News – Sheridan Media
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A lot of the focus during the final week of the legislative session was reconciling bills that passed both the House and the Senate. As each chamber works on a bill, it may make some amendments along the way, so the House and Senate final versions of a bill may have some differences. If that’s the case, then a conference committee is appointed for that bill consisting of members from the House and the Senate, and they get together to iron out any differences and work towards agreement on the final version of the bill. Then that version goes back to each chamber for approval. This process went smoothly and quickly for the vast majority of bills.
This being the budget session, a similar process happens with the state’s biennial budget (budget for the next two years). At the end of the day, the House and Senate final budgets ended up being fairly close to each other. The “Standard Budget” is the amount of funding that would maintain the state’s current level of services. The Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) and the Governor both create their versions of what they think the budget should be, and those two versions were almost $500 million dollars apart. The House and the Senate then take the JAC budget and amend it to come up with their own versions of the budget. Their final versions of the budget were only about $170 million dollars apart, which is historically a reasonably small difference looking back over the last decade.
The Senate budget proposed an increase to the Standard Budget of $760 million dollars, or 8.1% on a budget of approximately $9.37 billion dollars (all these figures are from the state Legislative Services Office). The House budget proposed an increase of $590 million dollars, or 6.3%. The differences in those two budgets were resolved in conference committee in a matter of hours.
Touching on some of the hot-button topics in the budget at a 30,000’ level, funding for the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Business Council, Wyoming Public Television and Radio were restored, and the Sheridan Community College will receive their requested funding for the restoration/expansion for the science building which is very much needed.
A new process for calculating what’s commonly called “direct distribution” was agreed upon by both chambers, providing more stability from that revenue source. In addition, the resident occupancy requirement kicks in this year which will increase the tax revenues on residential property that received the 25% homeowner exemption by anywhere from 10%-20% statewide. This is due to the fact that the exemption will only apply to owner-occupied residential properties where the owner has claimed residency.
K-12 education recalibration was completed providing significant funding increases and raises for classroom personnel. While this recalibration process is supposed to be done every 5 years, this is the first time that the legislature has completed the recalibration process in 15 years, so that was a tremendous accomplishment.
Additional money was also appropriated for invasive grasses, wildfire prevention/recovery and new “fire modules”, as well as for hospitals and healthcare.
All members in the House worked extremely hard on legislation this year, debating pretty much every single decision being made. Debating these issues is an important part of the process. For example, in the House there were 247 amendments proposed to HB001, the budget bill, with 37 of them being adopted. While that much debate on the budget consumed a great deal of time, leaving little time for other legislation to be considered, it is the budget session and the focus should rightly be on the budget.
The Governor has the power to make line-item vetoes to the final budget that the full legislature agreed upon where he can delete any specific words, lines, paragraphs, footnotes, etc., in the budget bill. His line-item vetoes were received on Friday morning. The Senate and House have the power to override a veto with a super-majority, or a 2/3’s vote, in both chambers. The Senate voted to override seven of the Governor’s vetoes. The House then voted on those seven vetoes and concurred on four of them, resulting in a total of four veto overrides.
The legislature is in recess until 10:00 am on Wednesday, March 11 for our final day. Between now and then we will see if the Governor vetoes any specific legislation that has been passed, and on Wednesday the legislature will review any vetoes for potential overrides. After that, the legislative session will be over for this year and it will be time to work on interim committee topics the rest of the year.
As always, if you have a question about a specific issue, please contact me. I will be happy to visit with you and provide you with the information that I have and the rationale for every one of my votes.
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Last modified: March 10, 2026