Couch Surfing

Out on the snowy prairie near Pinedale, Samantha Marks gave a Zoom tour of the log barn she built herself last summer. There’s a sleeping loft, a wood stove and big views of the Wind River Range.

“My wonderful boyfriend is helping me move all of my stuff into the barn because, with the federal employee thing, I was living in federal housing. So don’t have that much longer,” Marks said with a laugh.

Her boyfriend carted stuff in on his mountain bike because her driveway isn’t plowed. Outside the wide double barn doors, he piled up camping gear and pots and pans.

Marks got laid off as a probationary physical science technician from the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Now, she only has a few days left to get moved out of employee housing. Marks said there’s no way she can find an apartment in Pinedale – they go too fast. Plus, she said they cost around $2,000 a month. But she can’t move into this barn either. It isn’t heated or insulated.

“I’ll just be couch surfing until we can get the camper here.”

Her plan is that when the snow melts, she’ll pull a friend’s camper out here and live in that until she can build a house.

Marks thought she was being smart when she bought this land. She waited until the Forest Service offered her a permanent position. It was her dream job.

“On paper, I did everything right,” Marks said. “I don’t know if I would have made the same choice. I probably would have waited another year or two to pick this place. But now I’m also kind of glad that I did because I need some sort of stability in my life.”

Marks has decided to stay in Pinedale since she’s built a community here. This summer, though, she’ll have to hustle to find work and build a house.

“I’m pretty overwhelmed, honestly,” Marks said. “I lost my job, my housing and health insurance all in one day.”

Wyoming’s Affordable Housing Problem

These federal layoffs are hitting Wyoming in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. The state will be short as many as 38,000 homes by the end of this decade. And that much competition means that about 50,000 Wyomingites barely make enough to afford their rent or mortgage, according to a 2024 study by the Wyoming Community Development Authority. 

“This is a hard statistic to even fathom, but it’s real,” said Chris Volzke, the organization’s deputy executive director. “The median household income in Wyoming, which is a little over $70,000 a year, cannot afford the median priced house in every county in the state without being cost burdened.”

Cost burdened is when you have to pay more than a third of your income for your home. Volzke said their study shows that more Wyomingites are packing themselves into shared housing or even becoming unhoused.

“ The majority of homeless people in Wyoming are Wyomingites,” Volzke said. “It’s primarily our neighbors and people in our community that had a series of events that forced them out of their rental into a car, into the street, whatever the scenario is.”

One of those scenarios could be getting fired from a federal agency.

Full-time RVing

Alan Willes and Teri Gilfilen are both in their 70s and live full-time in their RV. They talked on Zoom from their RV couch, their cat Petra curled up next to them.

“ We’re at a RV resort in Camp Verde,” Willes said.

Each winter, they lead tours and man a visitor center at Palatki Heritage Site outside Sedona, Arizona. They get paid a stipend of $20 dollars a day. But because of the federal funding freeze, they haven’t gotten paid yet and the check is now two months late.

“If we could get [our stipend] without us costing an arm and a leg,” Willes said. They know hiring an attorney and fighting for the money in court is outside their budget. “It’d probably cost us $20,000 to go get $3,000. No, we can’t do that. They got us over a barrel.”

Right now, they’re paying $1,500 dollars a month for a lot in an RV park.

“Our next plan is waiting for the weather to break and go back up to Jackson, Wyoming, if we don’t freeze ourselves. And wait ‘til May, [which] is when the float trip season starts for me,” Willes said.

Every summer, Willes works as a shuttle driver for a rafting company. He’s worried the recent and expected future firings of National Park Service employees will hurt business.

“We’re very nervous about that,” he said. “If the park service closes down, I don’t know if we’d be closed down. I would think so.”

That would put their housing at risk, since the company lets them park in a pasture for free.

“Plan A, B, C, D. With today’s accelerations that are happening, I don’t think one plan cuts it,” said Gilfilen.

One of those plans is getting off the road and settling down in Wyoming.

“ Never in my life would I have thought I would be living in an RV in [my] 70s,” said Gilfilen. “Yeah, it just totally surprises me. But we do have an adventurous life.”

Wyoming Public Radio reached out to Coconino and Bridger-Teton national forests but both declined to comment. However, Coconino National Forest did send Willes and Gilfilen an email the same day Wyoming Public Radio reached out for comment. It said they could expect their money within the week. As of March 7, no check has arrived.

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount.

We begin in Wyoming which, our friends at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have been studying because it has become the Rocky Mountain equivalent of an offshore corporate haven, where hundreds of phantom corporations are based. And, in the latest installment of the Wyoming saga, the ICIJ reports that millions of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Act may have disappeared in that maze of corporate sleight of hand during the course of the pandemic.

In the spring of 2020, in an attempt to avert an economic collapse amid COVID-19 shutdowns, the U.S. government began dispensing billions of dollars in emergency loans to American businesses to maintain their payrolls. Among the millions that received the Paycheck Protection Program funds was a Wyoming-registered firm called the Alo Group*, which received $531,562 to support the wages of 36 U.S.-based employees the firm said it had, according to public records.

But it’s unclear whether the Alo Group was a legitimate business. The firm has no public profile, and on a state corporate filing it listed a disposable email address—vayapef199@homapin.com—at a domain name that has been used by scammers, according to the fraud detection firm IPQS. After it received the large COVID relief payment, the Alo Group switched its listed mailing address to a building in China, according to corporate records, before dissolving completely for failing to file required state paperwork.

The Alo Group traces its origin to a single-story storefront in Sheridan that is a hotspot in the state’s thriving corporate formation industry. The small building is home to the Sheridan office of Registered Agents Inc., a national corporate services firm; more than 266,000 companies incorporated using the address of this modest office between 2019 and 2024, according to an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists analysis of information provided by the data firm OpenCorporates.

According to the ICIJ, this storefront in Sheridan, Wyoming was, on paper, anyway, busier than 55 Water Street in New York City.

Companies registered at the Sheridan storefront are listed in a half-dozen criminal indictments of people across the country who allegedly stole millions in COVID relief payments from the federal government, according to an ICIJ analysis. Hundreds more companies that together received tens of millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans share the same Sheridan address: 30 N. Gould St. Some of these appear to be legitimate firms, but dozens, like the Alo Group, have little trace of aboveboard business.

And Wyoming is in the middle of an economic boom of corporate malfeasance.

The fraud indictments add to growing evidence that Wyoming is a major new destination for people outside the state—including criminals, suspected North Korean sanctions evaders, and those with wealth of dubious origin—to incorporate secretive limited liability companies, or LLCs, and other entities to hold and move cash. In December, ICIJ reporting showed that the state had overtaken Delaware in its rising per capita number of incorporations, leaving officials in the least populated U.S. state grappling with how to oversee a proliferation of anonymous shell companies.

[Ed. Note: *No relation to Alo Yoga]

Delaware dethroned!

Tara Berg, the county assessor for Wyoming’s Fremont County, told ICIJ that over the past several years residents have begun complaining about shell companies that, in an apparent attempt to appear legitimate, have falsely used the residents’ home addresses on corporate filings. “We have people bringing us stacks of mail that they’re getting for these companies at their addresses,” Berg said. “People are panicked.”

A single storefront at 30 N. Gould Street in Sheridan is the alleged home of 40 percent of the new incorporations registered in Wyoming in the last five years. And some of them are real prizes.

Such cases include that of Andrew Marnell, who pleaded guilty to bank fraud and money laundering and was sentenced in 2023 in a Los Angeles federal court for using shell companies to obtain nearly $9 million in PPP loans for hundreds of fictitious employees. Marnell spent the proceeds on, among other items, Rolex watches, a Range Rover, and a Ducati motorcycle, according to federal prosecutors. One of the key firms in his scheme, Slatestone LLC, was registered at 30 N. Gould St. and received more than $1.3 million to support 75 people the firm claimed to employ, according to prosecutors.

According to a 2024 indictment and corporate records, a Florida-based man named Jared Dean Eakes established an array of shell companies—all registered at 30 N. Gould St.—that took in $4.8 million in fraudulent loans from the federal government. Eakes, a former Merrill Lynch financial adviser and broker, also allegedly used companies registered at the address to steal more than $2 million from people who transferred him funds believing he was a private wealth manager, according to the indictment. Eakes pleaded not guilty to the charges and the case is pending.

In August 2024, Andre Shammas, in San Diego, pleaded guilty to helping to set up shell companies, including one registered at 30 N. Gould St., to defraud the government’s emergency relief program and obtain more than 40 PPP loans with a total value exceeding $5 million.

Sheridan, Wyoming—the Caymans of the northern Rockies. Aren’t business-friendly environments great?

We move along to North Carolina, where the state’s Republicans simply cannot stop themselves from playing monkey-mischief with the state’s reapportionment processes. From the NC Newsline:

Experts say it would run afoul of the U.S. Constitution and long-established U.S. Supreme Court precedent, but that hasn’t deterred a group of Republican members of the state House from reintroducing an amendment to the state constitution that would dramatically alter how North Carolinians elect state senators. Under the proposal, each of the state’s 50 senators would represent two of the state’s 100 counties, rather than a roughly equal number of state residents, as is the case now. Rep. Jay Adams (R-Catawba), who is one of the measure’s chief sponsors, filed House Bill 234, which is entitled “Little Federal Model NC Edition,” on Feb. 26. Adams introduced the same proposal in 2023, but it died in committee.

Rep. Adams is nothing if not persistent, and he has a specific goal in mind.

The proposal would almost certainly have the effect of further expanding Republican dominance in the Senate—where it currently enjoys a 30-20 advantage—by allotting many more senators to conservative, rural areas. Wake and Mecklenburg counties, the homes of Raleigh and Charlotte, respectively, are the state’s most populous. They each have six senators representing portions of the counties in the 2025-2026 legislative session, according to the General Assembly’s website. Of these 12 lawmakers, only one is Republican: Rep. Vickie Sawyer, whose district covers part of Mecklenburg County and all of Iredell County.

If the proposed amendment were to become law, one senator would represent Wake and a neighboring county—the text declares districts must consist of “contiguous territory.” This means that instead of six Democratic lawmakers representing portions of Wake County, there would be only one, whose constituency would be comprised of North Carolina’s most populous county and an additional adjoining county.

I don’t think the Republicans in North Carolina have any intention of letting an election be decided on the square ever again. Issues? What are those?

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Portuguese Man Of War Friedman of the Algarve brings us one small step short of faith healing. From Oklahoma Voice:

House Bill 1224, authored by Rep. Kevin West, R-Moore, moved through the Health and Human Services Oversight Committee Monday with a 7-6 vote with bipartisan opposition. Around 30 health care providers from around the state gathered at the Capitol and filled the committee meeting to advocate against the bill. They said they were disappointed by the outcome of the vote. The legislation, which West said has been successful in a handful of states, could allow a physician, or an entire hospital, to choose not to offer procedures that conflict with personal beliefs. This excludes emergency care, although the bill does not define the parameters that create that situation. No specific procedures or types of care are outlined in the bill, meaning a health care provider, institution or payor could choose to stop offering STD testing, blood transfusions or elective procedures.

Naturally, because you want as much ambiguity as possible while you’re bleeding out on the floor of the ER.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.