Wyoming
A Wyoming mother’s trust in the Catholic Church rattled by her son’s accusations of abuse – WyoFile
Renee Penton-Jones raised her son and daughter mostly as a single mother. Though she is Methodist, her ex-husband and kids were Catholic, and she relied “on the safety” of the Catholic Church for support. The Casper resident enrolled her children in Saint Anthony School and had them take part in church activities. The Christian education and physical activity her children received “meant the world” to Penton-Jones.
Last month, Penton-Jones’ son, James Stress, told her “that there was going to be a discussion with the church” about things that had happened to him as a boy. He didn’t want to talk about it with her then. She “really had no clue” what her son’s words could mean.
On March 31, Stress and two others filed a lawsuit alleging that a former Wyoming youth minister, Doug Hudson, who once worked at Our Lady of Fatima Church, had sexually assaulted them in the 1990s when they were boys. According to the complaint, Hudson had “plied” each of them “with copious amounts of alcohol.”
The lawsuit also named the Diocese of Cheyenne, which oversees parishes throughout Wyoming, and Our Lady of Fatima Church as defendants, stating that they failed to “supervise and control” the youth minister, which allowed for the alleged sexual assaults to occur.
Penton-Jones learned about the allegations last week through a news article that a friend sent to her. She was busy at work preparing for an Easter buffet and initially read only the headline. Then she sat at her desk and read the whole story. “It was just very disturbing, very upsetting, very shocking,” she told WyoFile. She called her son after to see that he was OK. And she wrote a comment on Facebook reacting to the news:
“As a single mother raising two children, I TRUSTED that they were safe within the arms of the Catholic Church. I TRUSTED that my son would be in a loving and caring, Christian environment when he was with the youth counselor hired by the church,” Penton-Jones wrote.
“I couldn’t have been more wrong and I can never undo the pain and suffering inflicted on my child. My heart breaks for him and the others who were subjected to this cruel and inhumane treatment right under the eyes of the church. I pray to God that there will be acknowledgement, apologies and accountability.”
Penton-Jones said she was unsure whether she could look to the church as the same place of safety that it had been to her for so long. “I would have to think about that,” she said. “There’s a lot of emotion. There’s anger. There’s frustration, like I told you, guilt, there are so many things that go through your head. How did I miss it? What didn’t I see?”
A spokesperson for the Diocese of Cheyenne initially declined to comment on the lawsuit, but told WyoFile that the diocese planned to respond publicly to the allegations “in the near future.”
The diocese shared its statement with WyoFile on Tuesday. The message refrains from commenting on the specific accusations in the lawsuit because the matter “is now the subject of active litigation.” At the same time, it expresses the diocese’s “awareness of the seriousness of such claims and its concern for all individuals who may be affected.”
“The Diocese recognizes that allegations of abuse — particularly those involving minors — can cause deep pain and lasting harm,” the message states. “Any person who comes forward with such allegations deserves to be heard with respect and compassion.”
The Diocese of Cheyenne, the statement continues, “remains committed” to protecting children and vulnerable people and upholding policies and procedures “to promote safety, accountability, and compliance with civil and Church law.”
“Out of respect for the legal process and all parties involved, the Diocese will refrain from further public comment while the matter proceeds,” the statement reads.
“All I can say is that I respect that there’s recognition,” Penton-Jones told WyoFile after a reporter read the statement to her.
When the lawsuit was filed, WyoFile attempted to contact Hudson through multiple avenues. None of those attempts were successful. A new court summons for Hudson lists a Kentucky address.
“I trusted him implicitly,” Penton-Jones said of Hudson. “I trusted the church with my children. So it was a huge shock.” If she had the opportunity to say something to Hudson, she would ask him “a lot of whys” and “How could you?”
Local Catholic Church members and others have reached out to Penton-Jones to “express their love and disappointment and prayers for healing and accountability.”
“It’s been a blessing to me,” she said. “To know that there’s so much positive in such a horrible situation, it’s comforting.”
Her “overwhelming thought is that the church be held responsible.”
“An apology would be ideal,” Penton-Jones said. “I can’t answer for my son. Good grief. I don’t know how you recover from that. How it affects your whole life.”
The federal government owns nearly half the land in Wyoming. That gives Wyomingites easy access to national forest and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, but it also means they miss out on the property taxes that would be paid by private landowners.
The federal Secure Rural Schools (SRS) program aims to rectify that.
Under the program, the U.S. Forest Service will be giving Wyoming $4.5 million this year to support rural schools and roads. That’s the state’s cut of this year’s $248 million total payout.
Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman touted the program on the House floor in December.
“With such a large percentage of Wyoming’s resources historically locked up in federal lands, including national forests, communities across my state have long weathered challenges associated with reduced flexibility and a decreased tax base,” she said. “Since [the program’s] creation, Wyoming communities have received vital funding to support infrastructure projects, public education, search and rescue operations and other critical emergency services.”
The program has been repeatedly reauthorized for decades with only a few lapses. A bill resuming the payments after its most recent lapse in 2024 advanced through Congress and was signed by Pres. Trump in December.
In April, the U.S. Forest Service announced that this year’s payout, which is determined by a complex calculation, would be $248 million across the country.
“Secure Rural Schools payments reflect our strong partnership with the counties and communities that surround national forests,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a news release. “These funds support critical infrastructure, while advancing active forest management and restoration that keep forests resilient and communities safer. We remain committed to deliver this support directly to rural communities that depend on these resources.”
The payments will be distributed to 19 of Wyoming’s 23 counties in roughly the following amounts:
- Albany: $328,000
- Big Horn: $320,000
- Carbon: $331,000
- Converse: $19,000
- Crook: $136,000
- Fremont: $715,000
- Hot Springs: $31,000
- Johnson: $179,000
- Lincoln: $370,000
- Natrona: $3,000
- Park: $664,000
- Platte: $1,000
- Sheridan: $166,000
- Sublette: $571,000
- Sweetwater: $69,000
- Teton: $550,000
- Uinta: $46,000
- Washakie: $29,000
- Weston: $5,000
The payments to Converse, Crook, Teton, and Weston Counties do not technically stem from the Secure Rural Schools program, though they are included in the forest service’s $248 million total and Wyoming’s $4.5 million.
For these four Wyoming counties, the payments are authorized by an older program, a 1908 act of Congress that gives counties 25% of the revenue generated on federal lands within their boundaries. Individual counties may choose to receive this revenue share instead of the SRS payment, and often do when the share is higher than their SRS payment would be.
For most counties in Wyoming, the SRS payment is more generous.
From timber sales to federal compensation
Legislation passed more than a century ago saw the federal government pay states some of the revenue it generated from logging activities in national forests. That was great for counties with federal forests in their backyards, but less so for counties with other less monetizable federal lands.
In 1976, the federal government started making Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) to these counties to address this disparity. A 2025 congressional overview of that program states:
“PILT was enacted in response to a shift in federal policy from one that prioritized disposal of federal lands — in which federal ownership was considered to be temporary — to one that prioritized retention of federal lands, in perpetuity, for public benefit … Along with this shift came the understanding that, because these lands were exempt from state and local taxation and were no longer likely to return to the tax base in the foreseeable future, some compensation should be provided to the impacted local governments.”
Logging revenue declined in the 1990s, so Congress stepped in with the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000. It provided for six years of payments to the counties that had historically shared in the federal government’s logging revenue.
“It was intended to be temporary,” said Mark Haggerty, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “The payments actually declined over those six years, and then they sunset. And the idea was that those counties would transition [so] they’re not going to be reliant on timber anymore. But they’ll become a recreation county, or they’ll become a remote work county, or they’ll be a retirement [county], like they’ll find another way to pay for their budgets.”
But “a lot of these rural counties have not transitioned,” Haggerty said. So the temporary program has become a semi-permanent one, with repeated reauthorizations throughout the years, often driven by the states with the most to lose if the funding went away completely.
“Wyoming is a classic case,” Haggerty said. “Wyoming pays for things with oil and gas money. It’s hard to develop a diversified tax structure around recreation in Wyoming, because you don’t have the taxes to pay for it, right? You don’t have an income tax. You have low sales taxes because you pay for things other ways.”
As the program has been renewed, its formula has been tweaked. Its overall payouts have fallen from a peak of more than $500 million when it was first reauthorized in 2008.
But some of the formula changes have benefited certain counties more than others. Now, in addition to a county’s historic timber sales, the SRS payout also takes into consideration federal land acreage and relative income levels.
“For some poor counties that have a lot of federal land but didn’t used to get a lot of timber receipts, all of a sudden their payments went up through the roof because those other formula factors really benefited them,” Haggerty said.
In Wyoming, that included Park County, which never saw Oregon-levels of logging but does have a lot of federal land.
Center for American Progress
Those same formula factors disadvantaged richer communities like Teton County, which left the program in 2008 when those changes took effect.
Center for American Progress
Today, all of these forces, as well as recent moves by the Trump administration, might be driving a wedge into the coalition of states that historically backed the SRS program.
A bipartisan coalition fractures
In the summer of 2025, SRS funding was removed from the One Big Beautiful Bill before the legislation’s passage. The Center for American Progress published an interactive map showing how the end of that funding would affect rural counties.
Each county has the option of receiving its SRS payment or taking its share of logging or other federal land revenues under the program that’s been going since 1908. When Teton County left the SRS program in 2008, it reverted to accepting revenue shares.
For many years, especially in the early years of the SRS program, it made more sense for counties to take SRS payments instead of the 1908 shares. That meant the SRS program usually had just enough support to be reauthorized. Haggerty said support came from Congress members of both parties, but only from those representing the states that benefited.
“It’s just really difficult politically,” he said. “It’s not a partisan issue, because both Republicans and Democrats in the states that get it support it. It’s a geographic problem. They just don’t have enough places that need it.”
Today, with SRS payments falling and a presidential administration pushing for more logging on national forests, Haggerty said some counties that once benefited from the SRS payments are eying a return to revenue-sharing.
“Either they think they can get more out of revenue-sharing than what a Secure Rural Schools payment might be, or they think by tying their budgets to activities on public lands, they can force the politics to open the public lands up again to more extraction,” Haggerty said. “That’s fragmented the coalition that already wasn’t big enough to consistently get it authorized. And so the future of Secure Rural Schools, I think, is probably less secure now than it has been in the past.”
The payments lapsed in 2016, and again in 2024, when Congress did not reauthorize them. The latest reauthorization also includes retroactive payments for 2024.
The Wyoming Republican Party can’t use its autonomy rights as a defense when sued if it “sat on” those rights for 40 years, an attorney suing the party argues.
A group of Hot Springs County Republican Party leaders sued the Wyoming Republican Party, its Dispute Resolution Committee and a few of its officials last year, alleging that the party violated state law by giving voting power to outgoing officials who weren’t precinct delegates chosen by a vote of the people.
While this case has been unfolding, the Wyoming Republican Party announced that it’s going to quit following the state laws that pertain to it in light of a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case, Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, affirming parties’ rights to dictate their own fate as private groups.
“We are reasserting, not asking for our rights,” Wyoming GOP Chair Bryan Miller said at the state party’s April 23-25 convention. “Wyoming will have to fight this if they want to fight this.”
Miller also said that, “the party’s rights have been violated for nearly four decades.”
Why Didn’t They Say So Before
The state GOP cited that same case and filed that same defense in the Hot Springs County case.
The plaintiffs’ new attorney Kate Mead, who replaced the original attorney Clark Stith as the latter is now a judge, told a court Friday that this logic doesn’t work.
That’s because of a legal concept called “laches.”
It means that when someone takes “unreasonable delay” in asserting his rights, and others suffer for that delay, the court will deny relief to the person who caused that delay, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.
Mead pointed to Miller’s comments to the convention’s bylaws committee.
“The chairman of the WRP’s statements … were the first that plaintiffs learned that the WRP had sat on its constitutional rights argument for nearly 40 years,” wrote Mead in her argument. “Why hasn’t the WRP sought review of Wyoming election law prior to this case?”
Mead noted that the Wyoming Supreme Court told a subgroup of the GOP, the Uinta County Republican Party, how to notify the Wyoming attorney general when launching a constitutional challenge during its 2023 case on these same arguments about autonomy.
“WRP’s delay of nearly 40 years, according to their own chairman, is undeniably inexcusable as a matter of equity,” wrote Mead. “WRP failed to file a direct constitutional challenge against the state, instead causing the plaintiffs here untold disadvantage, injury, time and money.”
Mead noted that the 2023 Uinta County case stemmed from the same basic dispute about which party leaders can vote, and whether the party can rely on its own bylaws rather than state law for that decision.
“And, as expected, here we are again,” she said, chalking the recurring dispute up to a lack of clarity and the party’s delay in vindicating its rights in court.
She’s asking the case judge, Uinta County District Court Judge James Kaste, to let her add her argument into this case.
Kaste is also expected to make a decision in the coming days on whether to dismiss the case or keep it alive for trial, a phase called “summary judgment.”
But That’s New
That’s not the whole story, Miller told Cowboy State Daily in a Wednesday phone interview.
The party has long had clashes over its rights and the restrictions state law places on it, but he didn’t know about the Eu case until Jan. 17 of this year when the party’s attorney, Caleb Wilkins, unearthed it for him, Miller said.
Before that point, the existence of that case was a theme of “scuttlebutt,” Miller said.
“I had heard there was a case out there. I’ve since found out that they tried to bring it up in the Uinta County case,” he said.
But Frank Eathorne was the state GOP chairman at that time, and Uinta County waged that case apart from the state party besides, said Miller.
He said the Eu case probably would have changed the outcome for Uinta County GOP, but the Wyoming Supreme Court wouldn’t hear that argument.
That’s because no one notified the state attorney general that the state’s laws were under attack as unconstitutional, as the law requires, court documents say.
“I’d been bugging our attorney, you know, for a couple months, December timeframe,” said Miller “Then January he goes, ‘I found the case you’re talking about.’”
Miller told bylaws committee members on April 23 that the party intends to challenge Wyoming in federal court to vindicate its rights.
He told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday it’s getting close to filing.
Meanwhile, The AG
Wyoming Attorney General Deputy Megan Pope is defending Wyoming’s laws in this case and asserts they’re constitutional.
While Pope has acknowledged the power of Eu, she’s also pointed to later cases setting up a tiered test by which a state may survive a party’s claims of autonomy by showing that its laws only burden the party minimally.
On Friday, Pope added another argument: the state Republican Party is not wholly private. It manages public functions.
Wyoming law tells major parties that their county central committees must comprise people elected at the primary election from within their respective neighborhoods.
It tells them to help fill vacancies when partisan elected officials leave office mid-term, as the party matching the incumbent’s affiliation chooses three nominees to replace him.
And state law tells the major parties they can’t financially back one candidate over another in the primary election. That’s generally read to mean the parties can’t endorse candidates in the primary election.
Party leaders at the convention April 25 said the party wants to endorse candidates, impose loyalty tests and assert its autonomy in other ways.
“These statutes do not intrude on private associational rights,” wrote Pope in her new Friday argument. “Instead, they regulate the composition of party committees that perform public functions.”
She pointed to cases addressing that quasi-public category.
“The First Amendment protects a party’s right to organize itself and conduct its own affairs,” wrote Pope, with a reference to the Eu case, “But when a party exercises powers ‘traditionally exclusively reserved to the State,’ it is treated as a state actor and its actions become subject to constitutional constrain under the public function doctrine.”
The quote within Pope’s quote there is from the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case of Jackson v. Metro Edison Co. — addressing the public functions of public utilities.
This case is ongoing, and Kaste has not yet ruled whether to dismiss it as too legally settled for trial or let it go to a jury.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
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