Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming, for Friday, May 30th. 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.

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The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark — and unanimous — decision to rein in the scope of environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects is a victory against federal governmental overreach.

That's what Governor Mark Gordon and other high-ranking elected officials said about the ruling that addresses the misuse of environmental law to obstruct development. Cowboy State Daily's David Madison reports that the case centered on an 88-mile railroad line proposed in northeastern Utah's Uinta Basin that would connect the oil-rich region to the national freight rail network.

"The court decided that it was okay to limit the scope of environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects… The governor says this is a welcome decision, and fits exactly with my long standing belief that NEPA, which is the Environmental Policy Act, has been co opted to obstruct development whenever and wherever… It's valuable use as a tool to understand the environmental impacts of a proposed actions has been diminished, and so he sees this court decision as affirming what he's felt for a long time."

The court stressed that federal agencies deserve "substantial deference" in determining the scope and content of environmental impact statements, and that courts should not, quote, "micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness."

Read the full story HERE.

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The trend toward tougher enforcement of English-language requirements for commercial truck drivers intensified Thursday when Wyoming's U.S. House representative introduced a bill to make it a federal law.

Longstanding federal rules already say commercial truck drivers must speak enough English to read road signs, converse with the general public and keep their logs. But a 2016 Obama-era Federal memorandum eroded those rules by instructing highway truck inspectors not to pull non-English-speaking truck drivers off the roads.

Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that President Donald Trump in April ordered his Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to rescind that rule.

"Trump said… we're going to look into some of these foreign CDLs. We're going to revive English language proficiency. And then the D O T acted on that order, and now representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming is working to put it in federal law. It's already in federal rules that Trump unburdened with his order because they were eroded by a memorandum for the past nearly decade, and now Representative Hageman is pushing the bill."

In announcing the bill, Hageman referenced a 2017 crash in which a distracted, non-English-speaking truck driver killed an 18-year-old man. The bill's title is "Connor's Law."

Read the full story HERE.

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