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- [Announcer] A new season of Capitol Outlook on Wyoming PBS starts with an interview with Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and First Lady Jenny Gordon.

One highlight is the Governor's New Education Initiative intended to be a cornerstone of his second term.

It kicks off eight weeks of Capitol Outlook coverage from Cheyenne.

Join us for Capitol Outlook.

(exciting band music) - [Narrator 1] This program is supported in part by a grant from the BNSF Railway Foundation, dedicated to improving the general welfare and quality of life in communities throughout the BNSF railway service area.

Proud to support Wyoming PBS.

- [Narrator 2] And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

Thank you for your support.

- Governor, Mrs. Gordon, welcome to Capitol Outlook.

It's our first program of the year, and I wanna say first, thanks for inviting us into the governor's residence this morning.

You didn't have to do that, but you did.

And we appreciate it.

I'm here with my videographer, Kyle Duba, and I've never been here before, so it's especially fun for me.

Our show is airing at the beginning of the new year, and we're here with holiday decorations around, we can see some of them here.

Is there a public role, Mrs. Gordon, in decorating the house and receiving ornaments and contributions from people?

How does that all work?

- Sure.

Well, we are so happy to host people here for the holidays, and many people come, whether they're an agency or a private group, they can have their party here.

- So this is a public area in addition to a residential one?

- Yes.

And so we have it kind of spread out because some of our parties are quite big.

So we have the tree up and on the tree are some ornaments that have been painted by folks, artists in different counties that we did in 2019.

They're beautiful and some of the legislator's spouses helped make that program happen.

- You see as well, there's art on the walls and many of the pieces have the designation First Lady's Choice.

How did that come about?

- Sure.

Well, I go to the High School Art Symposium every April.

- Huge event, isn't it?

- It is huge.

And it's the hardest job you'll ever have because you're picking out art in front of some of the artists.

But we love to display it year round and then kids can come down, see their art pieces, many have, and next year I'll go and get some more.

- Well, it's just outstanding.

It really adds to the decor and the charm of the place.

One of the expectations upon being elected governor that I don't think the state auditor has, for example, is when you come to Cheyenne to assume office, there's a house you're supposed to live in.

That hasn't been your choice necessarily.

You've been living here for a few years and because of the results of the election, which you're going to talk about, you have a few more years ahead of you here.

Does it feel like home to you after all this time?

- It does.

I think it is a wonderful home.

We love it.

It's fun to think about the families that have been in here before and the children that have been raised.

Of course, our grandkids have a chance to come over and run around this very wonderful yard and so that's wonderful.

And the home is very comfortable and we really feel blessed to have the opportunity to live here.

- I know there've been some governors through the years who, when they've, if they haven't been residents of Cheyenne, when they've been elected in Cheyenne, they've tended to stay here some of 'em sometimes for the rest of their lives, essentially make this a home.

But you have property elsewhere that continues to be very dear to you I know.

How do you strike the balance?

How much time do you, are you able to spend in the Buffalo area considering your duties of office and the long distance between the two?

- Yeah, it's tough.

You know, I of course served as treasurer before, which allowed a little more latitude so I could get back to the ranch and actually do my job from up there a bit, probably twice a month for a long weekend or something like that.

Now it's maybe two or three times a year.

I think Jenny goes up to handle the cattle we ship in the fall.

- [Steve] A working ranch.

- In fact, that's our love.

So anything you want to add to that?

- Well, I get up a little more frequently than that, but with family here and some of the duties that we have, it's not as much as we'd like.

- Not to bring up less pleasant memories, but I know when COVID affected your family, you were very glad to have a place to go for the good of your health and public health and staff and so forth, you were able to retreat, so to speak, to a place where you felt confident and comfortable and could do the right thing.

- Well, it was, yeah, it was a little bit of a shock.

We had planned to have our 2020 Thanksgiving with all the family around, grandkids, and our four kids and families.

And we went up on a Sunday and I think Monday I started feeling a little bit peaked and went in and got a test and turned out I was positive.

And so we called the kids, canceled everything.

Jenny had made a fabulous pumpkin pie.

She was staying in another part of the house.

And I snuck through that part- - More for you then.

- And I think probably gave her COVID because of it, because the pumpkin pie was so good.

- I think everyone can understand how that might have happened.

Our show is running, as I said, at the beginning of the new year.

It's the beginning of your second term in office as well.

Your first campaign for governor four years ago featured a busy primary ballot with five well qualified candidates.

And it was a battle and a very interesting one because of the dynamics of politics in Wyoming.

The Republican nominee is a prohibitive favorite for the general election.

So that a lot of it was came down to who won that primary, which you did.

And I know that of course was a triumph for you.

You're seeking the highest officer moving from another office wanting to win that race and you did.

I've heard other leaders tell me that there's something different and something special about the validation and affirmation of winning a second term.

How are you feeling about that?

- You know, Steve, I think that's absolutely correct and you know, it was a hard fought battle to first go around Foster Friess, and Sam Galeotos and Harriet Hageman, all extremely qualified candidates and a hard fought battle all the way through.

I have to say in true Republican fashion, it was nice to have Sam and to have Foster come in behind afterwards to support us.

I had been treasurer for some time and so thought it would be easy transition into the job, found out differently.

It is a very complicated I guess enterprise to sort of figure out how to get up to speed and then be ready.

And of course at that point the inauguration and the state of the state were back to back.

So it was really a flush time.

2019, the reason I had run was that we knew that there were gonna be challenges for the state.

We knew that fossil fuels were under the gun and those are the things that carry the state as you know, no one would've anticipated what happened with the coronavirus when it came.

I think Wyoming came through it better, I think better than any other state, but certainly in the top five states, both with being open and also being safe.

We always tried to balance lives and livelihoods during that.

There was a lot of stress as everybody knew during that time.

And so to come into this election, having that background, but to be able to stay on task and to realize that the people of Wyoming recognize that, the way they did, that is a wonderful confirmation that we were on the right path and that we are ready to go for another four.

- I'm a Wyoming history buff to a degree as many people are, and I've looked back through the history of the governor's office and since about the 1960s, the pattern that you're following has been pretty consistent.

The governor's elected, governor's more or less expected to run for another term, and that's been the pattern.

The only deviation was the governor who served three terms instead of two, which you can't do anymore.

Prior to that, however, it's interesting, there's a sort of a hodgepodge of incomplete terms and partial terms and non-consecutive terms and interrupted terms and appointees, and now it's much more sort of a stable pattern.

But the question always occurs to me is did it ever occur to you not to seek reelection or was that always the expectation that you had, that you viewed it as an eight year job and that's what you wanted to do?

- Yeah, Steve, I think the people of Wyoming expect people to work hard, and I think their expectation is you are going to run for two terms.

You don't ever expect to get elected.

We certainly didn't, but we felt that our job was to be prepared to try to make a difference over at least four years, but certainly prepared to lead into another, another four years beyond that.

- You touched on this a little bit, just that there is some transition time between general election and the time that you took off as four years ago probably didn't seem like enough for you.

I spoke to the superintendent of public instruction who was appointed and had to start the job essentially the following week, and he didn't get any of this orientation time, that you'd get between filing and the primary and the general and then the sort of training period.

So I'm assuming that, is it safe to say you're, of course, you feel it's more of a continuation obviously as opposed to cranking up the new machine.

What expectations in general do you find yourself having for the second term?

I'm sure it's a combination of new things and continuation of others.

- Yeah, I think a couple of things that flavor the way these next four years look to us, one is that that period during the pandemic was really a pause on a lot of things that we had hoped to get started.

I am thrilled, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that this year our economic diversity index was higher than it has been in the state for a very long time.

Showing that we have diversified our economy.

We need to continue with that.

The work that I had anticipated to really talk about how do we make education work better in Wyoming, and the way I say that is that we wanted to make sure the parents' communities were involved in the decisions about how education should be delivered in Wyoming.

We wanted to make it the best system for Wyoming.

And so looking really from pre-K all the way through post-secondary, and aligning our efforts in education so that they made sense across that continuum is something that we're really looking forward to.

- That wasn't always true necessarily, was it?

There were sort of, I don't wanna necessarily say competitions, but there wasn't a unification between the second grader and the community college freshman, for example?

- No, no, no, no, there wasn't.

And I think, you know, over the last few years we've seen some great examples where there is some alignment.

Sheridan, for instance, has some real alignment that makes a lot of sense.

We sent out our ride questionnaire and we got 7,000 respondents showing that people, mostly parents were quite interested in what the shape of education should look like.

And it's fun to really look now back at the coherence of the answers with our teachers have too many things they have to teach.

They're teaching more to formulas than they are really being able to concentrate on the student.

These are the things that teachers like to do is to teach to a student.

And so really thinking about how we can align our state's efforts to better leverage what teachers can teach and do is really gonna be a great thing.

And then of course, I think the other thing that has been really a long time labor of mine, even as treasurer, I kept working on how do we make sure that Wyoming is a leader in energy?

We've always been a leader in energy, but energy is transitioning.

Wyoming's always gonna be an energy source for the rest of the country.

But how can we capitalize on all of the above?

How can we make sure that we're a leader on carbon capture and sequestration?

We know we have great wind, we know we have great solar, now we have nuclear, quite a potential for geothermal.

So Wyoming, again, can be an incredible leader, not only in energy, but also an in the environmental front.

So these are all things I'm looking forward to.

- Yeah, the energy question that you raised or the issue that you raised, it's very interesting to me as well.

We talk about diversification in Wyoming for years, it's been going on for a generation or more.

One thing that occurred to me is that energy itself in Wyoming is a diversified industry.

Coal is not oil and oil is not uranium and uranium is not, and I mean minerals not just energy, right?

Uranium isn't bentonite, isn't petroleum, isn't wind or solar.

And so there, although it is diversification away from a mineral sector is vital and everybody I think understands that.

But within the minerals and energy industry itself, there is diversification promise and different areas of emphasis that can be productive, I'm sure.

- Yeah.

I think for me, Steve, I think one of the great things that we can focus on is how do we keep our legacy industries still strong and vibrant.

They have a very important role to play in attending to climate change.

We can do a better job of capturing the carbon, we can put it geologically in the ground.

We can do a better job of managing our forests and also sequester carbon, be able to integrate maybe some of the biomass with coal.

So these are easy technologies that we can begin.

But to your point, we have diversified, we've diversified across wind and solar.

And now the question for Wyoming, of course is, what do we love about this state?

Wind has a role to play, but we certainly don't want all our vistas covered in windmills.

We don't want our wildlife migration routes interfered with solar farms.

We can plan all of this, we can think it through.

And so that's really the challenge going forward.

We can be part of the nation's future for energy in a way that probably no other state can.

- I'm reminded of an old football coach of all people, John McKay at the University of Southern California, and he had a great running back, I won't mention.

And they just come out of a game and the guy, the kid had carried the ball 50 times and they asked the coach, are you worried about using overusing?

He said, I've got the horse and I'm gonna ride it.

And it made me think of Wyoming energy in a way, one of the reasons that it, some of these other diversification efforts, I just think almost naturally pale in comparison because energy and minerals have just been so good to the state.

And the idea of there's diversification doesn't mean turning our backs on that, it means hoping and working to make it viable in addition to building other things that it might make possible.

- I think that's absolutely correct.

And then you look at our tourism and our ag sectors, both of those have had real growth over the last few years.

I'm particularly interested in working with our university to try to create a new market for agriculture.

We know that good management leads to better carbon sequestration.

There's no reason why farmers and ranchers shouldn't be rewarded for better management.

And so I'm really looking forward to seeing how we can expand that marketplace, which is now becoming more and more important on the tourism sector.

You know, last year, 150th year of Yellowstone, fully anticipating a phenomenal banner year, rains came, national stories said Yellowstone's closed, on the Wyoming side, we opened in nine days.

Nobody was stranded.

Nobody had any major discomfort.

The communities around Cody and Jackson adapted to be able to take in the influx of people that were migrating out of Yellowstone.

The really frustrating thing was that the national news media could never pick up on the fact that Wyoming was open, ready to go.

They were all focused on the 6% that's Montana, which, you know, we worried a lot about our neighbors to the north and their economics as well.

But it really put a kind of a stop to a lot of visitation.

Finally at the end of the year, people began to come back and so the tourism sector actually did much better than we ever anticipated.

The fun thing was a good friend of mine in Grayville ran into somebody who had to leave from Yellowstone.

They were from I think Pennsylvania.

And they said, we stayed here for a couple days, this was fabulous.

My God, we had no idea that there was this great country around here, so we're gonna stay here a few more days.

- Yeah, it's very important to, we were in Yellowstone two or three weeks before the flood and superintendent Shelly said, well, one thing you know about, you learn in my job is you just never know what's gonna happen.

And he was talking about COVID having shut, and that was not part of his big agenda 'cause he came on during the 150th as it wasn't a part of yours, but there are things you learn from these adversities that are not, it's not just how to deal with them, but things that you can keep doing can continue.

Speaking on that issue, you mentioned the University of Wyoming.

We were there for the dedication of the big science initiative building and the couple of the professors there said, of course everyone agrees that the restrictions in education and the way we taught students during COVID, it's not what we wanted, but there are things we learned from that, that are worth keeping.

And I hear you saying that you learned from these adversities and it's not all just, oh, let's put it completely behind us.

It's let's learn from it, go forward.

- Oh no, absolutely.

I think on a ranch, you never know what's gonna happen.

You might get a blizzard, you might get scours in the calves or something like that and you adapt and you learn.

In fact, I think Jenny pushed very hard for a different type of management during calving and it's reduced our scours because of the response.

And so I think for us, couple of things that came out of that that I'm really encouraged about when you think about this with regard to post-secondary education.

And when I talk about that it's not just higher education, it's also career and technical education.

We've really established a great platform for technological sharing and classrooms that are now designed to be able to incorporate classrooms from all of our community colleges with a professor perhaps at UW or a professor at Northwest that might be teaching engineering to a student at Western.

You know, these are now possible to do.

And so for Wyoming, I think our ability to be nimble, to meet the needs of a changing workforce, to be able to anticipate the needs of industry.

We're in a unique role and capacity, I guess, to be able to meet those needs.

- Mrs. Gordon, one of your landmark achievements in the first term was the Wyoming Hunger Initiative, which you launched and have led and has been, I think, judged a success in many, many ways.

How did the pandemic affect that?

I'm sure it made, I suspect it might have made the priority seem even stronger to you.

How have you come out of that in the initiative and what are you looking to in the next four years with that?

- Well, you're absolutely correct.

The pandemic just, you know, exacerbated the food insecurity in our state.

There were folks who didn't know, they'd never used a pantry or food bank before, and they were having to access it because of the way, you know, things shut down in the economy initially.

And since then we've seen that it's sort of rebounded.

But now with the economy, you know, the inflation rate going higher, people are really suffering again.

So we have an increased need in the food banks and the pantries and decreased donations because everyone is in the same boat struggling a little bit.

So as we look forward to the future, we really wanna support the Hunger Initiative actually supports all of the agencies in all 23 counties in any capacity, whatever they're doing, we wanna support them.

They are the boots on the ground so we don't reinvent the wheel.

And so we anticipate that this initiative really does need to continue on past this administration.

So we'll be spinning it off into its own 501c3 and be able to support these agencies well into the future.

- It's something you want to continue when you aren't First Lady anymore.

That's part of the idea.

I was in Laramie speaking to the person there who was coordinated that great downtown redevelopment effort that they've done and has succeeded, is succeeding.

And I asked her what's one of the minimum things you wanted some or one of these businesses to do, thinking that she would say something like, well make sure you all paint your doorway the same way.

But she said no, and it reminded me of what you said, in using all the agencies said that one thing I required was, tell me what you want us to do for you.

And I know that's what you've done.

Agencies that might not have been viewed traditionally or been expected to be involved in a hunger initiative turned out to be important to it and as long as they would say what it was that you could do to help 'em.

So it's not just putting the can of soup on the shelf, which is a good thing to do for a household, but what you've been able to do is coordinate it and make it bigger and help everyone help each other.

Is that fair to say?

- Oh, absolutely.

You know, sharing resources has been huge.

You know, sometimes people didn't know what was just happening in the next county over.

So if there's an abundance of one thing somewhere, we have the network to get it spread around the state and people, we have regional directors that are in six regions and these are all volunteers that have really, they have meetings about once a month with all of the agencies and their counties.

And really just having that conversation and raising awareness has really brought this issue to light.

- I've heard people say about it as well, that one of the things that your initiative enabled them to do was to get past their own reluctance to use food security resource, if that's the bureaucratic term for it.

I was embarrassed to go to a food pantry.

I didn't think I deserved these, was entitled to the assistance, but I realized that I did need it or was okay to get it.

And now there was a, and the initiative itself helped me to overcome that.

So even at this individual sort of psychological level, that's been important, hasn't it?

- Yes.

You know, stigma is huge and we all wanna lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but sometimes just having that extra, you know, help in the month so you can pay either a rent or your car payment has been huge.

And I've learned in my life that everyone is one emergency away from being in need.

And so for us to help our neighbors next time you might be in that position.

- And that is our own bootstraps, isn't it?

- Absolutely.

At a community level.

- Well, I think one of the other things that I always marveled is with the Grow A Little Extra program and the food from the field program that are part of your Hunger Initiative, you've given people the capacity to not only meet their own needs, but to actually do a little bit more for others as well.

- And that's an area that I've observed is a place where people can come together regardless of what candidate they voted for or what cable channel they watch these local food initiatives that help each other and help the third party.

Something that a lot of people can agree on in a world where there's less and less to agree on.

- Yeah.

- It's a busy day for you.

I thank you for making time for us.

I'm very appreciative of your time with us today as we start the year with Capitol Outlook.

Thank you both.

- Thank you, Steve.

(exciting band music) - [Narrator 1] This program is supported in part by a grant from the BNSF Railway Foundation, dedicated to improving the general welfare and quality of life in communities throughout the BNSF railway service area.

Proud to support Wyoming PBS.

- [Narrator 2] And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

Thank you for your support.