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)

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.