Representative McKay Erickson (R-Afton) called into the Weekday Wake-Up on Monday, March 9 to provide a report on the final few days of the 2026 Wyoming State Legislative Session.

Rep. Erickson provided updates on the budget, school recalibration, property taxes and a gun related bill.

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Legislative report this morning from (0:13) Representative McKay Erickson of Star Valley as we have just the last final few days of (0:17) the session, Representative. Things winding down in Cheyenne. (0:21) Boy, they sure are.

I’m on my way back down there early in the morning to finish things (0:28) up and Wednesday take some votes and kind of get everything all wrapped up. So, looking (0:34) good. (0:35) Of course, budget year this year and it’s, boy, you talk about where things started with (0:40) the budget and where things ended up.

Let’s just go right into that and the Governor, (0:49) a number of veto line items and some of those overridden and some of them not. (0:53) Yeah. Yeah, that was quite a transformation, which I agreed with.

As you know and as we (1:01) talked a lot before, I was not happy with how the proposal came out of our Joint Appropriations (1:08) Committee. It just went after some things that just didn’t make sense. University of (1:15) Wyoming and some individual cuts, especially when the Governor’s budget come out, $50 (1:22) million underneath and then we actually were going to be able to put that away in savings.

(1:28) But as you know, the Senate and Governor ended up with kind of prevailing on the budget and (1:36) we rolled over pretty quickly to the Senate’s proposal in order to get it to the Governor (1:41) so that he could sign it. And as you said, the Governor then vetoed 25 or so, which was (1:49) pretty well expected. That’s typically what he does, 25 of the line items, which are individual (1:55) parts of the spending.

But a lot of it ended up being him vetoing some of the spending (2:01) policy things that we had put in. And so, it wasn’t a tremendous amount of money, you (2:07) know, with the exception of the University of Wyoming. But it mainly focused on how we (2:14) spend money and what accounts we spend money out of.

So, anyway, the Senate ended up picking (2:20) seven of those vetoes to address and where it’s the Senate’s budget this year, we can (2:28) only override the same ones that the Senate picks. And so, we dealt with seven of those (2:34) late last Friday afternoon and it needs a two-thirds of each body in order to override (2:41) the Governor’s veto. As I said, most of them were concerning policy of spending, not necessarily (2:47) dollar amounts.

We ended up sustaining four of those seven overrides. So, it was, you (2:55) know, it ended up, like you said at the first of the show, it ended up so much better than (3:01) what it started, you know, four and a half weeks ago. So, we were happy about that and (3:07) I think that the state’s going to be better off because of it, the way we went about (3:13) that.

So, it turned out good. (3:15) Representative, a couple of the items that had risen eyebrows, if you will. You mentioned (3:24) the University of Wyoming, there was also the Business Council.

I understand there was (3:28) some extra money given for state employee raises. Maybe just touch on those three and (3:33) how everything ended up going in the end. (3:35) Yeah, you bet.

We ended up coming back with restoring almost all of the University of (3:43) Wyoming, $40 million is what they had originally cut out and there wasn’t really a clear (3:48) reason as to why they had done that. And with the exception of they wanted, there was a (3:55) group that felt very strongly about kind of having control over what classes and what (4:01) programs the University of Wyoming was going to offer. And even though they cleared a bunch (4:07) of those up, those controversial classes in the last couple of years, that Joint Appropriations (4:12) Committee didn’t feel like they’d done enough.

And so, they went in and kind of whacked (4:18) at it. But like I said, on the vetoes, one of them was just a report at the end of this year. (4:28) If they make that report and it’s good, it’s going to be able to, they’re going to be able (4:33) to get the full restoration of their money and we kind of held $5 million over their head in (4:39) order to make sure that they were going to do that report.

So, that was kind of one of the (4:46) major ones. The Business Council, which we see it on a regular basis helping in order to put (4:52) fiber things in, in order to, there’s a project in Spain that was a benefactor of the Business (5:00) Council as well as the new sewer system out in Kemmerer. So, we kind of see, we didn’t see any (5:08) of the real controversial ones that they were spending their money on.

But the Business Council (5:13) bottom line is kind of going to be reformed and tightened up. And I think that was a, that’s (5:19) good for everybody is to always look at ways that you can be more efficient and your spending can (5:26) reflect the views of the Wyoming people. So, that turned out well too.

The next one, if you should (5:35) go right on to recalibration. Yeah, let’s do. Let’s talk about the school recalibration.

(5:40) Well, yeah, I couldn’t remember if I missed out one of those or not. But yeah, the recal, (5:46) recalibration is basically zeroing back in and saying, what exactly are we going to spend our (5:53) money on in education? And the recal hadn’t been passed in 15 years. So, it was facing the lawsuits (6:00) that we’re facing.

It was important that we get something together and make a really good attempt (6:06) at trying to meet those court case decisions that haven’t been very favorable because we haven’t (6:14) recalibrated and we haven’t kept up with the inflation and different things in education (6:22) spending. And so, that was what the recalibration committee really focused on. Almost every one of (6:32) those five or six major levers of that they pulled in order to get that ended up being changed to (6:40) much more favorable, I think, to public schools.

And they worked hard to take out some of the (6:47) obvious problems with it. For example, one was that I very much did not approve of and there (6:55) were a lot that felt that same way as having all of our school district employees go on the state (7:02) insurance plan, which would have overloaded it and just caused all kinds of problems and we would (7:07) have lost some of our other insurance providers in the state if we would have done that. And I (7:13) just didn’t think that was a good idea.

The only thing that I really ended up disliking quite a bit (7:21) from the recalibration after it was all said and done was that teacher funding is now going to go (7:28) into a silo, which in and of itself is not a bad idea. However, it does take away the local control (7:37) of school boards to have influence and make the needed on-the-ground changes to some of the funding (7:45) things within our district. And so, that loss of local control was a major sticking point with me, (7:53) but we’ll have to see how it turns out.

It will be a good opportunity for us to actually now apply (7:59) this new recalibration and go forward. And there could be pieces of it that gets (8:07) vetoed by the governor, but I’m not expecting many of those. I think that’s going to go through and (8:14) then we’ll test it against some of these lawsuits that we’re facing from the education groups and (8:21) some of the districts that are suing the state over that.

So, hopefully that’s moved forward. (8:28) Representative McKay Erickson here this morning on the Weekday Wake-Up. Representative, wanted to (8:32) give you a chance to talk property tax as well.

I know that there was a couple bills that were (8:37) discussed this year as well. Yeah, that’s good. I’m glad you mentioned that.

We ended up through (8:44) all three readings of bills, we ended up having two that came forward. One was the property tax (8:52) that related to that Amendment A that we passed as part of our Constitution two years ago in the (8:59) election. And we kind of ended up having an excellent debate on that as to do we want to move forward (9:09) with more property tax cuts, or do we want to kind of see how the things that we’ve done in the last (9:15) two years are going to affect us and how they’re going to apply.

Because we’re looking down the (9:21) barrel of 50% ballot initiative, 50% cut. And so we didn’t think that it was prudent in order to (9:29) go and do another say 25% property tax cut and then possibly vote in a 50% (9:37) property tax cut coming up this November. So, we decided to hold off and really let (9:44) those other bills that we passed in the last two years take effect and see how they’re going to (9:52) work.

Because there has been a significant amount of property tax relief and everybody’s kind of (9:58) adjusting to that, including our towns, our counties, our municipalities, as well as our (10:05) special districts. And a lot of people felt that we had got to the point where if we weren’t going (10:13) to have some property tax, we were going to have to come up with some other taxing method. And (10:19) none of those seemed to be the thing that we wanted to do.

You know, increasing in sales tax (10:26) or the dreaded word of an income tax. So, we held off on those and we’ll see how these all work out (10:34) and go forward on that. So, I was pleased how that worked with those being defeated and (10:41) a chance to work through the ones we’ve got.

Representative, we have just a real quick (10:46) second here at the end. There’s been a gun bill, the Second Amendment Protections Act. Touch on (10:50) that real quick.

Yeah, that one has been an interesting one. And it’s one that I (10:59) ended up digging into and really considering it word for word. It’s nothing about (11:10) the right to own a gun or use a firearm, the Senate File 101.

It actually is an out-of-state (11:17) lobby. They call themselves Y-O-Gun, but they’re not from the state. And it’s about (11:25) basically making it to where local law enforcement could not assist any type of a federal action, (11:33) a federal law enforcement action, that they can’t assist on that if there’s a gun involved.

(11:39) And so, I really felt it was about making sure that we don’t pass laws to put Wyoming’s law (11:45) enforcement in an impossible position when working to keep our community safe. It just (11:54) didn’t set right with me as well as there were 23 of the 23 county sheriffs that were very adamantly (12:02) opposed to it. And I felt like that meant quite a bit.

All the state agencies and state law (12:10) enforcement were all opposed to it, and it was that same principle, is we cannot get involved (12:18) without having the chance of being sued or brought litigation against. And that just didn’t (12:27) sit well with a few of us. And so, we’ll see how that goes.

It looks like the governor is going to (12:34) veto it, and then we’ll have an opportunity to override. But I would kind of be surprised to (12:39) see that veto overridden. So… Representative, thank you so much for your time, (12:44) and we appreciate the update.

Thank you so much.