The intense rush of wrestling a $3.6 billion budget and much more

— February 11, 2014
(This is an excerpt of a Capital Outlook blog post by Geoff O’Gara, Wyoming PBS)

Geoff O'Gara
Geoff O’Gara
Geoff O’Gara

Legislators who love the intense rush of wrestling a $3.6 billion budget and hopper full of bills in a tight four-week session are going to get a bonus this year: a special session to deal again with the question of who runs the Wyoming Department of Education: Superintendent of Public Instruction Cindy Hill, or a Governor-appointed director.

The legislative Management Council met yesterday afternoon to deal with what Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kite called “the elephant in the room”: her court has declared Senate File 104 – the 2013 bill that stripped Hill of most of her management duties at the department – unconstitutional. So the legislative leaders did what politicians often do with an intractable issue that could have an impact in an election year: they decided to study it and make changes later.

That will be in a special session, sometime in 2014, but not likely to follow closely on the heels of the current budget session.

To read the rest of this post, go to the Capitol Outlook blog at Wyoming PBS.

Geoffrey O’Gara is a writer and documentary producer based in Lander, Wyoming. He works for The Content Lab, LLC and serves on WyoFile's board of directors. His column, Weed Draw, is named for a remote...

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