Rep. JD Williams — March 3 update
Well Wyoming. Our chickens are coming home to roost. Wyoming elected this House of Representatives, and that election put the Freedom Caucus in the driver’s seat. This corner that we find ourselves in is just another reminder that elections matter. I encourage you to contact your Legislators and demand accountability. Depending on how you get along there, it’s not too early to start thinking about the next election. SF 69 has passed both houses of the legislature. Most of Wyoming is in favor of this measure as their property taxes have skyrocketed since COVID. County services and special districts in eastern Wyoming (excluding Laramie County, and Crook County), southern Wyoming and the Big Horn Basin will be the most heavily impacted by the 25% residential property tax cut of SF 69. Depending on what kind of shortfall reimbursements I can negotiate this week, your county commissioners will be having some hard conversations with your communities regarding services. 25% is much better than the proposed 50% but it still hits us hard. I am not fully persuaded that SF 69 is constitutional and so that is something to consider as we move forward.
Many of you are aware the legislative session hasn’t gone very smoothly in the House of Representatives. The late nights, the poor decorum, and lack of intellectual debate from much of the body illustrates the lack of experienced leadership and just how much out of state influence we are enduring in the lower house. The Freedom Caucus leadership team is working hard, they just don’t know what they don’t know. Throughout the property tax conversations and the education conversations this session, one thing is becoming more and more clear…The Freedom Caucus are not really Republicans. They have been very organized and strategic as they have infiltrated our Wyoming Republican Party, but really they deserve a party of their own. They speak of smaller government and yet they support growing the State’s influence in your communities. Rather than cutting the wasteful spending that they claim is happening, their policies instead cut revenues for our state. For example: SF 168 Budget Reserve Account (BRA)-repeal and SF 169 Strategic Investments and Projects Account (SIPA)-repeal are disguised as transparency bills but will cost the state millions of dollars and will make the dollars that are left EASIER to spend. SF 169 alone, will cost the state around $200 million dollars a year in lost interest income. Those of us Republicans who are from here can’t really understand their approach until we understand that they aren’t really Republicans.
There is something missing in the Wyoming State House of Representatives, and I believe it is the common sense of the old Wyoming Rancher. From the beginning, Wyoming ranchers have had a presence in the Capitol. That is why the legislature meets in the middle of the winter when life on the ranch has slowed down a little bit. But there are not many of us left in the Capitol who still ranch these days. Thankfully there are a quite a few who are only a generation or two removed from agriculture that still remember the dust and the blood and the cold. Ranching in Wyoming helps one to realize their limitations, to appreciate their neighbors, and to love the simple things in life. We remember the wise words of our forefathers, sometimes only when we have ignored them and we learn the same lesson again that they tried to share with us. We have lived through the long winters and the dry spells where the only victory is survival. We share these lessons with our sons and our daughters like our folks shared with us. When a ranch kid goes away to college, they come back with some big ideas, radical ideas, some might even work. But as Father time and Mother nature teach us their lessons our ideas become less and less radical. Granddad’s lessons become our own. Ranchers balance the condition of their cattle and the cost of feed. Sometimes greed tempts us to be a little stingy with our livestock but experience has taught us that it is much more cost effective to keep a cow in shape than to get her back into shape. During a long winter, or when it forgets to rain the difference between victory and defeat is how good of shape the livestock were going into the bad weather. When our stock is thin, it becomes very costly to survive adverse weather as our stock have no reserves to fall back on. When our stock is in poor shape because of our management, lessons are learned that will never be forgotten. If you survive, those are the lessons you tell your grandchildren about. Healthy stock have a little fat on their back.
I think of these lessons often as I sit on the floor of the House of Representatives with my fellow legislators as we debate reducing our reserves. The State of Wyoming’s reserves, our counties reserves, our municipalities reserves, our special districts reserves. These reserves are the accounts we have invested for future generations and the accounts we have carefully saved for the lean times that are sure to come. Many of my fellow legislators have recently moved here, they have never lived through the lean times in Wyoming when the energy markets have crashed and main streets became ghost towns. Legislators whose fathers never told them “Son, you can’t starve the profit out of a cow.” Thankfully there are still a few of the older generation in the House of Representatives who faithfully remind us what it can be like in old Wyoming. The question is, will we listen? Think about it Wyoming.
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