(Editor's Note:  A little background on the rooster…

In recent years, a statue of a rather odd looking rooster has sometimes been seen occupying space in leadership offices in the Wyoming legislature. The rooster, in fact, has become something of a prize in the Capitol – in 2007 it was for a time “kidnapped” and turned up in the Capitol Club, and other places. Was it kidnapped? Not clear. It may be moving about on its own. Certainly, it is proving, in Wyofile, to have a voice of its own.)

 

 

 

 

    Rooster listens for the phones in the Wyoming legislators' offices, and they're not ringing about cutting property taxes. Maybe this is because legislators don't have phones, but Rooster will stand by his research. He doesn't see any carrier pigeons, either, flapping about this issue.

    So the topic that so many thought could be the "defining" issue of the 2008 legislature will end up being a tiny toot at the end of the parade. There will be a small expansion of a small program that gives low-wage working people a small property tax refund if they'll bring in the paperwork they don't want to bring in to show how badly off they are. It's too humiliating, even for the whiney poor – the current program had only about 600 applicants. Rooster thinks that rich people should be required to turn in their check stubs to prove that they DON'T deserve the refund – otherwise, they get it, and everyone will think they're poor.

    The governor wanted to give a property tax refund to the elderly only, whether they asked for it or not. He says the secret to getting legislation passed is not to care who gets credit. In keeping with that philosophy, no one is getting credit for this one, because it isn't happening. Speaker Roy Cohee, who sometimes shares an office with me, says, "I don't see why you get a break just because you live a long time."

    The allure of property tax breaks to legislators seems to be that it would make Wyoming voters even less responsible for paying for state services, when, thanks to the energy industry, they already pay practically nothing (Rooster overheard Rep. Tom Lubnau saying, "Wyoming is the most conservative socialist state in the country."). The less citizens pay, the less they care what government does, or politicians. Which suggests a simple campaign slogan: "Reelect me. Stay home and watch your new TV while I eat shrimp in Cheyenne with the Petroleum Association."

    For a few weeks, the Republican legislature fell all over itself to offer a different tax break than the governor's. They would cut tax for veterans. They would cut the assessment rate that determines the tax you pay. They would cut the rate at which the assessment rate could grow. They would cut property taxes in Nebraska, New Jersey, and British Columbia. They would cut the grass, so Rooster can get to the worms.

    But in the end, nobody showed up in rags and Winnebagos to beg for relief. As Sen. Jayne Mockler said, surveying the big, crowded room during the House Revenue Committee's hearing on property taxes: "These are all lobbyists. There's a total of two regular citizens in the room."

    When the room is full of lobbyists, and the legislators swoon to the smell of shoe polish and slightly damp cashmere, time often runs short, because each one of these lobbyists must squeeze out some rhetorical honey to prove their worth (so they can pay the property taxes they don't want cut – and theirs, by the way, dwarf those whiney poor people's…). In the end, legislators saw the wisdom of these selfless advisors, and there will be no major changes.

-30-

 

 

 

    A tech-savvy Legislature needs to remember some rules of etiquette and proper legislative behavior. The Senate Rules Committee wants to unplug the chamber just a little – no phones on the floor or in the gallery and only legislative use of the Internet on the state-issued laptops on everyone’s desk.

    Citizens in the gallery, who have a bird’s eye view of the Senate floor, have complained about legislators’ extracurricular Internet activities instead of paying attention to business.

    Fellow legislators complain, too. Rules Committee member Jayne Mockler says she and the chairman were the only members of an interim committee who were actually listening to public testimony, while everyone else was absorbed in his or her laptop. A matter of courtesy and inattention, the Cheyenne Democrat says. She reports one House member read an entire book on his laptop during a session.

    The upstairs Senate doorman is fed up at seeing people sit down in the gallery and immediately take out their Blackberries to send e-mails or text messages, presumably to senators. He’d be happy to enforce a no-phone rule.

    But senators protested during a rules debate Friday that they might have to tend to business with a brief text message or e-mail, and they may have to open a Yahoo or Hotmail home page to do so – regardless of how it might look to folks in the gallery.

    Mockler says all this connectivity also allows lawmakers to find out what the other chamber is doing and even listen to debate, while their own business is going on. It’s against the rules to color your activity by what the other chamber is doing, after all. Lawmakers also shouldn’t be engaged in dialogue with lobbyists when they should be listening to fellow lawmakers, no matter how uninteresting the discussion seems.

 

 

Pinstriped Suits Haunt Legislature

    Remembering that Exxon purchased Mobil a few years back for $81 billion, a piddling $5 million couldn’t matter that much to the corporate behemoth, right? Yet there they were in the Capitol Wednesday, an army of energy industry lobbyists, led by ExxonMobil’s Patrick R. Day of Holland & Hart, weeping and gnashing of teeth at the thought of a severance tax on helium – a byproduct of the natural gas production. (And natural gas revenues have certainly kept ExxonMobile in making acquisitions.)

 

 

    So, on Wednesday morning, there among the sleek pinstriped lobbyist penguins sat a small band of Wyoming legislators, a clutch of trembling, disheveled dodos penned in a small hearing (yes, Rooster sometimes gets carried away with the odd avian metaphor). But these were stubborn dodos. With a little help from Attorney General Bruce Salzburg, the group had devised a bill that would NOT tax the property or its owner (the invulnerable feds), but would tax the producer (for severing the helium).

    Will the energy companies sue if this bill passes? They weren’t saying, but all the legislative birds are twittering that they will. Sure, the envisioned helium tax would only cost ExxonMobil $5 million, but lawyers voices get high and squeaky when they talk about the new natural gas processing plants soon to come on line – all of which plan to make some extra pocket change by separating out the helium (which is not much used anymore for blimps – Rooster is relieved – but is useful for superconducting magnets, deep-sea diving and other industrial uses, like…balloons?).

 

And Rooster overheard – because Rooster is in a position to overhear – one of our legislators in the Back Room say: “If you just took all the money being paid to the lobbyists in that room and gave it to the state, we’d make more than the tax.”