Mckay Erickson, Representative for House District 21, spoke with SVI as the final days of the 2026 Wyoming Legislature are wrapping up in Cheyenne. Find the full interview at svinews.com/radio.

Wyoming Budget

“The budget was quite a transformation,” Erickson said. “I was not happy with how the proposal came out of the committee and went after some things that didn’t make sense. The University of Wyoming was slated for cuts but as you know the Senate and the governor prevailed on the budget. The governor then vetoed 25 of the line items which are individual parts of the spending. Some of them were in the spending policy. It mainly focused on how we spend money and what accounts we us. The Senate picked seven of those to address. It needs a two-thirds to override the veto. We ended up sustaining four of those seven. It ended up so much better than what it started four weeks ago.”

Some of those items included a $5 million sum that will go to UW at the end of the year once the university submits specific reports amid requests for specifics from elected officials. Another is the Wyoming Business Council which was recommended to be cut completely heading into the session. The entity will have to meet certain criteria moving forward

“There’s a project in Thayne that benefitted from it as well as the sewer system in Kemmerer,” Erickson said of the WBC. “The bottom line is going to be reformed and tightened up.”

“The recalibration hadn’t been passed in 15 years and was facing lawsuits,” he continued. “So we had to make a really good attempt to keep up with the inflation and such in the education funding. That’s what the committee focused on. Almost all of those levers ended up being much more favorable to public schools and took out some of the obvious problems. One of which was having all of the district employees on the state insurance plans and I didn’t think that was a good idea. The teacher funding will now go into a silo and it does take away the control of the local schools boards and that loss of local control was a major sticking point with me. We will see how it turns out.”

Property Tax

“We ended up having two bills that came forward,” Erickson noted. “We ended up having an excellent debate on whether we want to move forward with more cuts, or wait and see how the things we’ve done affect things moving forward. We didn’t think it was prudent to do another cut and then have another cut coming up in November. So we wanted to wait and see how they work. There has been a significant amount of tax relief. A lot of people felt we had gotten to the point where if we weren’t going to have some property tax, then we needed to come up with some other tax method. We held off on those.”

Second Amendment Protections Act

“There’s nothing about the right the use a gun in this bill,” Erickson continued. “WyoGun is an out of state lobby and they basically want to make it so local law enforcement cannot assist with a federal action if a gun is involved. I didn’t want to put our law enforcement in an impossible position. It didn’t set right with me. 23 of the 23 county sheriffs were adamantly opposed to it and that meant quite a bit. We cannot get involved without having the chance to be sued or h av litigation brought against and that didn’t sit well with us. This will go to the governors desk and we will see if he vetoes it.”