(soft music) - The Wyoming legislature is in the midst of its biennial budget session.

That's a shorter session with almost just as much work to do.

Places extra focus on the work of the legislative leadership, including State Senator Bo Biteman, Senate President, Republican from Sheridan County.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

Join us for "Capital Outlook."

(inspiring music) Welcome to "Capital Outlook."

We're speaking to you from our Wyoming PBS studio at the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne.

Joined today by the president of the Wyoming Senate, Senator Bo Biteman, district 21 from Sheridan County.

Thanks for being with us.

- Thank you, Steve.

- It happens to be at the end of a long legislative day.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- And we appreciate your time as always.

- Appreciate you having me on, sir.

- What's turning in to be a busy session, but I guess they all are kind of like that.

- Yeah.

- This is your first budget session as Senate president, correct?

- Yes.

- How's that been so far?

Both just in terms of the session in general and your expanded duties as the leader?

- Yeah, it's been great.

The senate's been running very smooth.

I think we're either on or ahead of schedule of where we wanted to be.

We're getting all of our Senate files through as well as doing the budget.

We're gonna have our budget in on time and everything's running very well and I just can't thank my leadership team enough, vice President Salazar and Majority Leader Nethercott, all my chairman.

It's been a team effort.

And all my senators, and they've done a great job.

- That's not always the easiest thing in the world to do, is it?

There are no guarantees that it's gonna be smooth sailing.

I guess there aren't any even from here on out, but.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- So far so good.

- So far so good.

We collaborate, we talk a lot.

The Senate caucuses frequently, all members, not just the Republicans.

We invite the two Democrats down and I find it very important as the leader of the body to make sure I have my finger on the pulse of where the body's at and where we want to go.

- Well you've, this is the budget session, as we've mentioned.

The thing that you have to get done here in the next.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- Couple three weeks is get that budget done.

There are other things that you make time for if the body says that it wants to do it and I know that's happening as well.

Let's talk for a moment about the, a couple of moments about the budget.

The budget that was recommended and came out of the Joint Appropriations Committee, had some controversy to it.

Every budget has things that people disagree with, but in the past couple of days, this week that we're talking about, there've been some changes in that, the standing of that document and the Senate has taken a different point of view doing something that I'm not sure would've been predicted.

But reverting, in a way, and you tell me if I'm using improper vocabulary here, but to the basic budget recommendation that was handed over by the governor, which is part of his constitutional requirement as well.

He talked about it in his State of the Union, which we carried, recommended that the legislature go back to that.

And this week, essentially that's what the Senate did, correct?

- Correct, yeah.

So there's two ways we could have gone.

Obviously with my Senate, there's a pretty diverse group of folks.

All 31 of us represent 31 completely different constituencies and all have different concerns.

And when the budget was brought, the chairman of appropriations, Vice President Salazar told the body, this is now your budget.

Do with it as you will.

And you know, the body decided, you know, we could have worked from the JAC version of the bill and added stuff to it, or you know, kind hit around the edges or a group of senators got together and decided, you know what, the best thing to do, the most efficient use of our time would be to adopt the Governor's rec right off the chute and then work from there.

So that's what we did.

That's what the majority voted for.

And then on third reading, they said, come back with any amendments you want and we'll tweak it from there.

It's turned out to be a very efficient use of our time.

We finished the second reading of the budget in probably record speed and we were able to get through it very quickly and we'll have third reading on the budget on Thursday and Friday.

- As we're sitting here today, just in the next couple of days.

- Yeah.

- So this means there are now two budgets, bills at play.

And again, there's always are one chamber or the other and they always end up in the conference committee to iron things out at the end of the session.

Do you anticipate that that process is gonna be much different this year or made more difficult by the fact that you're sort of starting from two pretty different places?

Or can you tell at this point?

- Honestly, I don't think we're all that far apart dollar wise.

I don't have the specific amount, but it's not a whole lot.

And the only thing that's at play right now, since the Senate's a little bit ahead of the House, is the timing of things.

'Cause typically the budget bills move simultaneously through each chamber and then they come together at the same time.

Now that the House is still a day or two behind the Senate, we might have to slow things down on the Senate side so we don't get too far ahead of ourselves.

So that's something to pay attention to.

But we can correct that on Friday and we'll see where we're at on Friday.

And then hopefully Monday, both chambers will have have their budget bills finalized and sent over to the opposite chamber.

- And you're speaking with the Senate, I understand that.

You say you're ahead of the House.

How does something like that happen?

- So the House had a hundred and some odd amendments on second reading, and they went well into the night, into the wee hours of the morning.

So they ended up having to use an extra legislative day.

The Senate got, we got our second reading done by, we were done by five o'clock on second reading day.

Our Senate, our rules say that third reading has to happen on the second day after second reading, which for us would be Thursday.

We can stretch out the budget to Friday because the House, it sounds like, is going on Saturday on third reading as far as Saturday goes.

So there'll be a day ahead of us at least, and we can slow things down as much as possible and we will have to look at the procedures to do that.

- Just for comparison, how many amendments were offered in the Senate?

- 19 on second reading.

And most of them were withdrawn after the big one passed and then everybody got their third reading amendments in to go from there.

- Tell us what the big one was, if you don't mind.

- It was the Governor's rec.

- [Steve] I see.

- Yeah.

- My experience tells me the governor's budget is, as you just said, a recommendation.

And how often, let's put it this way.

In your experience, has the governor's budget been accepted more or less whole by either body of the legislature?

Not that often, right?

- Well, not that often, but it's usually pretty close.

(soft music) - During his state of the state address, February 9th, governor Mark Gordon talked about his budget proposal that now has been accepted by Senator Biteman as the starting point for the Senate's budget work, including a startling fact about the state's 50 year program of long-term savings.

Namely, that the earnings from those trust accounts now generate almost $1 billion for Wyoming every year.

- I turn now to some key areas that I hope you will keep top of mind as you embark on your work.

This session is about our ability to develop a two year budget for the state of Wyoming.

What I delivered to you in November is not a generic spending plan, but an essential contract between Wyoming families and the government they elected.

That government is us.

This budget originally left a surplus of 500 million.

Because of the good work of Treasurer Meyer and his team, we've harvested another 250 million in investment income just since I released my budget recommendation.

(people clapping) Now you know that income is not profiled in the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, which is why I now turn to the topic of savings.

In 1974, the people of this state amended their constitution to create the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund.

They understood that resources beneath the ground are not endless and the prosperity they bring forth should serve generations yet unborn.

By placing a portion of those revenues in a trust, Wyoming chose prudence and discipline over political impulse and indulgence.

That decision bears fruit today.

Last year, the PMTF and her sister trusts produced 913 million, now the single largest source of state income.

What we do today builds our future one way or another.

I therefore ask you to restore my original budget recommendation and place 250 million of the surplus into permanent savings this year, beyond the reach of current temptation.

(soft music) - Typically, when budget negotiations get down to the wire, we're basically hung up on 15, 30, $40 million out of a $10 billion budget.

So, you know, you start getting in the minutia at that point.

I'm very confident we'll have a budget deal at some point by the time we get outta here.

And again, it'll probably be something similar to where we're at now between the two chambers, - A lot of the processes are more or less the same.

You hear from the different departments, the different experts.

They say, here's what we think we ought to do.

You have one person in the governor's office expressing an opinion, maybe more than a single person has that kind of influence in the other bodies.

But it's all the same.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- Departments, the same issues, the same dollars and cents.

- Yeah, and the budgets over time have been pretty flat.

So it's not like this budget is blowing, it's not a budget buster by any means.

So it's pretty flat.

There's not a whole lot of new spending in there.

There's some state employee raises and, you know, but there's not a lot of contentious items in the budget.

- The budget session, as I hope our regular "Capital Outlook" viewers know, is only half the time, half the allotted time, compared to the general sessions.

The budget's a big thing you have to do, but other things can come up and a big one that's come up this year is issue referred to generally as K-12 recalibration.

- [Bo] Yes.

- Speaker Neiman gave a pretty good definition of what that was last week.

Something that has to be done regularly.

It's maybe a little overdue to be done now.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- And then adding to the pressure of it this year is a court ruling which says some of what you've been doing, in the court's opinion, is not quite right.

So you're taking that on as well.

- Yeah.

- As the budget.

And there are sessions, there are other sessions, other calibration/recalibration sessions when that's been in a general session and it's taken a lot of time to get that done there.

- Yeah.

- There was a big bill, and I'm gonna let you talk in a moment, I promise, but there was a big, big bill, speaker Neiman went through us and he listed item after item after item after item.

And I said, "Is this too big possibly for one bill?"

Because a lot of these things would've been bills of their own in other times.

And he said, "Well, our feeling was we needed to try to get it all done at once."

That's been complicated, obviously.

What's your view on it from the Senate leadership position?

- Yeah, from the Senate side, we had a mirror bill just in case something happened on the House side.

That the plan was that the bill would start in the House after it passed outta the recalibration committee.

It failed introduction over there and they had an attempt to resurrect it and that failed as well.

So the Senate broke the glass and grabbed the recalibration bill on the Senate side out of there.

And we sent it to, passed unanimously on introduction, and we sent it to the Education Committee where they've added some amendments to it that our constituents wanted and we feel like the bill's in a really good place right now and it'll be probably up on the floor here in the next couple days.

- No kidding.

- And it'll take some time away from other senate business, which was kind of our concern because there's half of US senators as there are House members.

And so it's twice as much work.

And we take on something as big as recalibration, in addition to all the other issues we have to deal with it.

It's quite a workload, but my senators are up for the task and we'll do it.

- When you say that the Senate got a little bit ahead of the House, is it fair to infer possibly from that that this might give your body more time to chew on the Recalibration Bill?

- Well, it would've if it came earlier, but now we're up against crossover.

So we've got some deadlines coming up.

Fridays the last day for bills that come out of committee as a whole.

Mondays, second reading, Tuesday third reading.

So Tuesday is technically crossover, so we've gotta get this thing out by Tuesday so we don't have a whole lot of time to work it.

- Crossover meaning of any bill that in one chamber that have to be heard by the other.

- Yeah.

- Has to be done in a timely fashion.

This is part of what your job is.

- [Bo] Yes.

- Proverbial keeping the trains running.

- [Bo] Yes.

- But you just have to do it.

You're budgeted for a certain amount of time, specified for a certain amount of time.

- Yeah.

- It's what you got.

- That's what we got.

And you know, with a 20 day session, you've got three days of budget hearings.

First couple, first day or two are pretty much pomp and circumstance, not a lot that's going on.

Introduction of bills.

And the last couple days are just conference committees.

So you really look at how condensed the middle portion of the budget session truly is.

It's very chaotic.

That's why we're here working late nights.

We're here, committees are working early in the morning and on into the evening.

So we work very hard in a short amount of time and do a tremendous amount of work.

- Yeah.

This committee process is so important.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- I continue to say, and I make sort of a point of saying it every year.

I think average citizens, viewers might, when they think of the legislature, think of soaring oratory from the floor or from your chair, whoever's in it.

But the committees do so much of the preparation, the heavy lifting, and they need to do good work.

- Yes, they do.

And they need to vet these bills carefully, take public input, maybe hear a different side of the story, maybe find something that they didn't see or catch something that needs to be fixed.

That's where that needs to happen.

By the time it hits the floor, you know, committee of the whole of first reading is pretty much your only chance to really debate a bill.

We have unlimited debate on first reading, but second readings, limited debate.

Third reading is limited debate as well.

And then, that's it, so.

- We're talking about the time crunch.

Another big issue that's been introduced and is being addressed again has to do with property taxes in Wyoming.

And there were a lot of bills considered in the past several years and a pretty good handful of them passed sort of at the same time, previous session.

Now we're feeling some of the effects of those and some of that's coming back again.

Does that adding to the time burden to be having to deal with property taxes when it maybe might've been presumed that we dealt with that last year?

- Well, on the first day, all of senate property tax bills died on introductions.

So we did, the body decided that we had done enough on property taxes.

So we haven't, we are dealing with the sunset on the long-term homeowner exemption and trying to repeal that.

But that's the only property tax related bill I've had in my chamber at the moment.

- And you're expecting you could receive some, from the House, yeah, - Possibly, we'll see.

I haven't got a whole lot of bills from the House yet, so we're waiting.

- Because they're still scrambling to to catch up.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- All right, here's something I knew you, I'm sure you knew I'd ask you about.

- Okay.

- Speaking of distractions.

This issue that has become, for better for worse, shortchange, shortcutted, nicknamed Checkgate.

And by now, people who are interested in this and have followed it.

It's several days old.

But when it did happen and it involved a person who is credentialed as the media and a quite a bit sort of different media approach than the one that I have, for example.

She came onto the floor of the House chamber and she passed out what turned out to be checks made to specific legislators and that caused disturbance, let's put it that way.

- Yeah.

- On top of everything else that you were expecting to have to deal with, and even the expected things are unexpected when you get out, you tell them, here comes this thing.

And I know that you had to spend, the legislature had to spend much, most of a day explaining this, talking about it, trying to figure out what happened, investigating it, trying to figure out what to do.

I don't know how much you want to talk about that.

I know there's an investigation going.

There's now law enforcement locally involved in it as well.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- But, fair to say that's not something, that's something you probably wished hadn't happened.

- Oh, of course it was.

It was a nuclear bomb that went off and nobody was expecting something like that to ever happen.

Certainly when you're presiding officer, you have a lot of, a lot of things that happen during your two years in office.

That's one thing you never would expect it would happen.

But it did.

And I think the Senate, at least on the Senate side, we acted swiftly and we acted accordingly, I think.

And we put out a statement right away condemning it wholeheartedly.

I think it was shocking on many levels.

- Tell us about what the big deal is when something like that happens or when that particular thing happened.

- Yeah, that's something, I don't think has ever really happened, at least in since I've been around, something as brazen as handing out checks on the floor of one of the chambers.

It's a solemn place.

It's something that, it's just, you just don't do.

And we never thought we'd see something like that happen before and it was a shock and it took a while to even process it.

But it's, you know, can't say a whole lot about it yet because of the investigations going on, but it's just, hopefully it's not a stain that'll be on the legislature for too long.

- I know you can't give us chapter and verse, all the details.

Can you tell us what exactly is the nature of what's being investigated?

Just generally speaking, what do you want to know?

- I think we wanna know if there was, you know, being tied to specific legislations that was of interest to the person handing out the checks and what those checks were for.

And so find out a little bit more about that.

But yeah, at this point I'd rather defer to law enforcement.

- Are you satisfied so far in the aftermath of it that things are progressing in at least a way that's gonna be productive?

- Yeah, I think so.

I have faith in the investigation that it will come out either way and we'll be satisfied with what they come up with.

- Irritating a little bit, I guess.

Today, or I guess it was yesterday, this week though, the governor now has become involved and he signed an executive order saying, "Don't do anything like this ever again."

Would that bit of, was that gonna be satisfactory do you think?

Or you're in the other body, the other branch of government.

Still have to have some action probably from the legislature as well.

- Well, the Senate passed a rule.

We drafted a rule change to address it.

So anything, so that won't be able to happen on the Senate floor or any place controlled by the Senate president, which would be our committee meeting rooms in this area.

And the governor took it a step further and used the whole capital grounds and complex.

So I think it's being addressed and it's probably something that probably should have been done a long time ago, but I never knew it to be an issue, so.

- A lot of, one of the interesting parts of the coverage has been lots of passed legislators, different sides of issues, different sides of the aisle have said, they've been almost unanimous since saying, "Boy, this is unheard of."

- [Bo] Yeah.

- And would've been unheard of and maybe still ought to be unheard of.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- Maybe going forward it will be again.

- Yeah, it should be unheard of from going from here forward.

Hopefully with these rural changes and things and just the outcry from the public just knowing that this is not right and it shouldn't have happened and we'll hopefully be able to learn our lesson and move on.

- Yeah, well you are concluding your term as Senate president.

And you know as well as anyone that the prop legislative leaders, historically, at least, they tend, number one, not to seek another term in the leadership.

It's not unheard of for that to happen.

And it has happened fairly recent with Speaker Harshman, for example, a few years ago.

But that's typically, I don't think it's a rule, but it's an expectation.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- At least.

And often they retire from the legislature as well.

Now you and Speaker Nieman Now you and Speaker Nieman have come to the, to the leadership positions a little sooner than, again, historically, many of the leaders have.

I asked him about this, he said, "You've only been in office a couple of terms, are you ready to retire from the legislature?"

And he of course said, "Listen, we're dealing with this right now.

And I'm thinking that all over."

The other thing that happens, of course, is Senate and House leadership, top leadership in the legislature.

The names tend to be mentioned for other offices, statewide offices.

Your name comes up from time to time in these discussions, as I'm sure you know.

What are you thinking about the future, anything?

Are those things crossing your mind?

Are you thinking about, "Hey, I maybe I'd like to be senate president another term" or?

- No, I will follow tradition and I will not be running for senate president again.

I won't return to the Senate.

I think it's important that it's time.

Once you're Senate president, I think it's best to head off and do other things.

- Remind us how long you've been in the legislature.

- This'll be my 10th year.

- Yeah, so it's not like you're a rookie but.

- No, so I did two terms in the Senate and one in the House and I term limit myself.

- Term limit yourself.

Good way, interesting way to put it.

All right, so you know the question that's following.

What are you running for now?

Is that something that's just in the general terms?

Is that something that's on your mind, under consideration?

- Certainly been asked.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Multiple times about.

- [Steve] It's inevitable.

- Multiple different positions, obviously.

But my answer is the same.

And it's, you know, in Wyoming we typically do the job we were elected to do first.

And I wanna maintain that tradition.

I've got two weeks left of this budget session to really finish the job.

And that's all I'm focused on right now at this time.

And there'll be plenty of time after session to come up with a decision.

- Periods for filing for office doesn't begin until months from now.

- [Bo] From May, yeah.

- I was in an interview we did two weeks earlier with the governor.

He and I were talking about remembering the time when in Wyoming you didn't have to announce your political intentions a year ahead of time.

- [Bo] Oh yeah.

- But that's one of these sort of creeping national trends that like so many eventually.

- Well, we'd like to see that not happen.

- That's why always, but of course, some candidates already have done that.

- [Bo] Yeah.

- So, think a lot of voters would depreciate hearing what you just said, a big job we have right now.

It's become a little extra complicated this session and even than we might have expected.

So concentrate on that for the time being.

- That's what I would expect as a voter.

You know, if I elected somebody to office, I'd want them to do the job I elected them to do and not seek higher office the whole time they were in that position, so.

- Senator Bo Biteman, president of the Senate.

Up there wheeling the gavel at the start and the end of the session and doing a lot of other things in between.

Busy, busy job and no obligation requires you to come here and speak with us.

But thank you for doing that, I appreciate it.

I hope viewers do.

I hope voters do.

I obviously think it's an important thing to do.

I'm glad at least for tonight that you thought the same thing.

- Absolutely, I love it.

I love this opportunity and it's always a pleasure to be on with you.

It's always a great conversation, - You know, Bo, I appreciate that.

Thanks for being with us on "Capital Outlook."

- Thank you.

(inspirational music)