Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming for Friday, April 3rd. I'm Mac Watson.

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Tensions between Gov. Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Chuck Gray erupted again Thursday during a meeting of the Wyoming Board of Land Commissioners concerning attainable housing. Cowboy State Daily's David Madison reports Gordon told Gray to "shut up" during a debate and invited him to step out of the room.

"Secretary Gray introduced an amendment where he wants to see applicants who want to have this attainable housing get screened to make sure they're US citizens. And that ignited a debate. Treasurer Meyer Kurt Meyer raised concern, saying, 'This sounds like an unfunded mandate. We're putting work on the Office of lands and investments that they don't do normally. This is what ICE does.' And as the debate continued, there was a little bit of cross talk where Superintendent of Public Instruction, Megan Degenfelder, was speaking and Chuck Gray was speaking at about the same time, and it's the chair's job, Governor Mark Gordon, to keep order, and he apparently had had enough, because he raised his voice. He told Chuck Gray to shut up and to stop. And then he stood up and kind of pointed as though, 'would you like to step outside?' I did not hear him say it this time, but the body language was pretty clear. In response, Chuck Gray said the governor was violating his own rules of decorum. And then the meeting took a pause when they came back, they continued to debate the amendment, ultimately tabled it. It could come back up later in April."

In a statement to Cowboy State Daily after the tense exchange, Gray said his amendment would ensure that state projects "mirror what President Trump has done at the federal level." He also accused Gordon of being a "liberal."

Read the full story HERE.

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Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder has apologized for her department's release of unredacted student information in a public records request. Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that Degenfelder says the release was the result of "human error" and those involved have been reprimanded.

"It was a public apology because her office released unredacted student information pursuant to a public records request that the Sweetwater County School District Superintendent had filed a parent filed for the same batch of records, and according to the leader of that parent group, also received a file dump of unredacted information. Dagenfield said that the people involved in this disclosure were reprimanded and aren't handling public records anymore."

The error came to light after a member of a group of parents in Sweetwater County School District No. 1 announced publicly that the district had asked the department in a public records request for a substantial amount of parent complaints.

Read the full story HERE.

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Gillette-based L&H Industrial built some of the massive hardware that helped the Artemis II rocket blast off on Wednesday taking astronauts to the moon for the first time in 50 years. Cowboy State Daily's Renee Jean reports this isn't first time the company has built components for NASA.

"New rockets weigh 6 million more pounds, so trying to wrap your brain around that just a little bit. The Saturn five rockets were already heavy, but so they needed something that could add 6 million pounds to that figure and still get the rocket there in one piece. And so that was L&H's first job for NASA was redesigning these crawlers to carry that much wei