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.

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.

A father-and-son duo of Blackfeet artists are visiting Riverton and Jackson this week to share their unique takes on ledger art. The events are part of Central Wyoming College’s week-long Native Voices celebration.

Terrance Guardipee and Terran Last Gun will share their work and perspectives during “Behind Linear Narratives: Indigenous Plains Ledger Art,” at the Intertribal Center at CWC’s Riverton campus on May 6 starting at 5:30 p.m.

The two also have an exhibition opening at the Jackson Hole History Museum on May 7, which will be part of an art walk featuring Native artists and Indigenous-inspired food tastings taking place that same evening.

Plains Indian communities lost one of their main canvases when the U.S. government and white settlers started eradicating bison in the mid-1800s. That’s how ledger art was born: Instead of documenting significant events on hides, people would find ways to acquire and draw on filled-out accounting books as a way to keep telling their stories.

Terrance Guardipee was introduced to the visual storytelling style by his mentor George Flett in the late 1990s. Flett gave Guardipee eight sheets of ledger paper to try it out.

“ He was a huge influence on me and guided me through my art career,” said Guardipee. “I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts and so did he. We had that connection.”

Flett, Guardipee and a collection of other artists worked together to revitalize and elevate the art form, and eventually succeeded in getting it recognized as its own competitive category at the Sante Fe Indian Market in 2009.

“ All of us had our own role in what we were doing and none of us looked the same,” he said. “Our art didn’t look the same. We were all individual people.”

Over time, Guardipee developed his own unique ledger art style, moving from a more traditional single-page approach to mixed-media collages that include old documents and antique maps – the more coffee-stained and marked-up, the better.

“ I grabbed stock certificates, checks, receipts, music paper, anything I thought my ancestors, if they came across it and they were doing this kind of work, they would’ve used,” he said. “ Each document wasn’t just a random document to me. They all went with the piece.”

The art form, in its many different iterations, has now grown far beyond its Plains roots, expanding all over Indian Country and among women artists, according to Guardipee. But he said his advice to people curious about the form is to create from their own cultural experiences, rather than replicate the symbols or imagery used by other artists.

Terran Last Gun

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Central Wyoming College

“ Get maps of where you’re from. That’s your homeland. Your ancestors are there,” he said. “Their blood’s been there [for] thousands of years. Draw on those. Represents where you’re from.”

Guardipee’s son, Terran Last Gun, is an acclaimed visual artist in his own right and also attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico. He took up a version of ledger art, but with his own more contemporary twist grounded in geometric shapes and bright colors.

Terrance Guardipee

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Instagram

“ Our ancestors evolved. We evolve. Ledger art evolves,” said Guardipee. “You go to my son, doing very abstract-looking ledger art, but it still connects to our culture. It still has to do with who we are, just in a different way of telling the story.”

The duo have both come away with top prizes at the Santa Fe Indian Market in recent years. For Guardipee, watching the ledger art movement grow and then seeing his son find his own path with the form is “the icing on the cake.”

CWC’s Native Voices event also includes screenings of the documentary “Free Leonard Peltier” in Riverton on May 5 and in Jackson on May 6. Film producer Jhane Meyers, who also worked on the 2022 film “Prey” in the “Predator” franchise, will be at both screenings for a post-showing discussion.

The celebration will wrap up on May 9 with the free sixth annual Teton Powwow at the Snow King Event Center in Jackson. The events are free and open to all.