interstate systems.”

Authority over workplace safety is limited and divided among several different agencies. Agriculture, for example, is exempt from OSHA rules and regulations, as are highways, Bebensee said. Other employee fatalities, such as heart attacks and COVID-related deaths among employees are not under OSHA jurisdiction but those incidents are included in a state’s workplace fatality rate calculation.

“There’s a lot that we don’t have jurisdiction over,” Bebensee said. “But we do compliance inspections, we have consultation programs and provide a lot of resources.”

It is difficult to collect and analyze enough data from various agencies to develop responsive strategies to improve workplace safety at the state level, Bebensee added. “Honestly, we’d love to have more people get involved in that,” she said, “but we do work with a lot of different employers.”

Continual problem

Workplace safety has dogged Wyoming throughout the state’s history. Even in modern times, Wyoming has continually ranked worst or among the worst in the nation for workplace fatalities, resulting in several efforts to improve safety.

The state created a Safety Improvement Fund in 2012 inviting employers to apply for up to $10,000 in state funds with a 10% match. State lawmakers considered stiffer OSHA penalties in 2014, responding to criticism that fines are not enough of a deterrent for ignoring safety standards and regulations. In 2016, Wyoming Workforce Services launched a “Safety and Risk” division. It’s unclear whether the industry-led Wyoming Oil & Gas Industry Safety Alliance, formed more than a decade ago, is still active.

Most of those efforts, however, are voluntary and rely on the good will of employers, the AFL-CIO’s Johnson said. There needs to be more inspections, more consequential enforcement actions and more empowerment of employees in Wyoming, she said, but state officials are leery of policies that empower workers.

“When I talk to legislators about safety statutes or protecting workers or workers rights or anything to do with changing how we work with employers and workers, I get crickets,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to talk about it.”

A stronger union presence in Wyoming would go a long way to empower workers, she said. But that’s difficult in a state like Wyoming that prioritizes “right to work” laws. This past legislative session, lawmakers again embraced an anti-union position with the passage of Senate File 147 – Government contracts-labor organization. The bill prohibits state agencies from entering into project labor agreements on public works projects.

A pervasive anti-union attitude among state-elected officials, combined with a poor workplace safety track record, doesn’t bode well for Wyoming’s ambition to attract enough qualified workers to construct major new power transmission lines and wind energy facilities that are in the works, or build myriad other infrastructure projects that are backed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Johnson said.

“They want to leave [workplace safety] up to the employers, and if you look at the data, you’ll see how good the employers are doing with that.”

The post Wyoming is the deadliest state in the nation for workers, again appeared first on WyoFile.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in Mile Markers, a twice monthly newsletter from Open Campus about the role of colleges in rural America. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

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Growing up in a working-class family in rural Wyoming, Ty McNamee knew that there was little spare money to pursue his dream of going to college.

“Although we have a farm and ranch, it’s a family business and almost any of the money we make goes back into our operating expenses,” he says.

In order to go to college, he and his twin brother both relied on federal aid. That made all the difference for McNamee, who is now a professor studying rurality and social class in higher education at the University of Mississippi.

Despite being more likely to graduate high school than their urban or suburban peers, rural students are the least likely to attend college.

Experts are worried that rural students will become even less likely to get a college degree, due to changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) that take effect this fall.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is expected to introduce a bill this week to restore the exemption. She and three other senators released a statement in March “raising the alarm” about how families could be negatively affected.

“These farm families, whose businesses are vital to our states’ communities and economies, need tailored guidance to respond to their unique business model,” the bipartisan group wrote in the letter addressed to the Department of Education. (Ernst was joined by fellow Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley , Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).

(And in case you’re curious, there are about 2.1 million family farms in the U.S., though not every one would necessarily be affected by the FAFSA change.)

It remains to be seen whether the bill will move forward in Congress. But without it, the new requirements will compound the difficulties rural students already have when pursuing higher education, potentially adding to the enrollment challenges colleges are already facing.

“You can’t sell tractors” to to pay for college.

That’s a special concern to Frank Ballman, federal relations director for the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs. The association has lobbied for keeping the family farm and small business exemption.

Family farms may have a high net worth on paper but can’t actually sell their farm land or equipment to pay for college.

“If you’re an investor and you have stock, you can sell some of that stock,” says Ritchie Morrow, who works as a financial aid officer for the Nebraska state agency responsible for disbursing state education grants. “If you’re a family farmer, you can’t sell an auger, because you need it to move the corn. You can’t sell a tractor.”

Some argue the change just makes everything more complicated, as the new supposedly simpler FAFSA will require families to quantify the value of things like crops and land on top of other assets. And those vagaries are worsened by the fact that the Department of Education has already said it won’t be issuing instructions on how to calculate their value accurately.

A mistake could prove more than just costly: When families fill out the FAFSA, they are required to sign a statement certifying that they aren’t providing false information.

“What that says to a business owner is ‘Be prepared to go to jail or face a hefty fine,’” Ballmann says.

Ensuring rural students can go to college really matters. Many attend two- or -four year programs with the intention of learning the latest farming innovations and returning to their communities.

That was the case for Luke Carlson, a Nebraska farmer in his forties who left to attend Northwest Missouri State but knew he would return.

Luke has long worked alongside his stereotype-defying father Jim, who voted for former President Donald Trump but is known to quote Al Gore about climate change. (He was protesting the Keystone Pipeline when we first met a few years back, and had recently erected a 2.8-kilowatt solar panel over farmland drillers had tried to seize).

Their family has farmed in Nebraska for over a century, as Luke recently recounted in an article published by Central Valley Ag, a farmer-owned cooperative he serves on the board of.

He and his wife, Sherri, hope their three kids will have the same choices they did — whether it’s pursuing a university education, running the farm, or both.

But as family farms like theirs increasingly die out, are absorbed by corporations, or otherwise struggle to make ends meet their options could be dwindling.

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Wyoming Attorney General Bridget Hill and Gov. Mark Gordon oppose the secretary of state’s request to join their defense of the state’s abortion ban in an ongoing lawsuit.

Gordon and Hill, both defendants in the case challenging the ban, claim in a brief filed Tuesday that Chuck Gray doesn’t have legal standing, and that joining the case “in his official capacity” as secretary of state is contrary to Wyoming statutes.

“Public officers such as the Secretary of State ‘have and can exercise only such powers as are conferred to them by law,’” the filing states, citing the case McDougall v. Board of Land Commissioners of Wyoming.

“In Wyoming, the powers and duties of the Secretary of State are prescribed by the Wyoming Legislature,” the filing continues. “In his official capacity, Secretary of State Gray cannot intervene in this case unless a Wyoming statute authorizes him to do so.”

While Gray has argued he has standing given his role as successor to the governor and public records custodian, the defendants state neither give him authority to intervene or even participate in the trial.

Plaintiffs fighting for abortion access noted that potential intervenors could request to file amicus briefs in the case if denied the right to intervene. That option would allow them to share their perspective and evidence.

“In his official capacity, Secretary of State Gray cannot intervene in this case unless a Wyoming statute authorizes him to do so.”

AG/Governor filing in abortion ban case

Gordon and Hill, however, argue that Gray should not be allowed participation of any kind.

Ninth District Court Judge Melissa Owens has scheduled a hearing for May 24 at 1 p.m. to consider arguments from all sides for and against admitting the potential intervenors. Other defendants in the case have until May 1 to file a response to the intervenors’ request, and the intervenors have until May 19 to reply.

The governor and attorney general don’t oppose Right to Life of Wyoming or Reps. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody) or Chip Neiman’s (R-Hulett) requests to intervene in the case. The defendants do, however, “disagree with the intervenors’ apparent belief that this Court should hold an evidentiary hearing or a formal trial in this case and do oppose this Court granting them intervention based on the premise that such a hearing or trial is necessary.”

The case only involves “questions of law,” the filing states, which precludes the need for such a hearing or trial. That suggests the judge should only consider whether the new abortion bans are constitutional on their face, excluding information or evidence that goes beyond what’s needed to make that narrow determination.

Instead, defendants argue, the judge should issue a “summary judgment,” which would limit expenses for all parties.

The potential intervenors — excluding Gray — tried to intervene in the case over the state’s previous ban last year, but were denied. They appealed that decision to the Wyoming Supreme Court, but asked it to be dismissed in light of the 2023 ban that replaced the one from 2022.

Observers expect the case to ultimately be decided by the Wyoming Supreme Court, regardless of the outcome in district court, where it currently sits.

The post Gov., AG oppose secretary of state’s request to join abortion ban defense appeared first on WyoFile.