Wyoming
Bill Winney Has Lost Six Times For Wyoming… | Cowboy State Daily
Bondurant resident Bill Winney is one of the more recognizable faces at the Wyoming Legislature even though he’s never been part of the body as an elected official.
Winney is steadfast in his desire to be involved in Wyoming politics, so much so that he’s testified on almost every topic that’s come up at the Legislature over the last 15 years.
He’s now making his seventh attempt to win a seat in the Legislature over the last 14 years, running in the Republican primary for Senate District 14 against House Speaker Albert Sommers, R-Pinedale, and Kemmerer resident Laura Taliaferro Pearson. This is his first time running for the Senate.
Winney may have had an easier path to victory if he ran for the House in District 20, with two newcomer candidates looking to fill Sommers’ role, but he told Cowboy State Daily that he believes the Senate is a better place to try and enact property tax reform.
A 30-year Navy veteran, Winney was in charge of large-scale budgets while working as a program coordinator at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Upon retirement, Winney could have easily devoted his time to more leisurely pursuits, but said “it wasn’t in my heart” to do that. Instead, he’s been closely observing and participating in the Legislature since 2005.
Winney has spent most of this time attempting to draw a bridge between his Navy and federal government experience and a multitude of Wyoming topics over the years at the Legislature. Simply put, if there’s a bill being considered by a committee, you’re likely to see Winney give his input on it.
Winney credits himself for helping convince legislators to pass multiple bills into law, such as rangeland studies and computer science programs since he testified for the first time in 2009.
“A private citizen in Wyoming, if you speak well and speak from the heart and speak from experience, you can affect what they do,” he said.
He was officially recognized by the Legislature for his participation in 2019.
Too Much Spending
Integral in Winney’s campaign is a belief that Wyoming state government is spending too much money. Winney said it’s not that any single department or program is wasteful as a whole, but more that the government could be spending its money more wisely.
“There’s a lot of places they could cut spending if they just took a good hard look at what they’re doing,” he said.
Winney was in charge of making many fiscal decisions during the six years he spent working at the Pentagon. He also wrote the equivalent of laws for the submarines he was a commander on.
He cited the example of a local school district in Sublette County his wife worked at spending $25,000 on a set of reading and literacy books it never used.
“That’s money that came out of taxes and it did nothing,” Winney said. “How do you get down into that level of detail? I’d like to try and do that.”
Winney still supports local control and wants school boards to be property trained so they know where to look to prevent future incidents like that.
“It’s the part and parcel of bureaucrats, superintendents, principals, vice presidents to know how to do things and get the school board to want them to do,” Winney said. “How do you get the school board to be able to recognize it?”
Property Taxes
Winney said most retired Wyoming residents don’t get cost-of-living pension increases like he does with the Navy that have doubled in 20 years. As a result, when their property taxes increase, they don’t have extra income to cover the bills. He’s already seen this happen to a few former Teton County residents who had to move to cheaper residences further south.
“We have to remember that if we push elders out of their homes, they’re going to end up in the elder care facilities, which is a lot more expensive in the long run,” Winney said.
If elected, Winney said he’d look at putting inflationary caps to help curb the rising property taxes the state has been dealing with the last few years. He also firmly supports a constitutional amendment going before the voters this fall that, if passed, would separate residential property as a separate form of taxation in Wyoming. This would allow for a reduction of the assessment rates in the state.
Although Winney didn’t have much to criticize about his two opponents, he was disappointed by the lack of interest from a slim majority of legislators this spring in calling a special session to override Gov. Mark Gordon’s vetoes. One of the most upsetting vetoes for Winney was on Senate File 54, a bill that would have provided 25% property tax relief on home values worth up to $2 million in Wyoming.
Sommers had been one of the most vocal in opposing the special session effort at the time, arguing that it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort spent convening when the bills could be brought back again next year.
“I thought the response particularly of the House leadership was underwhelming,” Winney said. “I thought the House and Senate should have come back into session and they kind of faded out on that.”
During his time as speaker, Sommers has had a relatively cold relationship with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, a group of farther right House Republicans. Winney said the Freedom Caucus gets a “bum rap” and their members are actually much more dynamic than other groups of the Legislature. He supports their fiscal approaches, but said the group’s members also have a tendency to get “a little doctrinaire.”
“Spending — that’s a big deal for those Freedom Caucus guys, but I think it should be a big deal across the broader part of the Legislature,” Winney said.
Other Issues
Winney also wants to look at cost-of-living pension increases for retired state employees and to make emergency medical services classified as essential in Wyoming.
“Our EMS out here, people can be an hour or more away from some kind of trauma care,” Winney said. “That’s going to be a tall order but I got it.”
Certain Republicans have opposed pension increases, saying the state can’t afford it. Sommers said this could be easily remedied by pulling money from savings.
“We can’t afford to not do that,” he said.
Pearson is a sheep rancher and school bus driver who has often testified before the Legislature over the last few years on a variety of issues, consistently expressing farther right views.
Pearson said the people of Wyoming are “fed up” with the way the state is being run.
SD 14 also encompasses the new TerraPower small nuclear plant that will be built in Kemmerer. Winney said he wants to pass legislation to help better support the facility. Because of his past experience working with submarines, Winney has strong knowledge on the topic of nuclear energy.
“There are folks that are anti-nuclear out there and I’ve found that they typically tell only one side of the story,” he said.
On education, he believes there hasn’t been enough focus on providing scholarships for students to attend community colleges or receive vocational training.
Winney’s Chances
Winney has run in every election cycle in Wyoming since 2010, six times for the Legislature and one time for Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2014, only winning one contested primary and no general elections.
His closest race came in 2020 when he lost to former Independent state legislator Jim Roscoe by 366 votes.
Winney said he plans to engage in more door-knocking, mailers and text messaging to make his seventh bid for the Legislature the charm.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
A Wyoming judge struck down three abortion laws on Friday, the latest instance of the courts here rejecting attempts by state lawmakers to curtail the procedure in the Equality State.
Retired District Judge Thomas T. C. Campbell ruled the laws violated a 2012 amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that protects individuals’ rights to make their own healthcare decisions. The Wyoming Supreme Court in January cited the same provision when it struck down two statewide abortion bans, and a different judge noted the amendment in April when he blocked enforcement of the state’s new “heartbeat” bill.
Friday’s ruling concerned three laws passed by lawmakers in 2025. One created a mandatory ultrasound requirement and a 48-hour waiting period for patients seeking abortions. The second enacted a set of new and more stringent regulations that critics said were intended to make operating an abortion clinic in Wyoming unfeasible. A third involved abortion restrictions within a larger law governing the prescription of off-label medications.
Campbell temporarily blocked enforcement of all three laws last year after the plaintiffs in the case — which included abortion providers and abortion rights advocates — filed suit in state court. But his final determination that the laws are unconstitutional did not come until Friday.
‘No competent evidence’
In his 34-page decision, Campbell wrote repeatedly that the state, which had defended the laws in court, failed to provide evidence backing its claims. He noted the state alleged that the ultrasound law serves as a way to protect women from the consequences of undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies. But the judge found that the state “offers no competent evidence that such instances are occurring with any measure of regularity.” Additionally, he wrote, the state “offered no cogent evidence illustrating that a waiting period is necessary for any purpose.”
Meanwhile, the plaintiffs showed that the ultrasound rule would not significantly lessen the risk for ectopic pregnancy complications and that waiting periods have no medical utility, the judge wrote. They also offered “ample evidence” that the ultrasound requirement lacked a compelling government interest, according to Campbell’s ruling.
“The Plaintiffs provide concise evidence undermining the medical necessity of an ultrasound prior to undergoing a chemical abortion,” he wrote. “The Plaintiffs request for relief is underscored by their evidence that abortion is inherently safe. They provide Wyoming Department of Health data indicating zero complications or deaths resulting from abortion in Wyoming. They also specifically cite clinical guidance explicitly proclaiming that ultrasounds are not medically necessary for women seeking chemical abortions.”
Campbell also took issue with what he termed a lack of evidence by state lawyers defending the law that required abortion clinics be regulated as “ambulatory surgical centers,” which come with more stringent, and costly, regulations. The state contended the law constituted a compelling interest because it closed a legal loophole, but did not provide evidence showing that “consistency of laws forms a compelling government interest,” he wrote.
He also rejected the state’s arguments that the law helped to ensure women’s health.
“Of course, it is conceivable that preserving women’s health could independently invoke a compelling interest,” he wrote. “However, outside of sweeping generalizations, the State again provides no evidence or a causal link of how a surgical abortion facility, operating outside the regulatory framework of an [ambulatory surgical center], negatively impacts women’s health and welfare.”
As for the off-label medication law, which abortion advocates fear would discourage doctors from prescribing common abortion medications, the judge agreed with the plaintiffs, who maintained it was a solution in need of a problem.
Abortion opponents stymied by constitutional amendment
State lawmakers have made several attempts to limit or ban abortion in Wyoming since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade. Since then, the same group of plaintiffs has repeatedly succeeded in convincing the courts that the laws violated a 2012 amendment to the Wyoming Constitution. Voters enacted the amendment after a push by conservatives who feared Obamacare would lead to government infringement on healthcare autonomy.
The amendment protects adults’ rights to make their own healthcare decisions. The Wyoming Supreme Court in January concluded that “a woman has a fundamental right to make her own health care decisions, including the decision to have an abortion.”
In the aftermath of that ruling, Gov. Mark Gordon called on the Wyoming Legislature to pursue a constitutional amendment that would settle the matter. But lawmakers instead chose to pass a law that made abortion illegal once fetal cardiac activity is detected, which can occur by the sixth week. That law is also tied up in the courts while a legal challenge proceeds.
Still, anti-abortion advocates in the Legislature promised to continue their attempts to end the practice here.
“We will not quit, we will not give up and we will not stop the fight to protect innocent life,” Speaker of the House Chip Neiman said in a video posted to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ Facebook page. “It’s really too bad. It’s quite a testimony, quite a statement about our judiciary that, I think once again, they’ve acted to thwart and to ignore the will of the Legislature and have complete disregard for innocent life in Wyoming.”
Neiman, a Republican who is now running for the state senate, said he expected Wyoming Attorney General Keith Kautz, who advocated against abortion after he retired from the Wyoming Supreme Court, to fight Friday’s ruling, presumably by appealing to the high court.
Meanwhile, the president of Wyoming’s only abortion clinic, Casper’s Wellspring Health Access, hailed Friday’s decision, while also alluding to the likelihood of more legal battles ahead.
“These politically motivated laws, which unfairly target abortion providers, harm the people we serve by creating unnecessary barriers to essential health care,” Julie Burkhart said in a statement. While we know the fight against these laws is far from over, this outcome strengthens our determination to continue providing comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion, to the people of Wyoming.”
The University of Wyoming has conducted repeated polls on abortion in Wyoming. The latest, which was released in November 2024, showed that about 10% of Wyomingites backed a total ban on abortion, with another 31% favoring abortion restrictions with exceptions for rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger. Another 20% preferred those exemptions and others once the need for an abortion had been clearly established. About 39% said abortion should remain a personal choice.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Wyoming officials are reminding travelers to be prepared for high winds this summer, especially those driving or towing recreational vehicles.
The Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources and the Wyoming Department of Transportation are encouraging outdoor enthusiasts to plan ahead and stay informed about weather conditions before hitting the road. Officials said highways such as Interstate 25, Interstate 80 and U.S. 287 frequently experience strong wind gusts that can create dangerous driving conditions for high-profile vehicles.
Vehicles most vulnerable during high-wind events include motorhomes, fifth-wheel and bumper-pull trailers, toy haulers, rooftop tent vehicles and passenger vehicles towing campers, boats or utility trailers.
Wyoming transportation officials may impose travel restrictions or temporarily close roads to certain vehicles during severe wind events.
Travelers are encouraged to check road conditions at wyoroad.info or by calling 511 before departing and to build flexibility into their travel plans. Officials also recommend securing external gear and understanding how wind conditions may impact their specific vehicle setup.
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