Cooper hopes budget will be reconciled this week

Sen. Ed Cooper (R-Ten Sleep) called in his weekly legislative update on Monday. 

Last week the Senate began reviewing the House bills. 

This week they are spending a lot of time on the budget. 

The House budget and the Senate budget are about $109 million apart. Cooper said he doesn’t believe the difference in insurmountable. “There are three or four key items that will pull us all back together,” said Cooper. “It should be pretty easy to reconcile, hopefully this week.” 

SF0069 HOMEOWNER PROPERTY TAX EXEMPTION 

“This bill was pretty strict,” said Cooper. “It is basically the People’s Initiative. But the Freedom Caucus waffled hard on that. They amended the heck out of it, and you aren’t going to recognize it as the same bill I don’t think when it comes out of the House. It is going to be extremely expensive because of the backfills. They completely changed the structure of the bill.” 

Originally the Senate Bill had no backfill with a sunset clause. (A sunset clause is a legal provision that ends an agreement or law after a specific date. It’s also known as a sunset provision, sunset law, or termination clause.) 

Cooper said he did support a backfill for emergency services: fire, EMT, senior centers, hospitals, in the supplement budget. “The backfill was for $15 million statewide. Basically, it is a mandate for emergency services for the next two years.” 

HB-0199-WYOMING FREEDOM SCHOLARSHIP ACT 

This bill has received a lot of attention and generated e-mails, phone calls, etc. to the legislators. “It has some real constitutionality issues. We did pass through Committee as a Whole (COW) last Friday. Senator Schuler brought some really good amendments that kind of worked around the constitutionality. It changed the structure of it a little bit so that is on a for on need basis.”  It is a tier program based on the U.S. poverty level. 

He said his problem with the bill is it doesn’t have anything in it for preschools. “In our small communities we don’t have a lot of opportunities for preschool. I feel it is necessary to include preschools in the bill.” He hopes an amendment for this will pass on the second or third reading. 

DARK MONEY 

Cooper addressed dark money. “There is a bill coming over from the House to prevent dark money in the election for The People’s Initiative. I’m going to support the bill because any place we can prevent it should be done.” 

He continued that it is a Freedom Caucus bill which he believes is a little hypocritical because they pushed back on SJ0008. This joint resolution was introduced by Cooper. “They are in favor of dark money for elections but not for their pet projects,” he said.

Cooper thinks the House bill will run into some constitutionality problems. The legislation will get an opinion based on Citizens United. This lawsuit was between Citizens United and the Federal Election Commission in 2010.