- In the Wyoming legislature, there's probably no more authoritative figure than state Senator Barry Crago, Republican House District 22 from Johnson County on the changing face of property taxes in Wyoming.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming, PBS Join us now for capital Outlook.

Welcome to Capital Outlook.

We're here at the Wyoming Capital at the intersection of 24th and Capital streets in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Joined today by State Senator Barry Crago, Republican Senate District 22 Johnson.

And do you, is one of your district is one of those that spills over into another county - Y Yes sir.

So it's all of Johnson County and part of Sheridan County.

Our good president, Senator Biteman has the other part of Sheridan County.

- He was our guest as it happened last week.

So this brings up a tiny little quirk of representational government that I like to bring up when I can.

You are, I believe, the Senator for Governor Mark Gordon.

Right?

- I I, I do get to be the senator for the governor, but also for the First Lady, which might be more important.

- Yes.

And they live in, in your district when they're not, when they're not here.

Assuming you're acquainted with with both of 'em.

- I am very well.

They're great people.

It's an honor to be their neighbor.

- Wow.

Good.

Glad, glad to hear that.

We are here on a Wednesday evening and thanks to you for making time after what I is always a busy session, but you said you got done on, on time today and so that's probably a good sign.

You were in the chair, right?

- I was, I was running the committee of the whole, so oftentimes when people click on the Zoom and they, they see us out there doing, doing the work.

If if you're not the president or the vice president and you're sitting in the chair, it's likely you're running committee of the whole, which means we're working the bills on their first reading.

- First reading.

So there's a schedule that we go through and this is the shorter of the two legislative sessions, the budget session scheduled for 20 days.

We have, as we're sitting here now, about a week to go on the basic schedule that can change a little bit, run too many more days like you did today.

We might get done early, but could reserve another day or so.

If, if that came up Any sense?

I know you can't predict exactly what's gonna happen, especially since the house district or the house chambers also working, but any sense of how on time we are now?

I know there was some discrepancy earlier.

- You know, I think we're doing fine.

The, the Senate is probably ahead of schedule.

Our leadership has done a really good job of keeping us on task, keeping us move, moving forward.

We did not spend the amount of time that the House did on the budget.

We worked it in dramatically less time.

And so we're in a good spot.

We, we should be able to get through all the house bills.

No problems.

I don't know about the house.

They're probably a little bit behind us and so we'll just have to wait and see where we get.

But both, both the House and the Senate now have appointed their conference committees for the, for the budget bill.

So we'll see how that plays out over the next few days.

- And that's, doesn't necessarily reflect that there's some problem.

A conference committee is just inevitable in any budget, right?

- It, it, it is.

That's how the budget process works.

Every budget process includes a conference committee.

So the senate works, their version of the bill sends it down to the house to review the house works their version of the bill and sends it to us.

It's called the mere budget bill process.

And so once we've each passed the bill out of our chambers, then we appoint a conference committee.

By we, I mean the presiding officers.

So the speaker and the president appoints a conference committee and then five people, five members from each chamber meet to go over those differences and try to resolve those differences because they rarely are the same.

In fact, I don't know if it's ever happened where they're exactly the same.

- Sure.

And that's just the way it goes.

Different, different people with different ideas, just different approaches.

How far apart are we roughly between the two bills now?

- You know, I think the last report I heard was around 170 million, but some of that is just coming from different places as well.

So I think it actually could be less than that in total.

- Now that's real money of course, but the overall state budget is roughly how big.

- Yeah.

Billions.

And so this is, yeah, this is not that big of a difference in, in reality.

- And it strikes you at least as being resolvable.

- Absolutely.

I, I too, - It always gets resolved, but - Yes sir.

I think it in both houses, I think they were both chambers.

They would tell you we're close.

We we should be able to figure this out.

It each side gives a little bit.

We should be able to get there.

- Do you happen to be on the conference committee?

- I do.

I do not.

- Do not.

You are in your second year as a senator.

Do I have that right?

And served four years prior in the, in the Wyoming house?

- That's correct.

So I, yeah, I did four years in the house, house District 40, which is now held by Representative Connolly and moved over to the Senate two years ago.

- What got you interested in public office?

- Well, I, I've been in interested in politics in civics and just being involved in government for a, a very long time.

I grew up with a grandmother who served in this body who served in the Wyoming State House for a very long time.

- Sure.

Hers is a name, many will remember.

Say it for us.

- Marlene Simons.

And so I've spent a lot of time around this place and just grew up admiring the process.

I've spent the last almost 20 years working as a Deputy county attorney, which means, and I do all the civil work for Johnson County, which means I get to attend all the board meetings, whether it's county commissioners, library board, predator District, you name it.

I go to all of the different meetings that are happened back home.

And so that, just being involved in the community and seeing what everybody else does and how they pitched it pitch in probably prompted me to say, yeah, I'm willing to do the same thing and go to Cheyenne and act on people's behalf from back home.

- Yeah.

Deputy attorney.

Pretty good training for lots of other civic duties I would assume.

- It, it, it is, in particular, the civil part of that job allows me to learn what all of these other local districts do, what the county does, you know, and all have also represented small towns.

And so we've represented the town of Kaycee for very long tim So just, you know, have the ability and, and the opportunity really to the good opportunity to learn so much about Wyoming and, and its people.

- Well, you mentioned off camera as well that you were an intern for the legislature when you were a kid, right?

- I, I was, when I was in college, I did an internship over here.

Yes, sir.

So - Nothing turned you off.

Made in fact made you want to come back.

- It it, it did.

That's right.

- Why the move across from House to Senate?

What prompted bat?

- So Senator Kinsky decided not to run, it was an opportunity to, to join the Senate and, and I took that opportunity.

I it's not better or worse, it's just different.

- Different how?

- Well, for one, for those who have watched the Senate and the House, the debate is markedly different.

I would say the Senate is probably a more controlled environment.

My kids tell me it's boring compared to the house.

And there's probably some truth to that, that it, that it is that.

And so, but if you watch the debates on the floor, the house has a, you know, has much more conversation going on during the debates.

The senate's more focused on the individual.

If you, if you go look at the paintings on the walls, the, the paintings in the corners of the chambers of both the House and the, the Senate, you'll notice the ones in the Senate are focused on individuals and the ones in the house are focused on groups.

- No kidding, I had not noticed that.

Now I really want to.

- Yes.

And so those paintings that were put up there and, and procured by Mr.

True Allen Tupper True.

Those paintings signify the bodies themselves.

Hmm.

They really do.

And so one's more, you know, more about groups and working together as groups and, and the, I think the Senate's more about working as an individual and if you watch the debate and watch how things happen, it's definitely true.

- No kidding.

So it isn't just recent divisions or ideologies or anything that since you're getting that historically is it's always been that way?

- It's always been that way in my recollection, both from when I was as a young man to being here.

Now as a member of both Chambers, - You've mentioned that the budget conferencing process is about to begin.

The house has its version of the budget bill the Senate has its version of the budget Bill.

Something that was interesting to me, and I don't know if it was directly in response to, let's just say the, the, i, I think it's safe to say some of the difficulty that the House had in getting through its version of the budget.

There was notably, and it's been covered elsewhere, a session where more than a hundred amendments were brought up and they went into the middle of the night.

Well past at one o'clock, one 30 in the morning to try to get through all those.

I, I don't know about you, but I know in some of my work through my life, working in the, into the middle of the night on detailed work isn't necessarily conducive to doing the very best you can or I didn't feel confident that I really was.

And I'm sure they must have felt that as well.

The Senate may be in response to this, and I hope you can address that a little bit.

Did something that in my experience, long experience in watching the legislature I'd never seen done before, which was rather than create our own from scratch budget Bill, let's accept the budget that the governor put forward submitted to us in November outlining his state of state or death.

And we used that as our starting point.

What'd you think of that idea when it first came out?

- I thought it was a great idea.

Yeah.

Supported it fully.

Otherwise we would've been doing the same thing the House did, which was going through budget by budget, you know, agency by agency and trying to get back to where the governor recommended we start.

The governor sent us a responsible, as he called it, essentials budget.

It didn't overspend it spent things on it, spent money on the things people expected government to spend money on and, and that's what it did.

And so it, it was a responsible place to start.

Of course we then went in and made changes up and down and, you know, made it our budget in the Senate.

But it saved us days and days of time and in the end we had a fairly good support for the, you know, final product.

- A point that Senate President Biteman then brought up last week on this show was one I will acknowledge I hadn't really thought of before when thinking about starting your budget bill from scratch, you only have half as many people as the house does.

And he said, that can become a problem in a real big busy bill with lots of amending and committee work and so forth.

There just aren't as, as many hired hands to do the job.

- And that's accurate.

Yes, we have to cover the same amount of territory with, with half as many hands.

- Yeah.

So again, a, a reason to, to do this thing, which again, historically has been sort of unusual to do, does has this period known as crossover where Senate considers house bills, house now considers Senate bills.

Has that now begun?

- It has.

It has, yes.

- So you're getting those now?

- We, we are.

So today all we worked on committee of the whole was house bills.

And so all of those bills had to be out two days ago.

All of our files had to be out two days ago.

So now we are only working on, on the, on the house bills as they have come across, which does include some of the committee bills that were worked by the joint interim committees together.

So although they're labeled as house bills, they're bills that we work together as both House and Senate through the interim.

- Let's talk a little bit about that process, the committee bills and how they're treated and how they're introduced and sometimes are not.

There's a, a big, a lot of your time as a legislator spend in what we call the interim, the period between the two sessions and your meeting in your various committees.

What, what are your committees at the moment?

- So my two standing committees are agriculture and judiciary.

- Two things you know, a lot about just as in general.

Yeah.

- Yes sir.

Two things I happen to know a little about and really love.

So those are my interests for sure.

- And you hear bills, bills get assigned and they get originated.

You hear them, you vet them, you hear a lot of testimony on them.

Sometimes these committee meetings can take a couple of days to do, not just hearing one bill, but you're going through it maybe in a, in a more deliberate way than you're able to do with an eight o'clock committee meeting over here in the extension when this session's about to convene in an hour later, a couple hours later.

So you do some good work and the, the bills get reported out, so to speak, and the committee says, yeah, we recommend this bill in this form, let's introduce it.

Am I right in saying in your now six years of experience, fewer of those committee bills seem to survive the introductory period into the committee as a whole?

- Yeah, I I I think that's probably true today as, as opposed to my first year or two in the legislature.

I think that's true a lot just based on how the two thirds introductory vote works, right?

Sure.

You have to get two thirds, which is a very high standard to achieve.

And so there are more bills that are probably coming outta committee with less than full support of that committee.

And when that happens, they're much more likely to not make it through introduction vote.

- We're talking about two thirds of the members in either body during the budget session, a shorter session when you're supposed to be working on the budget first and foremost, they're, they have to be really high priority and able to in order to get introduced.

- That's right.

I mean that's the point of the constitutional provision is so that we can focus on the budget.

Although there are other things that are important as well.

Take for example, recalibration this year, that's a big issue that we needed to tackle.

And so yeah, we, our, our main focus should be the budget.

Everything else after that better be super important and it should be able to, you know, acquire a two thirds vote, otherwise we'll deal with it next year when that standard isn't there.

- K 12 recalibration, you are the legislator.

You tell me what that means exactly.

What is it that you're the legislature's trying to get done?

- A absolutely so recalibration or we call it re cal upstairs, but it's really K through 12 funding.

It's the funding model that we use to fund all of our schools statewide.

It's very complicated, it's very in depth and a lot of good folks spent a lot of time working that up this summer through the interim process and trying to get us a product that we could get across the finish line that constitutionally funded education.

But it did, it did it responsibly and in response to the needs of both of our students, our teachers, our, our facul, you know, our other faculty, our superintendents, administrators tried to help everybody out in a, in a responsible way.

We're supposed to be doing, looking at that model every five years, we haven't done it in quite some time, - More than more than five years, - A lot more than five years.

We have not done it since I've been here and there hasn't actually been a full recalibration done in over a decade.

And so we're, we're trying to get that done where we're, there's litigation out there regarding the school funding model and so we're trying to respond to that and actually give, give a responsible product out of the legislature on how to fund K through 12.

- The court, the litigation you mentioned adds to the urgency of it, I believe, or would you say so?

- Yeah, I mean I, I think that's, I think that's fair, but I don't think we use the litigation as a reason to just kick something out the door.

- It's time to do it anyway.

- It's time to do it anyways and it's time to do it right and, and I want, you know, I think, I think we're, we're well down that path in the Senate.

We'll see what the house does with the bill now, but I'm proud of the work that the Senate did in, in working that bill and improving it through the process.

- Again, Eagle Eye viewers will email me if I'm wrong about this, but my recollection is the last time recalibration happen, it was not shoehorned into a budget session, it was a link.

It's such a big bill.

Speaker Neiman was on the show and he said, you've never seen so many moving parts in one piece of legislation as there are here.

And that's the sort of an item which might take up a bulk of a legislative session if that's all that was on the agenda.

And now putting it on top of the budget as well adds to the, to the challenge of you superhuman lawmakers.

His feeling was that if it didn't get done this session, there could be a special session that became necessary if the court's got antsy about it, there's sort of been a, they've allowed a bit of a delay I guess to let you work on, you think you've taken a good enough crack at it that you're hoping you're an attorney, the court might, might say, okay, you're making progress, let's give you another view or So - I I think so.

And if we're able to pass the final product through, that'll give them something else to look at, something else to review and, and maybe not.

That would only happen if someone actually challenges the new model.

So we'll just have to wait and see.

I can't, I can't predict that, but hopefully we can get the, the new model passed out the door, get the governor's signature and then and move on and then reassess in a couple years, maybe even next year and just keep an eye on it and see where it needs improved.

- The previous recalibration led to some big changes that people really noticed of how big classrooms could be.

I know in, in Fremont County where our station is headquartered, walls got built to make more classrooms so they could be fewer kids in it, in them.

And now there's been a lot of talk about whether that's gonna change and, and and what the number's gonna be and some people saying, well gee, that was the most important thing in the world 10 years ago and suddenly it isn't anymore.

How come that is?

And I'm not asking you to pass judgment on any of those things, just to illustrate though, boy there's a lot to this, so good luck with that.

- Yep.

There is a lot to it and that's why we hire experts to help us make, make some of these decisions, but we also listen to our educators, listen to our parents, you know, talk to our kids.

There's a lot that goes into it and we put all that together to try to, you know, come up with a good product in the schools themselves, whether it's community members, parents, et cetera, grandparents, the schools are important to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons.

And we do need their input.

We need, and if we wanna keep them functioning at a high level, we we need that.

- Alright, here's another thing people pay a lot of attention to and you become recognize, I think as something of an authority or a, a very interested legislator and that's property taxes.

You told me before we came on that your work as the deputy county attorney has led you to become involved in local property tax issues and the treating one property owner fairly compared to another one has always been sort of the center, the crux of property tax discussions as, as it needs to be recently in recent years.

That's become more complicated in Wyoming than it used to be, I bet.

In your county in maybe more so than in some others.

Tell me what's happened in recent years, refreshing our viewers as to why it's a bigger issue now than ever.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So as you remember over the last few years, property taxes have skyrocketed in particular parts of Wyoming.

My, my counties being two of those places, they're, they're not at the top of the list, but they're close.

And so people were seeing property values, seeing their homes double, triple in value.

Well with that, so did their property taxes because how our property tax system works, you're, you, you pay taxes on the market value of your home, what's it worth today if you were to sell it?

And so that created a lot of problems, especially for folks on fixed income retirees who were planning to pay a certain amount of taxes on their home every year for the next, next 10 or 20 years.

And they, you know, were throwing a, a very large surprise.

So we, you know, the legislature tried to do something about that.

- I'll give my one minute thirty second version of why a lot of this happened.

You tell me if you agree, especially particularly during the period of the COVID pandemic when some other states had lots of restrictions and closures and Wyoming looked good to them from outta state.

A lot of people with money to spend came in and bought property.

And so the guy right next to my property might have sold his for a million dollars.

I didn't get that offer on mine, I didn't sell mine or decided not to.

Fair market value was if the guy next door sold for $2 million, you probably could too there go your property taxes even though you're not planning to sell.

And that's a a portion of, of what this is all about last year and not just last year, but in in particular memorably, there were a lot of property tax bills that were being juggled by your lawmakers all at the same time.

And some different approaches were put into law.

So simultaneously now we're seeing some of the effects of that and we're anticipating some of the other effects.

I was thinking that property taxes might be a big issue this session again, but in fact I guess the consensus kind of has been let's let this play out for another year and we'll have a biennium at least to assess what's happened.

Is that a fair assessment?

- I think that's a very fair assessment.

I think all of us, although we want to make sure people are continuing to get the, you know, the tax relief we previously provided.

Right?

I think a lot of us think that's, we need to just sort of hit the, hit the pause button and see what this looks like next year, maybe even the year after that.

Let's see where this leaves folks.

Let's see how the, the housing market plays out and what happens to people's taxes.

They, they might even go down, which would be a good thing.

The markets, you know, might settle down and actually go down.

I, you know, there's certain places in Wyoming that's never gonna happen.

You live in one of them.

It's just, and I probably do too at this point.

You know, people would love to move to our parts of Wyoming and, and that's, that's, that's great, but it does create an issue for property taxes.

On the flip side of that though, there are places in Wyoming where their taxes are going down and so, you know, we have to, we have to take a measured approach.

We don't, we don't want to bankrupt bankrupt our local governments.

We don't.

- Those property taxes pay for things at the local level.

- That's right.

They pay for things, they pay for roads, they pay for schools, they pay for your weed and pest district They pay for your solid waste districts.

They pay for all those things that are services that you know lot, most of us, not all, not all of us, but most of us utilize.

And so I think we just have to keep, keep that in mind and, and remember there's a balance here and we have to find the right balance.

- Sure.

It's, it's a very popular idea to think, boy, I don't have to pay as much property taxes.

I used to.

Great.

Oh the library's closed now and these are the things that just sort of becoming apparent.

There were some property tax bills that were an at least anticipated before the session.

Many of them didn't survive introduction and what in this session in the remaining week or so is still alive in the realm of property tax.

- There are two bills that are very similar.

One of them is mine, which is senate file 39, and then there's a house bill 45.

And, and both of those bills, they, those, those bills take out the sunset date or repeal the sunset, sunset date on the long-term homeowners exemption because it is set to expire early next year.

And so, - And that did what exactly, - That provides a 50% tax exemption for those folks over 65 that have lived in their home for 25 years or more.

That was the one really targeted bill that we brought a couple years ago to provide, as I was talking about earlier, provide relief to those folks who were on fixed incomes that have lived in Wyoming and you know, definitely paid their fair share of taxes.

We were trying to help those folks make sure that they weren't taxed outta their homes and, and it, it accomplished that.

And those, a lot of people have used that particular program.

- So Sunset means it was scheduled to expire at a certain point and wise people in the Capitol are suggesting let's keep that in place for a while longer.

- That, that's correct.

Neither Bill has passed yet, but we'll see.

One of them, I'm, I'm quite certain will make it across the finish line.

It's a good program.

It has over general support across the legislation.

- Would it have a new sunset date on it or would that be left indefinite for now?

- It is left indefinite according to both of those bills for now.

Now that could change between now and third reading.

Either of those bills could be amended to add a sunset date in there, which may or may not happen.

- Well Senator Barry Crago, Senate District 22.

Very interesting to hear what's going on in from your vantage point in the Senate and I appreciate your time and thanks for being with us on Capital Outlook.

- Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it.