Wyoming in 2022 was lots just like the man who finds a long-forgotten $20 invoice in a coat pocket.
For the 2 years prior, the state had suffered via a stretch of income declines introduced on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the vitality downturn. Gov. Mark Gordon introduced funds cuts and layoffs. Even easy issues – like some relaxation stops – proved too expensive to afford.
However the state’s financial fortunes have loved fairly a turnaround this yr. The first accounts used to pay for applications and companies collected practically $330 million greater than anticipated. The rosier fiscal outlook is largely on account of higher-than-expected oil, pure gasoline and coal costs.
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The windfall raises questions: Is it greatest to place that extra cash into financial savings? Spend the money now on long-planned tasks? Make investments the cash?
We consider the windfall represents a possibility to place Wyoming to thrive over the long-term. The identical forces which have buoyed our economic system of late will inevitably undergo one other downturn, leading to much less income to pay for presidency companies. But when we plan correctly, we are able to make the most of our success now to safe a greater future.
Individuals are additionally studying…
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Our state’s political technique has typically been to maintain taxes low. However there’s extra to governing than that. What we must always actually be asking is: What can we do now to make tomorrow higher than at this time?
Listed here are a number of concepts. Let’s put money into our journey trade with a particular goal – how can we encourage vacationers to spend a number of further days right here after their go to to Yellowstone or fishing journey alongside the North Platte? What can we accomplish that a household that travels to Jackson stays in Kemmerer afterward to discover that neighborhood’s wonderful trove of fossils?
Now can also be the time to put money into ahead pondering concepts inside our training system in order that we’re making ready our younger folks for the roles that might be in demand over the approaching many years. What can we do to assist our neighborhood faculties and the College of Wyoming in order that younger folks select to remain right here for his or her school diploma?
It’s not unusual in our state to listen to the chorus: Wyoming is what America was. Whereas we perceive the very human impulse to pine for the halcyon days, it’s not attainable to maneuver ahead if we’re all the time wanting again. We encourage the Legislature to embark on the upcoming session with imaginative and prescient and braveness. We have now an actual alternative to raised place Wyoming for the long run. Now could be the time to make the most of it.
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The opinions of the Casper Star-Tribune Editorial Board characterize the views of a majority of its members. Not all members will essentially agree on all elements of a printed editorial.
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A DNA analyst enters her area of the Wyoming State Crime lab with a digital key card, dons her lab coat, goggles and gloves, sterilizes her work bench and pulls a bagged pair of underwear from the evidence locker.
She’s sterilized her work bench with bleach and cleaned it off with ethanol, the two scents that hang about her like an aura. She spreads a fresh swatch of paper onto her desk and lays the evidence bag on it. If the bag is sealed and free of tampering, she’ll open it.
She writes notes: observations on the size, color, brand and staining of the garment. She screens it for body fluids with a special light. If she finds any stains of interest – blood, saliva, body fluid – she’ll report back to the investigator who sent the garment to her.
That investigator might be working for the public defender’s office trying to clear a defendant. He might be a police detective trying to put one in prison.
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That doesn’t matter, but the science does.
If the investigator thinks the substance matters, the analyst shaves off a 5 millimeter by 5 millimeter flake of it and puts it in a test tube with an enzyme that breaks the DNA free from its other components. She separates the other cell debris, such as cotton.
If enough DNA remains, she amplifies it by putting it in an advanced heater called a thermocycler along with primers, loose nucleotides and an enzyme found in the Yellowstone Hot Springs just a half day’s drive to her northwest.
When warm, the thermus aquaticus enzyme loves to replicate DNA exponentially, turning one strand into millions, which the analyst will then pipe through a cramped tube with 15,000 volts of electricity.
Smaller “peaks” or identifying markers emerge from the tube quicker, while larger ones take longer, enabling her to see the size of each one.
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It’s like echolocation, on a nanoscopic scale.
Later, she’ll plug the DNA profile into a database to see who left it behind.
Lindsey Human is a forensic drug chemist at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. There’s close to $1 million worth of equipment in this lab, including six machines that separate and identify various chemicals. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Kim Ley, a forensic analyst at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne, works in the Screening Room, where evidence and items are analyzed for the types of substances that may be on them. This machine uses various types of light to show different bodily fluids that could be on something. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Amber Smith, a forensic analyst at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne, demonstrates how this Hamilton aparatus works. It can process nearly 90 individual DNA samples at a time. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
A detail view of the Agilent 8890 GC System, right, combined with the Angilent 5977B GC/MSD, left, that work together to process and analyze samples to identify their chemical makeup. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
The various laboratories at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne each specialize in a different science that helps identify substances, fingerprints and other clues that help solve crimes. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Top Six
Down the hall, fingerprint analysts are performing their own nuanced rituals. Ballistics experts are measuring grooves on metal shards. Chemists are scrutinizing murky powders and toxicologists are searching for tranquilizers in urine samples — as a stray example.
For performing these tasks with a more than 90% efficiency rate in using money and personnel, the Wyoming State Crime lab received the prestigious 2023 Foresight Maximus award earlier this month.
“We didn’t know we were going to get an award,” Scott McWilliams, Crime Lab director for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.
He and two lab staffers attended a May 1 meeting for the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors in Birmingham, Alabama, months after sending a rigorous accounting of the Wyoming lab’s staffing, costs, uses and output to that group.
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“We did this to see where we have inefficiencies and where we can make ourselves better,” said McWilliams.
When the forensics group presented the Wyoming lab with an efficiency award that only 16, or 7.6%, of the 211 applicants earned, McWilliams and the two staffers were “just shocked and really honored.”
The other 15 forensic labs awarded span another 12 American states, Puerto Rico, Costa Ric and Auckland, New Zealand.
“These 16 laboratories stand as beacons of innovation and efficiency, representing the very best in forensic science laboratories,” said ASCLD President Timothy Kupferschmid in a press release. “Congratulations to each winner for their outstanding achievements and unwavering dedication to the pursuit of scientific truth.”
It’s Been Half A Century
The Wyoming State Crime Lab began with the inception of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) in 1973. The statewide agency works drug and organized crime cases, officer-involved crime investigations, and any other investigations to which it’s invited.
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In the early days in 1973, analysts were called “scientist agents,” McWilliams said, qualifying that he knows these things despite not yet having been born.
“And they did some science,” he said with a chuckle. It was basic: fingerprint analysis, some forgery and document analysis.
The lab introduced DNA analysis to its repertoire in 2002 and criminal toxicology in 2018, McWilliams said.
Eaton, Of Course
In the same year it added DNA technology, the lab crew decided to plug an old, but important, bit of DNA from a stain found on a murdered woman’s clothing into a federal database.
Lisa Marie “Li’l Miss” Kimmel had been dead for 14 years by then. Search parties found her body in the North Platte River in 1988. Her autopsy revealed she’d been repeatedly raped, stabbed and bludgeoned.
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The federal database yielded a match to a man already in federal prison on a weapons charge, Dale Wayne Eaton.
The Natrona County Sheriff’s Office and others converged on Eaton’s former home in Moneta, Wyoming, and eventually unearthed Kimmel’s car buried on Eaton’s property. A jury convicted him in 2004.
Now, McWilliams recalls this as the most notable DNA crime bust in which the Wyoming State Crime Lab had a hand.
The entrance to the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
The Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Forensic analyst Amber Smith shows an example of a sample vile for testing DNA at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
These aren’t futuristic microwave ovens, they’re among the specialize equipment used in the DNA testing area of the Wyoming State Crime Lab. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Lindsey Human is a forensic drug chemist at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. There’s close to $1 million worth of equipment in this lab, including six machines that separate and identify various chemicals. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
The Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Kim Ley, a forensic analyst at the Wyoming State Crime Lab in Cheyenne, works in the Screening Room, where evidence and items are analyzed for the types of substances that may be on them. This machine uses various types of light to show different bodily fluids that could be on something. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Some Zoologist
McWilliams wouldn’t join the facility until three years later, starting as a DNA analyst, progressing to unit supervisor and becoming lab director in 2021.
His University of Wyoming bachelor’s degree is in zoology and physiology, he said, adding that he’d considered going into medicine.
But a tour of the crime lab he took in college sparked his interest, and when he applied for a job later, he “got lucky and got in.”
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McWilliams would later acknowledge that DCI runs on more than luck: applicants undergo an extensive background and character check. The agency sends hiring agents to applicants’ hometowns to talk to the people who know them best, he said.
McWilliams later earned his master’s degree in forensic science and DNA.
Let That Not Diminish …
McWilliams has to check himself in conversation so he doesn’t rhapsodize the science of DNA too much and lose his listeners, he said.
But he also credited the lab’s other study areas as important to solving crimes: naming the drugs, identifying the poison, linking latent prints to the fingers that made them and matching spent ammunition to the gun that fired it.
The Western Identification Network and Next-Generation Identification databases are to “latent print,” or fingerprint analysists, what the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is to DNA analysts, McWilliams said.
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Most areas require a two-year training period, making it rare for an agent to cross into multiple forensics fields, he said. He deems those two years more important than the college degrees applicants receive before them.
“On-the-job training is the really critical part,” he said.
Here To Report
Also critical are lab purity, analyst accountability, DNA privacy and neutrality, he said.
McWilliams said analysts must have a laser focus on their specimens and their data.
“It’s not just about getting the bad guy, it’s about doing the right science,” said McWilliams. If the science doesn’t support an investigator’s hunch, “it sometimes disappoints people when we didn’t get what they want — but it’s the scientific truth that we’re here to report.”
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Contact Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
Long after Wyoming had finished its first round at the National Golf Invitational, head coach Joe Jensen was still waiting on the returns. His men had played the first 18 holes at Ak-Chin Southern Dunes in Maricopa, Arizona, in 6 under to land in third, three shots off the lead, but Jensen was waiting on the university to finalize the team GPA.
The number should be around 3.7 – so Jensen’s anticipation was coming from a place of pride, not fear – but this is where the slightly self-deprecating team motto is debunked.
“Quite honestly I have a solid group and I’ve always had,” Jensen said. “If there’s a program slogan that defines us – and we all laugh about it – it’s that we’re better people than we are players and we poke fun at ourselves for that.”
Scores: National Golf Invitational
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While Jensen’s point is clear, nevertheless here is Wyoming contending for a postseason title – again. The Cowboys played in the inaugural NGI last spring and were part of a five-team horserace in the final round. Wyoming finished second to Texas State by a single shot after having a one-shot lead going into the final hole.
“It was so close and for us to finish second, it was such a great learning experience,” Jensen said. “So fond, fond, fond memories.”
On Friday, each of four teams had the lead at some point during the round: Wyoming, TCU, Butler and Richmond. Ultimately, TCU finished at 9 under for the overnight lead, with Richmond in second at 8 under and Butler in fifth at 4 under.
Washington State’s Preston Bebich and TCU’s Jack Beauchamp lead the individual race at 5 under.
For Wyoming, junior Patrick Azevedo, in the No. 4 spot, birdied half his holes, including five straight from No. 13 to 17. Including Azevedo, Wyoming counted three rounds of 3-under 69 plus a 75 from Davis Seybert in the No. 5 spot, with whom Jensen spent the majority of the day. Leading scorer Jimmy Dales posted an uncharacteristic 77 after a marathon week that included graduation, moving, driving home to Michigan and then flying back to Arizona.
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“I’m cautiously pleased with how we played,” said Jensen, who knows from experience how tight this tournament will likely be.
Jensen, who has led Wyoming for 23 seasons, is a guy who loves his job and someone who tries to cultivate a family-like team atmosphere. He jokes that Wyoming leads the nation in parents. But rankings-wise, Wyoming is a team that’s always in the conversation though often a little bit outside at-large selection into NCAA Regionals.
“We’ve been that team that we sit from national ranking 75 to 125,” he said. “So if we’re not going to make it – and we’ve been always real close, real close, real close – for us to be able to come back (to the NGI) is exciting. So you bring the guys back, and it’s just fun to compete.”
Jensen sees the NGI satisfying a tremendous need in college golf, where each year it only gets harder to qualify for the NCAA finals. For his team, playing in a postseason environment could be a difference-maker when it comes to cracking that bubble into an NCAA Regional. That said, Wyoming players are paying little attention to the acronym at Ak-Chin Southern Dunes.
“There’s no way you’re going to tell our kids that this is not the NCAAs or this is not a valued postseason experience,” Jensen said. “That’s what it feels like, and it does so much good for our program.”
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Jensen has been in this business long enough to know that there are always tough holes around the corner. He is working hard to coach his players to weather those better and cultivate an environment where his players can play free and with confidence. It has been a commentary within the group.
“To me, this event, I’m using it as a little bit of a springboard into next year because I think we can be competitive next year,” Jensen said. “I’m not afraid to say that.”
That starts, Jensen noted, with being relevant this week. So far, so good.
