Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming, for Tuesday, May 20th. I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by the Wyoming Community Foundation, who asks you to give back to the place you call home. "5 to thrive" is YOUR opportunity to leave a legacy for generations to come. Support the community nonprofits you care about with a gift through the Wyoming Community Foundation. Visit wycf.org to learn more.

A new law that becomes active July 1 requires Wyoming agencies to investigate land transfers near critical infrastructures, such as power plants and military bases. It's designed to curb sales in sensitive zones to foreign adversaries and the companies they own.

But Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that the Wyoming Legislature may need to back up its demand for tight monitoring of land sales around critical infrastructures with money.

"That definition critical infrastructure can be interpreted little more broadly, and different counties have different criteria about what they value, and so the surveys are coming in from the county emergency management people like what's critical in that county, and it's amounted to, like, 15% of Wyoming would would include those lands. And so the the analyst from Wyoming Office of Homeland Security was like, you know, whoa, for us to investigate land sales in these areas, and then if we have a reasonable suspicion there's a threat, we have to investigate who's involved in those land sales. This is going to take more than my office of two people, and we should stand up a streamlined software system that's going to cost money."

The Wyoming Office of Homeland Security is now formulating its "request for proposal" description so that it can generate more detailed bids to bring before the legislature ahead of its 2026 budget session.

Read the full story HERE.

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A staffing shortage has forced the National Weather Service's Forecast Office in Cheyenne to close its offices overnight, raising questions about the accuracy of future weather forecasts and the timeliness of warnings.

Cowboy State Daily's Renee Jean reports that the change is a public safety issue, one that meteorologist Don Day told her, should transcend the politics of the moment.

"The weather just doesn't sleep. You know, just because we're asleep, the weather is still going, Flash, floods, tornadoes, those kind of things can happen anytime of the night. So we have been spoiled in America, I guess, to have 24/7 monitoring of the situation at key places across the country. Now, 52 of our 122 sites are too short staffed to maintain that, so we're spreading that resource kind of thin… the practical reality is, if weather happens too close to the Earth, if it's just a few miles above the surface of the Earth, radar can't see it. So there's a big component of our weather forecasting that relies on people on the ground to Spot Weather when it's happening. And part of that are these folks who man these offices, 24/7."

Day said closing forecast offices overnight could lead to shortened timeframes for warnings, giving people less lead time to respond.

Read the full story HERE.