Gordon, Gray feud escalates as Wyoming’s top officials grapple with mining, wind projects

CHEYENNE—Observers expected tension when Wyoming officials met early this month to determine the fate of a prized state property at the base of Casper Mountain. 

Since early 2024, a group of Natrona County residents has protested the development of a state-approved gravel mine at the site. They formed an organization and gathered tens of thousands of signatures. Soon local office holders amended zoning rules, effectively halting the project. Then the gravel mining company struck back with a lawsuit against the county. A month later, the gravel pit opponents filed their own suit. 

The dustup would come to a head at the June 5 meeting of the State Board of Land Commissioners, a standing panel consisting of Wyoming’s five statewide elected officials. The mine operator’s state-land leases were up for renewal, and stakeholders awaited the board’s ruling on the fraught dispute. 

And yet, perhaps the meeting’s most contentious moments came in an exchange between Gov. Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Chuck Gray, after the latter criticized the chief executive over his management of the meeting. 

“You need to be patient, sir, and allow the process to work,” Gordon said. 

“Mr. Chairman, I’ve been — I would like to respond to that,” Gray said. “I’ve been very patient with you in requesting the parameters for public comment on this meeting and they have never been provided. So I just, I really would appreciate that these continued false accusations towards me cease, thank you.” 

As the governor and the secretary went back and forth for the next couple minutes, the three other commissioners mostly averted their eyes. Some members of the audience audibly groaned. 

It wasn’t the first time the two electeds had sparred on a state board issue. 

In the weeks prior, Gray took to social media to criticize Gordon for his vote on a wind farm lease on state lands. Gordon fired back in his newsletter. In the days before the June 5 land commissioners meeting, Gray also published a press release calling Gordon’s decision to keep the meeting in Cheyenne “a dereliction.” And when the board arrived at the gravel pit agenda item, Gray reiterated his “disappointment that this meeting was not moved to Casper to allow for public comment.”

(None of the public comments at the meeting that would follow — neither for or against the gravel mine — addressed the location of the meeting.)

“We smile a lot,” Treasurer Curt Meier chuckled after the meeting when asked how he deals with ongoing tensions between his fellow commissioners. 

Over the years, Gray and Gordon haven’t seen eye-to-eye on a number of issues. That isn’t unusual for Wyoming’s top officials. Several former office holders and longtime political observers, however, told WyoFile it’s much less common to see those disputes play out so publicly in meetings and online, and in such acrimonious fashion amongst members of the same political party. 

At least one longtime observer of state meetings says the public spat has slowed the board’s process.

“The main thing I see is that issues that normally would be resolved with a discussion and a vote 10 minutes later now end up being issues that go on for maybe 30, 40 minutes, so it makes the meetings longer, ” said Jim Magagna, who lobbies for Wyoming’s agricultural industry. “And then other issues probably don’t get the attention that they deserve, because things got hung up.”

Origins and differences 

The acrimony between Gray and Gordon dates back to the secretary’s time as a state lawmaker, when the governor vetoed some of his legislation, Meier noted. 

As a lawmaker, Gray had led the charge on a 2019 bill granting the Legislature $250,000 and the authority to pursue a legal challenge against Washington state for denying construction permits for coal export terminals. 

The bill passed both chambers by wide margins before Gordon rejected it with one of his first vetoes as governor. 

“I understand and applaud the desire of the Legislature to be ever vigilant in protecting the economic interests of the state and its citizens. I share that same dedication and zeal for assuring that Wyoming is not harmed by the actions of other states,” Gordon wrote in his veto letter. 

“Even so, I can see no compelling reason for potentially confusing the courts, complicating matters at hand, disrupting the coalition of states friendly to our perspective, or introducing reasons to delay an expeditious hearing of the case currently before the court.” 

Gray called the governor’s decision “unfortunate” at the time, according to the Casper-Star Tribune. 

“The veto is detrimental to efforts to protect the coal industry from a radical Leftist political ideology that seeks to put it out of business by any means necessary,” Gray told the newspaper. “It’s going to take a team effort between the executive and legislative branches for there to be success on this issue.”

These days, Gray — like his allies in the Wyoming Freedom Caucus — casts Gordon himself as left-leaning for his “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which involves low-carbon and renewable power sources. 

Outside the legislative process, Gray and Gordon have also disagreed about the executive branch’s rulemaking process. Last year, Gordon rejected two rulemaking proposals by Gray’s office, both on the basis that the proposals went outside the secretary’s authority. 

In August 2023, the Wyoming State Loan and Investment Board — another committee made up of the same five members — approved a policy to require companies doing business with the state to disclose any investment practices guided by environmental, social, governance principles. As members of the board, both Gordon and Gray voted in favor of the policy. 

Meanwhile, Gray proposed stiffer rules by requiring all investment brokers, broker-dealers and securities agents in Wyoming — not just those working with the state — to disclose ESG principles in writing every three years. 

While Gordon wrote in a letter to Gray that he also “vehemently opposes the national push” for implementing ESG, he also said “our zeal to oppose this radical push does not justify implementing rules that go beyond the legal authority of a state agency.”

Gray pushed back, maintaining his office acted within its legal bounds, and said that “Wyoming needs real leadership on these issues, rather than the defensive tone that Governor Gordon lays out in his letter.”

Months later, when Gordon rejected separate rules proposed by Gray that would have added proof of residency to the voter registration process, the secretary said, “they should have been signed.” 

War of words on wind

On May 19, Gray posted a photograph on X and Facebook of a wind turbine that appears to have a broken blade. Of the five statewide electeds, the secretary is among the most active on social media. 

“A photo of Mark Gordon’s outrageously wrong ‘vision’ for Wyoming,” Gray wrote in the post, in which he also tagged Cowboy State Daily and a Blaze News senior editor. 

Gray had been the sole dissenting vote when the State Board of Land Commissioners approved state leases for the Pronghorn and Sidewinder wind projects in early April. A few days after Gray’s post, Gordon responded in a newsletter — an unusual move for the governor, who tends to avoid public feuding. 

“Typically, I have paid little attention to the insults our Secretary of State spews because they are bogus,” Gordon wrote. “But after Mr. Gray’s most recent social media lie suggesting my vision for Wyoming energy only includes wind power, the record needs to be set straight.” 

That Friday evening, Gray responded in a five-minute video posted to his social media. 

“In this video, I respond to Mark Gordon’s lies. He’s upset that I’m exposing the truth about Gordon’s left-wing, green boondoggle wind policies,” Gray wrote on the post in which he also tagged the governor, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, the State Freedom Caucus Network, Cowboy State Daily and two national conservative commentators. 

From their own perspectives 

WyoFile sent Gordon and Gray identical inquiries for this story, which included written questions about whether ongoing tensions are hampering their ability to communicate, work together and accomplish the people’s business. Both responded. 

“The ‘tensions’ are little more than a distraction. The Secretary seems overly eager to manufacture issues to garner attention from the media or get views on Facebook; it reveals his inexperience as a statesman,” Gordon wrote in an email. “It is sad that he wants to resort to half-truths or outright deception. My hope is he will focus on the demands of his current position, even if his ambitions to other offices are getting the best of him.”

“For my part, I am confident the people of Wyoming can see that I am singularly focused on ‘accomplishing the people’s business,’” Gordon wrote. “I will continue to work with him, and others, to protect our property rights, our core industries, our children’s futures, and strengthen our economy. That’s what I was elected to do by an overwhelming majority.” 

Gray says the disagreements between the two men center on policy, as Gordon seeks to “advance the most liberal policies possible, while providing made up excuses as to why common sense conservative policies can’t be achieved,” Gray wrote in an email. 

“Because his allies in the media also want liberal policies, they repeat his misleading claims and excuses,” he wrote. “But what has made us particularly effective is that I’m not afraid to stand up to Gordon’s false statements and expose them as being false talking points and excuses of the Left. Gordon understands that the exposure of how liberal his preferred policies are presents a particular problem for him. So Gordon responds to my statements with personal attacks and theatrics, because he doesn’t want to have a policy debate.”

Both Gordon and Gray’s full responses can be read here. 

Historical comparison

Joan Barron spent nearly half a century covering Wyoming politics before retiring in 2014. She can recall one other instance when two of the state’s top electeds had a similar kind of feud. It occurred during the 2000s, when Republican U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis served as state treasurer alongside Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal. 

The two had testy public exchanges fairly frequently, Barron said, particularly at meetings for the State Board of Land Commissioners and the State Loan and Investment Board. The coinciding boards are the only panels on which all five electeds serve together as a voting body. 

“It’s not uncommon for members [of those boards] just to rub each other the wrong way,” Barron said. 

But even then, most of Lummis and Freudenthal’s squabbles took place behind the scenes, Barron said, until a comment the governor allegedly made resurfaced and caught headlines more than two years after the fact. 

“If you cross me, I’ll cut your head off and you won’t know it ‘til it hits the ground,” is what Lummis recalled Freudenthal saying during a 2005 luncheon for the five statewide electeds, according to the Associated Press. 

Freudenthal didn’t deny he made such a remark at the time, but said if he had, it had been in jest. Lummis, meanwhile, said it felt like a threat. 

Retired politicians weigh in

For Diana Ohman, a Republican who first served Wyoming in the 1990s as superintendent of public instruction and then as secretary of state, the times have simply changed. There’s less compromise among officials, she told WyoFile, and more of a my-way-or-the-highway mentality. 

“Politicians are choosing more and more just to go straight out in public with how they think, and not come together in a 10-minute meeting to talk about, ‘How can we iron this out?’”

While officials need to be transparent with the public, Ohman said, it doesn’t help negotiations when officials “start using social media instead of picking up the phone and talking to somebody or walking down the hall and seeing if you can make an appointment.” 

Those kinds of face-to-face discussions, Ohman said, weren’t without hiccups, but ultimately kept things on the rails during her eight years in office. 

“A lot of what we did had to do with bringing everybody around the table. And Mike [Sullivan] was especially good at it,” Ohman said. “He had no problem with calling up any of the electeds and saying, ‘You know, let’s get together. It looks like we’re kind of far apart on this.’ And for me, that was the saving grace.”

Mike Sullivan, a Democrat who served as Wyoming’s governor from 1987 to 1995, told WyoFile some of those discussions “weren’t necessarily pretty.”

“In many ways, maybe they weren’t civil, but I think they were much more civil than these days,” he said, adding that they were also more private. 

“I mean, you weren’t having them in public to try to gain an advantage of some kind.”

Former Republican Gov. Jim Geringer, who succeeded Sullivan and worked alongside Ohman, said there were no major disputes among the top five elected officials during his time as governor. 

“At times, we were challenging each other to fully understand maximizing revenue for the schools versus looking out for public interest in other ways. You know, ‘Should we be giving greater economic deference to certain decisions that the land board could make?’ whether it be by loans to agriculture or respecting tribal authority,” Geringer said. “There were differences of how we might approach it, but there was nothing that disintegrated into misrepresentations on social media. That’s the difference today.”