CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The list of veteran Wyoming legislators leaving office at the end of this year keeps growing.
Sen. Tony Ross, R-Cheyenne, announced Wednesday he won’t return to the Legislature when his current term expires.
Ross is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a former Senate president. He has been active in the group overseeing renovation of the state Capitol.
Before starting his legislative career in the House in 1995, Ross worked as a contract attorney for the non-partisan Legislative Service Office drafting bills. In a news conference at his law office on Wednesday, he described the Legislature as “the love of my life, to a certain extent.”
Wyoming is facing an uncertain financial future with thousands of layoffs in the energy industry in recent months.
In the budget session that wrapped up in March, lawmakers said they don’t see a solution for how the state will come up with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the future to cover the cost of school construction and maintenance in the face of disappearing coal revenues.
Nonetheless, Ross said he believes Wyoming is in better financial shape now than it was in 1995, when he joined the Legislature. He pointed out that lawmakers have saved $1.8 billion in the state’s so-called rainy day fund to help cover expenses during the current downturn.
“We tried this session to hit a 10 percent kind of spending rate of that, to get us through what many forecast is a 10-year downturn,” Ross said of the rainy day fund. “We hope that is not the case. But I think that Wyoming is facing huge challenges.”
Ross pointed out that Wyoming has run into stiff opposition in the Northwest to its efforts to export coal to Asia. Many residents there oppose Wyoming’s bid to use deep-water ports, saying they’re concerned about dust, train noise and the overall effect of burning more coal on the Earth’s atmosphere.
Ross, who has traveled to Asia with other legislators to explore coal export options, said Asian countries would actually reduce emissions from their coal-fired plants by burning Wyoming coal that’s cleaner than the coal produced locally.
“So there are avenues and there are options for us,” Ross said. “We just need to continue to press forward and expand what we do well.”
At least three other senators already have announced they won’t be back next year: Stan Cooper, R-Kemmerer; former Senate President Gerald Geis, R-Worland, and Wayne Johnson, R- Cheyenne.
Current Senate President Phil Nicholas, R-Laramie, is set to make an announcement Thursday on his plans. The Senate has 30 members while the House has 60.
On the House side, House Speaker Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, and Rep. Norine Kasperik, R-Gillette, also have announced they won’t be back.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Brown said he appreciates that voters sent him to Cheyenne six times in a row.
“And I appreciated the opportunity to serve as speaker, being elected to that position by my fellow legislators, and I hope that I made a little bit of a difference,” he said.
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