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Dear Casper,

Our legislators are failing us all, and they know it.

This year, the Wyoming legislature voted to burden our public schools with a $686 million funding deficit through property tax cuts without a plan to make up for that loss. They also passed legislation to allow public dollars to be pulled from public institutions and instead used for private education.

Additionally, despite the overwhelming evidence that Wyoming’s economy is not adequately diversified, lawmakers continue to fail to support economic development that would sustainably attract young families to the state. Boom and bust cycles hit and the global economy continues to move away from some of the industries we have over-relied on to support our state. As a result, young families go, school enrollment declines, and so does the funding that comes with it. 

On top of these local leadership failures, the state faces $50 million in royalty losses annually from increased federal subsidies to the coal industry as part of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”  

All of these factors converge to dramatically underfund and undermine public education, our children, and our state’s future. Our lawmakers know this, and they are only making it worse. They are intentionally stripping our schools, our families, and our children of the resources that are necessary to ensure individuals can thrive into adulthood and that we have stable, accessible economies across the state.

This week the School Finance Recalibration Committee met in Casper. The committee seems prepared to take the critical step to increase teacher salaries. This is essential and not enough. Despite testimony that strongly reflected the value of school resource officers, school counselors, and food services, the committee is not planning to increase support to any of them. This is despite the judicial finding earlier this year that lawmakers have routinely underfunded our public education system for decades.

Our state Constitution mandates that our public schools are adequately funded to provide a quality and equitable education to all Wyoming students. This is good for children, families, and the state overall. Only the legislature can make the necessary decisions to fulfill this mandate. They aren’t. It’s time to vote them out for those who will. 

Writing in solidarity for a better Wyoming future,

Jai-Ayla Sutherland
Casper

Related

Activists in Utah and Wyoming held rallies this week urging state regulators to scrutinize a document they believe will raise energy bills for hundreds of thousands of Westerners, and worsen air pollution across the northern Rockies.

The subject of the gatherings was Rocky Mountain Power’s 2025 integrated resource plan, a roadmap for electricity generation and transmission from the largest utility in both states, and a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, which is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. This year’s integrated resource plan, which is updated every two years, forecasted slowing investments in wind and solar power and battery storage—increasingly inexpensive ways of delivering electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions.

Residents and environmentalists in both states, where fossil fuel production helps keep residential tax burdens low, have objected to these plans, arguing that failing to invest in renewables—especially before Republican cuts to clean energy tax credits kick in next year—will make energy bills unnecessarily expensive. 

“We are being sold a monster,” said Luis Miranda, a senior campaign organizer with the Sierra Club, ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City. “We hope this kind of pressure brings a bit of accountability or sense of responsibility from PacifiCorp.”

David Eskelsen, a spokesperson for PacifiCorp, said the company “does not usually comment on the content of statements made in public witness hearings.” In testimony filed with its regulator in Utah, the Public Service Commission, PacifiCorp disputed the need to build tax-advantaged renewable energy as it had already planned for fossil fuel resources to stay online in Utah.

At a hearing in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Utah public service commissioners responsible for deciding whether to accept the document heard comments from 15 members of the public, none of whom supported PacifiCorp’s plan. Some testified in the spirit of Halloween. 

“My name is Dr. Frankenstein,” one costumed commenter said, reimagining the character as a “Pacifi-Corpse” executive. “My 2025 IRP creation is a monster. … You do have the power to stop this IRP before it grows stronger. You could tell Pacifi-Corpse to go back to the lab and to build something clean and affordable.”

“I can’t resist the temptation to wish you a happy Halloween,” David Clark, a commissioner, responded.

Other critiques were less abstract. Tilden Warner, a college student who attended the meeting on crutches and in a walking boot for a broken leg, testified that he is worried PacifiCorp’s plan, with its continued reliance on coal and other fossil fuels, will contribute to increased environmental degradation in Utah. He lamented the ongoing loss of islands in the Great Salt Lake, which are becoming connected to the lakeshore as water evaporates.

“By the time I have kids and they are born here and they grow up, there may be no lake at all,” he said.

Emma Verhamme, a pregnant woman living in Salt Lake, spoke about how she mourns the world her daughter will be born into. Air pollution, climate volatility and higher energy costs all weighed on her.

“I know that I’m not giving her the same world that I was born into,” she said of her daughter’s future. “I can’t put clean air and reliable and affordable energy on my baby shower registry. That’s why I’m here asking you, Public Service Commission, to represent the needs and wants of the people and reject Rocky Mountain Power’s disappointing and seemingly self-serving integrated resource plan.”

If the Utah Public Service Commission accepts the plan instead, the utility could use it as evidence that the commission supported the proposal when applying for rate adjustments associated with it in the future. While PacifiCorp can still pursue the plan if it is not acknowledged, it would be more difficult to claim any costs associated with the plan are prudent, the Sierra Club’s Miranda said.

“I think the community is hopeful because of how the Public Service Commission has reacted over the past year and a half,” Miranda said. “They have been very reasonable and fair, and frankly outstanding.”

A Sierra Club gathering in Laramie, Wyoming, kicked off just a few minutes after the hearing in Salt Lake City ended. Recent Rocky Mountain Power rate hikes in the Cowboy State have been the subject of intense political scrutiny ever since 2023, when the utility applied for a near-30 percent increase. Residents expressed hope Wednesday that their Public Service Commission would soon hold a hearing on Rocky Mountain Power’s integrated resource plan, and how it might affect what they pay for electricity.

John Burbridge, secretary and chief counsel for the Wyoming Public Service Commission, told Inside Climate News there would be a hearing, but it had not yet been scheduled. Burbridge did not comment on the rally in Laramie.

“What Rocky Mountain Power invests in in this [plan] is ultimately going to affect your rates,” said Emma Jones, a community organizer with the Sierra Club in Wyoming, during that event. “The Public Service Commission needs to hear more from people like you.”

Affordability was at the center of the rally’s proceedings. “I’m concerned about the future,” said Madeline Dalrymple, a Laramie resident. The current plan “will increase our cost of living and make Wyoming more expensive.”

Both federal and private-sector estimates have shown wind and solar energy projects, and battery systems to store their electricity, are cheaper to build than natural gas and coal power plants. 

“We see a plan that is trying to hold on to a world that just doesn’t exist anymore,” said Tanner Ewalt, another Laramie resident. “The market itself is determining that coal and oil aren’t the future.”

Elsewhere in the West, other groups are concerned by what they describe as a regional fracturing of PacifiCorp’s system, which stretches across six Western states. Fred Heutte, a senior policy associate with NW Energy Coalition, said he was surprised to see the company propose confining some of the costs on its system to specific regions. 

He and Miranda are concerned that a more localized grid will lead to higher costs for consumers. If PacifiCorp built renewables in Oregon and Washington, Utahns and Wyomingites would miss out on that more affordable energy without a suitable transmission connection to bring that energy from west to east—which Heutte said PacifiCorp claims is the case. And Oregonians and Washingtonians, whose states have clean energy mandates, may disproportionately shoulder the capital costs of building new renewable energy operations that should benefit the whole system. 

“The reality is, it is a single system, and the new resources that provide the most customer value, wherever they are, are the ones that should be developed,” Heutte said.