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CHEYENNE — It’s been 15 years since the Wyoming Legislature last revised its funding formula for school maintenance and repairs, and one state official said an adjustment is long overdue. But after a primary election set the stage for the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, a far-right group of hardline Republicans, to take control of the lower chamber in November, at least one lawmaker questions how well a bill that appropriates $43 million in major maintenance funds will do in the next legislative session. The Legislature’s Select Committee on Schoo...
CASPER — Less than 25% of eighth graders are proficient in civics, and PBS is trying to combat that. In partnership with GBH, which is the primary PBS station out of Boston, PBS LearningMedia has put together a collection of civics resources, lesson plans and activities for primary and secondary education teachers. “The new collection will draw on media to engage students, spark their interest in civics, and promote the active learning of skills by connecting the basic principles from the nation’s founding documents to issues they care about...
SHERIDAN — For many Wyomingites, buying a home is one of the biggest decisions of their lives, but the real estate world can be one with a steep learning curve. A first-time homeowner may wonder the difference between a real estate agent and a Realtor, or the difference between a buyer's agent and a seller's agent. Another may wonder what guarantee they have that a listing will accurately reflect the home they visit. And although rare, cases like the Gillette Realtor accused of forging s...
By Mike Koshmrl, Katie Klingsporn and Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile.com A year after a conservation-heavy draft management plan for 3.6 million acres of public land in southwest Wyoming ignited intense opposition, the Bureau of Land Management has issued a finalized plan seeking more of a balance between landscape protection and development. The final environmental impact statement outlining BLM’s proposed Resource Management Plan for the Rock Springs Field Office was released Thursday. The plan b...
CASPER — An up-and-coming renewable energy venture on Tuesday filed an application for the construction of a large-scale solar generation and storage project that could add an additional 500 megawatts to the state’s energy portfolio. The Dutchman Renewable Power Project would see the construction of utility-scale photovoltaic solar panels, battery banks, a new substation and three miles of overhead transmission lines to bring its electric generation near Glenrock to the wider Wyoming grid. The application comes at a gangbusters moment for sol...
JACKSON — Local elections aren’t just about deciding who sits on the Town Council or heads to Cheyenne to write laws in the Wyoming Legislature. Voters decide on the makeup of their county political parties. Precinct committee people are selected every two years to make up the county central committee, according to Wyoming law, for the Democratic and Republican parties. One precinct committeeman and committee woman is elected for every 250 votes or major fraction cast for the party candidate’s representative in Congress in the last gener...
CASPER — Weighing less than 1 pound, with short ears, little legs and an endearingly “scampering gait,” the pygmy rabbit is the smallest rabbit species in America. Worryingly, though, its population is also small — and getting smaller — and is now in desperate need of protection, according to a chorus of conservation scientists. In the hope of protecting the species, a contingent of conservation groups issued a notice to sue the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for failure to respond t...
POWELL — After migrating to the North Fork of the Shoshone River and more than a dozen major tributaries to spawn in the spring and early-summer months, many of the highly migratory rainbow and Yellowstone cutthroat trout return to Buffalo Bill Reservoir. This wild population of trout, which have survived without stocking efforts from Wyoming Game and Fish Department fisheries biologists, is the pride of the Cody Region. But while the population isn’t being supplemented, it is getting help. Reg...
A Campbell County single parent with one preschooler and one school-age child needs to earn more than $60,000 annually to cover basic monthly costs living in Wyoming, according to a new report on affordability in the state. At the minimum wage standard of $7.25 per hour, he or she would have to work a superhuman 159 hours a week to make that happen. “But there are only 168 hours in a full week,” said Micah Richardson, associate policy director of Wyoming Women’s Foundation. The found...
GREYBULL - Amid red flag warnings, dry weather and record high temperatures, Wyoming has found itself blanketed in smoke from both local and regional wildfires raging across the western United States and Canada. Since mid-July, Wyomingites have woken to blood red suns and hazy conditions. Two of the four major fires in Montana were brought under control last week, offering a brief reprieve and some blue skies, but the smoke has since returned, carried on eastern winds out of Oregon and California, and southern currents from Alberta, Canada....
Federal wildlife managers won’t make any jurisdictional decisions about Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bears until early 2025 — two full years after the agency was supposed to proceed with or deny Wyoming’s petition to cease Endangered Species Act protections for the region’s grizzlies. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Director Matt Hogan announced the delay in a legal filing last week, citing a mess of lawsuits and grizzly-related decisions that “directly impact one another.” “To ensure consistency between these decisions, th...
CHEYENNE — Was U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., justified in chasing down former U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle at the Republican National Convention, days after former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated? Was Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman’s description of Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire” a full-blown racist comment? Nearly a dozen Wyoming Republican and Democratic political candidates and party leaders weighed in on the recent actions and comments by two of the Cowboy State’s three federal l...
JACKSON — A single mother with two children has to make $45 an hour to be “self-sufficient” in Teton County. The Wyoming Women’s Foundation’s 2024 Self Sufficiency Report reveals such a wage will cover a family’s basic expenses — transportation, groceries, health care, child care, taxes and housing (assuming rent is only $1,700 a month) — without room for most extraneous purchases. When the foundation last released its report, in 2020, a three-person family in Teton County had to make $39 an hour. In 2005, it was $18 an hour. “Yes, we all kn...
POWELL — As the State of Wyoming moves forward with plans to build a world-class shooting facility, a panel is recommending that the complex be built in Cody. Following months of proposals, pitches and site visits, a task force voted 8-4 to favor a chunk of state land south of Cody over a competing spot near the Campbell County Cam-plex in Gillette. Campbell County put together an appealing proposal that included millions of dollars of funding and property that’s easily accessible and all but shovel ready. In contrast, Cody’s remote site impre...
CHEYENNE — Defendants in the public records lawsuit led by former lawyers George Powers of Cheyenne and Rodger McDaniel of Laramie have been found to have “knowingly or intentionally” violated the Wyoming Public Records Act. The lawsuit, filed against the Wyoming Department of Education, Communications Director Linda Finnerty and former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Brian Schroeder, was related to records detailing the origin of funds for a press conference titled “Stop the Sexualization of Our Children.” The event, organized...
Wyoming’s top elected officials denounced political violence and offered their prayers following an assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “President Trump, his family and the families of the victims of today’s shooting are in our prayers,” Gov. Mark Gordon said in a statement. Trump’s campaign said the presumptive GOP nominee was doing “fine” after the shooting, according to the Associated Press, after a bullet pierced the u...
CODY — The Biden administration has recently proposed a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule aimed at protecting workers from extreme heat exposure. This regulation, while potentially life-saving, could impose significant costs on employers. The proposed rule, announced on July 2, 2024, requires employers to develop comprehensive heat illness prevention plans. These plans would include measures such as providing water, mandatory rest breaks, and monitoring for heat-related symptoms when temperatures reach certain t...
CASPER—Walking into the Natrona County Townsend Justice Center is a bit daunting. You’re met with security, asked to part with electronic devices and then shepherded through a metal detector. Take a quick right, then left, and just past the elevator you arrive at the Natrona County Court Navigator Pilot Project, which has a name possibly larger than the closet-like space from which it operates. While sparse and windowless, the room and its volunteers represent an effort from the state’s judiciar...
CHEYENNE — When former Wyoming lawmaker Rodger McDaniel wrote the story of former U.S. Sen. Lester Hunt’s death, it was a story that hadn’t been told before. The story is one of suicide, blackmail and how divisive politics permanently changed the lives of a Wyoming politician’s family. “When I wrote the book ‘Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins,’ very few people knew (the story),” McDaniel told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. “They were shocked to learn that there was a time in Wyoming history when politics was so divisive that it resulted in a suici...
POWELL — The Supreme Court has overturned the Chevron Doctrine, which instructed courts to defer to federal agencies on details where the law is unclear, so long as that guidance is “reasonable." The decision, released Friday by the court, will significantly reduce the federal government’s power to interpret laws and issue regulations — including protections for the environment, wildlife and their habitats and how scientists work in a variety of fields. The victory for Loper Bright Enterprises, a herring fishing company in New Jersey, will ma...
JACKSON—Naysayers were nowhere to be found Thursday in the Teton County commissioners’ chambers, where residents showered praise on a plan to lease a 640-acre swath of state land on Munger Mountain to keep it open to the public and undeveloped. The occasion was a hearing of the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments, which is formally analyzing a 35-year “recreational lease” proposal that Teton County sent the state agency this spring. Accolades followed accolades as one Jackson Hole re...
KEMMERER — Monday, June 10, may have started like a normal day for Kemmerer, but as black vans rolled in single file to pick up more than 200 people to shuttle them to the official TerraPower groundbreaking ceremony, it was apparent this was no ordinary day. Heavy excavating equipment set against the big open sky with the Naughton coal plant — which is scheduled for retirement — across the way, served as an appropriate backdrop for the event. Attached to a dozer and an excavator were the American and Wyoming flags, which blew gently in the b...
GILLETTE (WNE) — A new program to help Gillette residents with their mental health has gotten off to a fast start. Earlier this spring, the Northeast Wyoming Community Health Foundation launched Hope Source to help people pay for therapy and counseling costs. Nachelle McGrath, executive director of the foundation, said she’s received 20 applications, and 10 of them have been approved. The other applications were sent back because they needed more information, and they will be re-submitted. “I didn’t realize we’d have so many so quickly,...
JACKSON (WNE) — A 0.1-acre wildland fire that broke out in Yellowstone National Park, dubbed the "Milepost 17 Fire" and the first of the season, was on track to be contained on Tuesday, the park announced in a Monday press release. The lightning-ignited fire was detected by a motorist driving on Highway 191, on the west side of the park, after lightning torched a single tree almost a mile west of Highway 191 and 17 miles north of West Yellowstone, Montana. Yellowstone wildland firefighters were suppressing the fire and expected it to be c...
SHERIDAN — As many builders across Wyoming chip away at a demand for homes that still outpaces supply, any new housing will help alleviate Wyoming’s so-called housing crisis. A greater number of all types of housing — from low income to mid-level to higher end, custom housing — would help, experts say. Available housing at all levels allows people mobility, meaning that someone who moves into a large, custom home at a higher price could free up a mid-level home for another family. However, if a community doesn’t have homes at a higher pr...
