Vote-by-mail has been proven to dramatically increase voter turnout in our neighbors like Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska. Wyoming state leaders have hinted at an interest in expanding our mail-in program, but they are mostly dragging their feet.
The Legislature’s Revenue Committee has one job: to develop proposals that allow Wyoming to adequately fund its public services and infrastructure. Now that fossil fuel mining taxes are going away, the committee has failed at its single job again and again and again.
Unemployed workers losing their healthcare, rural hospitals losing revenue, and an uncertain future for Wyoming’s economy have the Legislature taking another look at its decision to refuse federal Medicaid funding.
The Wyoming Legislature is bad at transparency, lacks modern technological infrastructure, and is about to convene an emergency “virtual” session the public can’t attend to appropriate more than $1 billion in federal COVID-19 funding. What could possibly go wrong?
The bill would create a program that uses federal emergency funds to reimburse landlords who have experienced rental losses as a result of COVID-19, protecting both landlord and renter. The Legislature will consider the proposal during a special session next week.
Low-wage workers living paycheck-to-paycheck are least prepared to grapple with layoffs and cut hours resulting from the COVID crisis. By far, most low-wage workers in Wyoming are women.
As unemployment spikes during the pandemic, Wyoming workers are increasingly unable to make housing payments. Federal measures and the goodwill of banks and landlords do not offer Wyoming families the housing protections they need.
The increased ability for towns and counties to raise revenues is a nod toward diversifying Wyoming’s tax structure. But because the new revenues will come from sales tax, they will come at the highest cost to the state’s poorest residents.
A veto by Governor Mark Gordon helped House education advocates fend off severe funding cuts pushed by the Senate throughout the Wyoming Legislature’s 2020 session. But they couldn’t stop them all.
The bill would criminalize doctors who fail to perform life-saving measures for infants meant to be aborted but that are accidentally “born alive”—a law that would rarely, if ever, be applied in Wyoming, since abortions after 12 weeks are illegal here and fetuses are not viable until at least 20 – 23 weeks. Two other anti-abortion bills have been defeated.
