Winters discusses budget decisions

With last week’s adjournment of the Wyoming Legislature, Representative Nathan Winters spoke Monday on decisions made concerning the state’s budget.

“In a budget session,” Winters said, “you’re making, on average, 30 major decisions a day on various bills, some of which have millions of dollars attached.”

In previous years, the budget has been combined into one large omnibus bill to include all sources of funding: the Abandoned Mine Lands (AML), the Capital Construction, the School Capital Construction funding and General Operations.

This year, that omnibus was divided amongst four or five different bills. General Operations was separated out as one piece of Legislation, and other bills came through separately for Capital Construction, etc.

Though he agreed with much of the budget, with solid decisions to help the state of Wyoming, Winters expressed concern about General Operations, particularly an item for $8 million for food for athletes at the University of Wyoming. “In an economic downturn,” he said, “like the one we’re facing right now $8 million for food for athletes, I felt, was probably a misplacement of priorities.”

Winters also chose not to vote for the Capital Construction bill, as he believes there were issues that could put the state in a difficult place, such as spending too much too quickly on the state capitol restoration. While he believes it has to continue, Winters said it does not have to at its current degree.

Another issue, he said, is the expansion of the Wyoming Life Resource Center in Lander while simultaneously pulling from the mission statement of the Retirement Center in Basin.

“I felt that it would be best if we slowed down some of the massive changes at some of these other state facilities.”

With regard to schools, Winters said last year he fought hard for the Economic Cost Adjustment (ECA), which allows for proper spending levels. This year, there was an attempt to take away the ECA because of the economic downturn in Wyoming. Winters fought for at least part of the ECA’s restoration, and while the end result was not the full amount it is not disappearing completely.

The session itself was very challenging, Winters said, because of a loss of nearly a half-billion dollars in the previous 16 months due to decline in the value of a barrel of oil and the war on coal, it means there’s some hard choices that have to be made. Fortunately, he added, there was the foresight of those 10-15 years ago that chose not to recklessly spend the money brought in during bountiful years.

Though there has been plenty of revenue lost already, Winters cautioned there is more to come, and funds in the Legislative Stabilization Reserve Account (LSRA) funds have to be planned out accordingly.

“We have to plan it out. That’s what we were trying to do, to make sure we’re doing everything we can to keep the most conservative, stable budget we can right now and make sure that we’re only accessing what we absolutely need. The next biennium is going to look really tough. That’s what all the economic forecasts are saying.”

With regard to other bills, Winters was particularly proud of one he carried, concerning wolf depredation, that was of great importance along the southern and eastern boundaries of Yellowstone National Park.

He explained Wyoming developed the Wyoming Wolf Plan, which defined two different regions of wolves in the state. Just outside Yellowstone, there is the wolf trophy game zone, in which the wolf is considered trophy game with a regular hunting period. For livestock growers, if there is predation on their livestock they receive payment for their loss.

“Wolves are a serious apex predator,” Winters said, “They can take out quite a number of other species.” Outside the predation zone, the wolf was considered simply a predator that could be taken out if needed, and so predation payments were nonexistent.

In September 2014, an injunction was placed on the Wyoming Wolf Management Plan, essentially removing management from Wyoming. However, those in the predation zone were in a bit of a tough spot because they couldn’t take out the animals, but they weren’t receiving predation payments.

Winters’ bill actually stands up a program designed to go away if the wolf is de-listed as an endangered species and to last for one biennium to allow for data gathering with regard to how much predation is happening outside the trophy game zone. The program begins July 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year.