(uplifting music) - Members of the Wyoming House of Representatives and the Wyoming Senate are assembling in Cheyenne soon for the start of the 2024 biennial budget session of the Wyoming legislature.

Meanwhile, the State's governor has sent his budget message to lawmakers as well, in which he sets out his budget priorities for the next two years.

I'm Steve Peck.

We'll sit with Governor Mark Gordon as a new season of "Capital Outlook" begins here on Wyoming PBS.

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- Welcome to "Capital Outlook."

We're pleased and privileged again this year to begin our season with Governor Mark Gordon.

- Steve, it's wonderful to be here and thanks so much for coming here.

- Well, you're starting your sixth year in office.

Time flies sometimes, doesn't it?

- Oh, it does.

And especially if you look at the course of this, you know, of course I served as treasurer before, but coming into the second term, you really thought, wow, that might be a bit of a chance to kind of slow down a little bit.

And it seems like it's ramped up, which of course makes time fly faster.

- One of the things you did recently that I noticed, I think a lot of people around the country did.

You appeared on "60 Minutes" sometime around Thanksgiving.

That's not quite the prestige interview that "Capital Outlook" is, (laughing) but still that show commands a big audience, big national audience.

It was on right after an NFL football game, so even more eyes probably on you and on Wyoming.

How did that come about exactly?

How do you get invited to be on "60 Minutes"?

- If you remember a few years ago, "60 Minutes" did a great story on the drift with Albert Sommers.

- Yeah.

- And I called Albert, and I said, "There's so much conversation about energy, and Wyoming is gonna be ground zero for virtually every type of energy that's presented.

And yet the conversation we have isn't a balanced conversation.

Do you know anybody at "60 Minutes" that I can talk to that just sort of talk about what's going on in Wyoming and the balance we need to have?"

And the notion was, you know, here's a state that really is in a leadership role.

I thought the opportunity to talk about how Wyoming has got a great track record of doing conventional energy thoughtfully, carefully, environmentally soundly, that we have a great opportunity with our renewable portfolio and that in fact all of these things have impacts that affect not only the workforce, but the environment and that we need to talk about energy honestly and really talk about what our opportunities are.

- It's an interesting point that I think a lot of people outside Wyoming don't necessarily pick up on, given what our sort of stereotypical reputation probably is nationwide based on presidential elections and the congressional delegation and some of the rhetoric that is thrown around.

But it's kind of hard to pigeonhole Wyoming, isn't it?

- It seems to me the national conversation is, it's either or.

Wyoming is very much a we can develop and we can do great things for our environment, and we can protect our wildlife, and we can lead on issues like migration corridors, methane regulation, all these things that Wyoming has developed.

And in fact our industry has been very much engaged in the development of that.

And that's the point that I really wanted to carry forward to a national audience.

- Again and again on our own program, "Capital Outlook," Wyoming Chronicle as well, we've encountered individuals who've used state resources in ways that perhaps weren't expected.

So goes to what you were driving at that Wyoming's in the middle of a lot of things.

- As we talk about our energy portfolio going forward, we need to understand what the demand is gonna look like.

People think I need electricity, that's gonna be great if we can do it all renewable.

It's all ostensibly clean, and there's a role for wind to play and solar to play in that.

But we really need to have the ability to deliver electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and there's battery technologies, but there's a lot of environmental impact that comes with battery technology as well.

It's a long ways away.

And so we can use these conventional resources, and I think it's important that Wyoming be part of that conversation, because we can advance the technology and extend the life of our industries, which is one of the most important factors.

Our coal and our oil and gas account for a very large portion of our budget.

And the more that they're pressured not to produce, the more of a challenge it's gonna be for us to stay.

We need to make sure those industries stay viable, not only because we need the energy domestically, but also because they provide great jobs and tax revenues that help build our schools.

- I use the B word, budget, (laughing) the legislature is about to start its biennial budget session.

Part of that includes the governor sending a budget message to the lawmakers, the fiscal news in the past few months, as it's often the case in Wyoming, it's been kind of on a seesaw.

Am I right in thinking that generally speaking, things are looking fairly good for the biennium head?

How do you view that?

- Well, I think that Wyoming is in a pretty good spot right now.

We are more diverse than we've been in some time.

We have a lot of opportunity that's starting to show up, companies that are moving here and others that is helping.

And I think our tourism has gone up pretty substantially, but there's no discounting the fact that, you know, when I took office in that first year, we had roughly 33 rigs running in the state of Wyoming.

A week ago is down to 12.

This is a big problem.

We've seen a couple of our coal companies go through bankruptcy and change ownership.

And as I predicted off of the fairly optimistic view we had in October on the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, the CREG, you know, we would see a little bit of a decline.

And so I think it's time to be very cautious about our future.

I'm optimistic about it, but the other challenge with this budget that's a big challenge is, we were sort of moving along pretty well in 2019, 2020.

Then of course we had Covid.

Covid- - I'm gonna ask you about that.

- Was a dramatic, I mean, 1/3 of our revenue disappeared overnight.

Our ability to cut was bolstered by the fact we had some savings that could kind of take up the slack there.

But we still had to make substantial cuts.

Then we had, of course, Congress weighing in with tremendous amounts of money that are now drying up.

Those sources of drying up or we're using the last of them, that has sort of mitigated some of the challenges.

So we haven't really had a standard budget for a number of years.

- How carefully do you watch the CREG numbers in making specific budget recommendations?

Do you try to keep your budget thoughts sort of above those CREG numbers and concentrate on issues instead?

What's your approach to it?

- Well, I think that CREG often is subject to the volatility of the commodity markets.

I'm a rancher by background.

There are good years and bad.

You always try to make the most of the good years, so that you have something left over for the bad.

And so when I look at the CREG, it's very informative.

Trying to set the budget according to whatever the latest CREG forecast is is a mistake.

I think it's important that we understand where the CREG is and what its projections are, but I think it's also important to sort of get a better sense of how the overall economy is performing, and what we can see in the track record of Wyoming over the last several years, - You had mentioned the Coronavirus pandemic and the federal funds that came to Wyoming with it and all other states as well.

About a billion dollars give or take, a hundred million or so, running through most of that now, seeing the end of it.

What did that money mean to us?

How are we going to adjust now that it's running out?

- When the money first started showing up in both RPA funding and the IIJA funding and all of the various government programs that came along, I was saying we need to make sure that we make substantial investments that will benefit our grandchildren, because it's really our grandchildren who will be paying for this.

This is all borrowed money from future generations.

And so it seemed very important to me that we really focus on things like infrastructure, that we focus on ways to make sure that our communities were stronger coming out of that.

And for the most part, we've done a pretty good job.

The Office of State Lands and Investments and the State Loan and Investment Board have been able to use the monies that the legislature allowed us to do to build out water systems and help with roads and streets and other things like that.

So that's all been good.

Where the biggest challenge came from Covid and quite frankly, you lose 1/3 of your revenue, nobody's traveling.

That's even a bigger hit.

And you have to make these adjustments.

Wyoming's biggest agencies are health, corrections, family services, and you can't make meaningful cuts without affecting those, 'cause they're the largest parts of our budget.

So it was painful to do things like reduce senior in-home care.

It was really painful to have to make some of the reductions we did in family services.

We were able to get some savings outta corrections.

But now those are the issues that we're trying to figure out.

We were able to stop gap some of those with those federal funds.

And now it's a matter of trying to build back the programs well.

But we still have inflation with us.

And I think people in Wyoming are feeling that.

- So putting it back the way it was or closer to the way it was, it's gonna take time.

It's not gonna be as sudden as the influx of the Covid money is.

Could it be done in one biennium, two, three?

What do you think?

- I'm very hopeful this budget brings us back to a near, I'll say normal.

Normal in the sense that the economy's always changing, but more the way Wyoming has performed in the past.

But I think this is not an easy sort of one and done.

It's fixed and we can move on.

- There've been several bills discussed in various stages of pre-planning as the session years related to the sort of umbrella term reforming property tax.

- Sure.

- In Wyoming, which tends to mean in the language of these bills, finding ways to reduce it.

How big a priority is that for you, and do you see a particular approach to it that you favor?

- It's certainly a very high priority for me.

If you look back to, again, Covid, Wyoming was open, people loved the idea that we were a conservative state, that we weren't putting a lot of regulations and restrictions in place.

And so people moved here in droves and property taxes, because assessed valuations were going up, really hit people on fixed income and low income, especially hard.

And for ranchers for example, you know, the corresponding change in their income levels didn't happen.

And so really put a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on particularly senior citizens, low income folks of families that have been here for a number of years.

We put forward straight up rebate in place.

91% of the requests were funded.

That was a pretty successful program, successful enough that we actually doubled and put $20 million into that program this year to get relief targeted to the people who need it the most.

And so we're pushing for that in the budget.

Outside of that, the legislature has a number of pieces of legislation.

My biggest concern is that we understand how property tax works.

It funds mostly the schools, and then it funds the counties for things like, you know, our local fire departments and roads and other things.

So when we cut property taxes, if we don't have a way for the state, which we don't currently, to be able to backfill that, the services and the opportunities that counties have to be able to meet the needs of their citizens are gonna be reduced.

And I think one of the great things about Wyoming is that we do believe in government closest to the people and accountable to the people, which is why I think we need to make sure that we preserve the right for voters to be able to vote on the taxes that they want to impose on themselves for whatever it may be.

So when I look at that, the sort of broad brush stuff I think is problematic.

I like the idea of capping how much assessments can raise in a given year, but the specific remedy that we're proposing is that rebate.

- And the typical issue, I think if I'm right about this, is that someone who perhaps came in during the pandemic, now I've been looking for a place to move, I've saved up some money, here's my chance, lays down some big money for a house or a ranch or something like that and suddenly the guy who's lived there for 40 years nearby sees his property tax go up based on the comparison with this new one.

And that person has nowhere to go.

- That is absolutely correct.

So Johnson County where our ranch is, 23%, 24% raise.

Teton County very, very high.

But the average home there is around $3.8 million, $3.8 to 4.2.

- It strikes me as one of these issues where we almost might get ahead of ourselves a little bit.

Voters of course love the idea, boy, I don't have to pay as much property tax as I used to.

- Right.

- Meanwhile, the school's falling apart or we need an ambulance or the library's not open anymore.

And this is the difficulty that you and the legislators have to sift through.

- There is no denying.

When you look at Lincoln County, Crook County, Sheridan County, even Laramie County, you know, they've all had substantial increase in the property tax and considering the fact that many of the people who were moving here had bought these sight unseen, because they were wanting to get away from wherever it was.

Unintended consequence increase in the taxes, but really problematic for those people.

And it makes it very hard to be able to pass your ranch on to another generation, pass your home onto another generation.

So my hope is that as we look at this, that the legislature fully discusses what are the ways that we can really bring relief to property tax payers without compromising the revenues that need to go to keep our schools in the great condition they are and to make sure that we have those services that we need.

And I would remind people that this year there is a constitutional amendment that is on the ballot that will allow for a definition of residential, which can allow us to reduce residential property taxes overall.

- An issue I know that you've followed and been involved with during the previous year has been EMS or emergency services around the state.

In the past decade or so, I know that services that used to be considered more or less essential and were part of county governments most of the time and many cases have been privatized now because that's, it was an idea worth exploring.

Could a private company do it better than the government could?

Results have been mixed, I think would be the fair way to put that.

What's your view on what's going on with EMS and how could we make the situation better?

There's an easy one for you.

- Yeah.

- Make that better.

- Well, I think one of the things that we've looked at is how can we make EMS services more of an essential service?

How do we recognize that when you call 911, that somebody's able to to respond, and look, you know, growing up in Kaycee when I did in the late, you know, through the '60s and '70s, I can remember if somebody got hurt on the ranch, you know, you'd usually throw 'em in the back of Dad's station wagon and get 'em blanketed up and drive them to the hospital, which wasn't much of a hospital in those days.

It's come a long ways and, you know, over gravel roads and bumpy and all that sort of stuff.

And that clearly wasn't the best answer.

So to have local group kind of organized a volunteer ambulance service and bought an ambulance.

Ambulances are incredibly expensive.

- Are they ever.

- You know, Niobrara just came asking for a new ambulance, 'cause the one they have, the motor cuts out regularly.

And so if it's- - Can't have that with an ambulance.

- Right, exactly.

And if it's a couple of weeks ago and it was below zero, then you're halfway between Lusk and Torrington, that not a good thing.

And so what I think- - So is there a state solution to this, I guess is the question?

- Well, we've really looked at this over the last couple of years.

One is that we have these ambulance sort of areas of service kind of districts that don't make a lot of sense.

One of them was like east of Shoshone up to Kaycee, down to Lusk, all because that sort of made sense for Casper, but obviously there's a lot of other territory in between.

So we've really talked about what are the things we can do to regionalize ambulance service in a way that makes much more sense, that's more fundable, that can be easier to do.

So Sheridan and Campbell County now have kind of worked together, providing a regionalized, Cody's done another area of service, and to try to figure out how we can make this work that gets a professional staff in place.

So many of our volunteers are really starting to age out.

That gives us the opportunity to be able to employ and get, you know, professional staff that can stay on, which is particularly important in rural areas.

So we need to get a handle on those expenses.

We need to make sure that when people call 911, they can be assured that they're gonna have someone there.

And that's particularly true of our remotest places, places like Kinnear, where if the ambulance crew is transporting a patient to Salt Lake, they're essentially left without anyone to pick up the slack in that.

- An issue related to that is the hospital environment in Wyoming is much different now from the way it was 20 years ago.

- Mm-hmm.

- Fewer full service hospitals than there used to be.

And so there's a question now, where do we take this traumatized person in our ambulance?

Complicated thing, I have a feeling it's another one of these issues that's gonna take a while to get through, but worth taking the time on.

- Absolutely, people in Wyoming deserve to have healthcare.

They deserve to have good emergency medical services, and the costs that are associated, this goes back to even Freudenthal's time when ambulance services were so expensive that he was looking at solutions.

I know Governor Mead looked at solutions.

We've been talking about the regionalized approach and trying to cut down on so much of air travel, that seems to be one of the most expensive and most dangerous ways, great companies, et cetera.

But you know, suddenly you're stuck with an an amazingly high bill, and this is problematic for people in Wyoming.

- Another issue that I know consumed a lot of your time where state and federal issues meet, let's just say, is this Bureau of Land management a plan for the Rock Springs areas, as it's come to be known.

There's always give and take, shall we say, some friction between the state and the BLM.

But this seemed to be a bigger, more volatile or more problematic issue for Wyoming than some BLM proposals have been.

- It had been kind of in the pipeline, so to speak, for at least 12 years.

I can remember talking with then Secretary Bernhardt about what we can do.

Then of course you have the Biden administration came in, and there was kind of radio silence on Rock Springs for quite a while.

And then suddenly out of the blue came, came a proposal, and normally they're usually a high and a low.

Let's develop a lot, let's not develop a lot, let's protect a lot.

Something in between that had been kind of negotiated, and then whatever the status quo was.

In this case, there had been a well negotiated over several administrations, as I say, kind of alternative.

And when the Biden administration issued the RMP, it was, or the draft RMP, it envisioned the full protection, it called it the conservation alternative.

It was more of a preservation alternative.

It completely ignored the work that had been worked on for 12 years.

And then they completely discounted all the development and then the status quo was sort of left intact.

And the concern was that this administration's priority on protecting the environment was coming at the expense really of the jobs and the opportunities and in fact the local sentiments that were there, and being very clear about that.

These are people who care about recreating.

They care about hunting and fishing.

They care about the resource.

They know the Red Desert, they love Little Mountain.

They know Killpecker Sand Dunes, and all the great things that are out there.

So to have them sort of ignored in that process was a really a kind of a slap in the face.

We were able to work with the Department of Interior to get a little bit extra time and to invite director Tracy Stone-Manning out to listen to what that task force, which represented a broad cross section, from the environmental groups to motorized recreation to trona mining to the counties and to tourism.

And ultimately, I think it was a good exercise.

I hope that it has an impact on what comes next, which is a final document.

- It begins with being heard.

And that's what you were stressing.

That's the feeling that I got.

I wanna be sure that Wyoming plays a bigger role in this than some people have in mind.

- Well, I think that's true and I think in some cases there's this national agenda, and what really concerned me most was that this national agenda was being sort of foisted on southwestern Wyoming.

It was absolutely, you know, not attuned to what the local population cared about.

And there's always gotta be a conversation.

After all, the federal government is our largest landlord and that sometimes is problematic.

And so we do have to work with them, but they should be respectful of the local communities.

- Governor, I know we could spend a lot longer talking, but you, I get the impression you're a busy man and so you have other things to do besides speak with us today.

But I appreciate the time very much and best of luck to you and working with the lawmakers as the session convenes and as your second term continues.

- Well, thank you.

- And always a pleasure sir, and thanks for being with us on "Capital Outlook."

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