Laramie Live Sessions with Local Legislators: Rep. Kermit Brown

Representative Kermit Brown joined Laramie Live in a continued look ahead to the 61st Wyoming Legislature's budget session. Brown has represented House District 14 since 2005 and serves on the Judiciary Committee.

-What work has been done in the past year on the Judiciary committee?

"Well the Judiciary committee is one of the real work horses in the legislature. The final products that we have going into the session include proposed changes in the governmental claims, limitations of liability (which is instances that the government is liable for its conduct). The proposal is to double the individual damages limit from $250,000 to $500,000. It hasn't been raised in almost twenty years. Also to raise the total claims in any one incident from $500,000 to $1,000,000. Frankly, I have a lot of reservation about limiting that, because we have incidents where you have public buses, and to say we're going to cap the whole busload at $1,000,000, I don't think is fair. We're going to look at that.

"Than we've had some issues about juvenile justice, open meetings, open records, wrongful death representatives, exemptions from execution on judgments and some issues on prisoner litigation. We did go through a number of other issues, but those are the ones that I think are coming up to the top as we head into the session.

"If Wyoming has a shortcoming with juveniles right now, it's alternatives for placement of those juveniles when they are identified in the system. We did pass a new concept called 'single point of entry'. No matter how a child comes into the system, whether through municipal court, district court or circuit court, wherever it may be, all of those charges file to a single point of entry. So we have one person that know the history on this person and dispensation or deferrals that have been made to them in the past and how they ought to be treated. That works pretty well I think. But the thing I hear from judges is, 'I don't have enough places to put them' and 'I don't have enough alternatives'. That we probably need to work on, especially for kids in the 16, maybe 15 to 18 age range. They are the tough ones to deal with and we are not doing a good job of providing an array of alternatives for the judges to choose from to try to get those kids on track."

-Where do you think the legislature may struggle to bring the budget together?

"Well not only the budget, I think there are four big areas that are going to dominate. That would be wolves, education, redistricting and the budget. Now those are four really big areas and we've got twenty days to fight our way through those.

"With the budget, I see this morning, gas is down again. The eight years I've been in the legislature have really been times of plenty. We've had a lot of money, we've had surpluses and done a lot of wonderful things. We've built buildings at the University, visitors centers at all of the entrances to the state, all kinds of great things that we've done, well now the financial trend is going the other way. I think the big challenge budget wise is going to be saving money.

"Right now even though revenues are flat or maybe declining, there's been a lot made of the fact that they've asked for 2,5 and 8 percent budget cuts from state agencies. Everybody is running around saying the world is falling in and in the face of that comes Brown and Nicholas saying we've got to continue to save money. Well the reason we need to do that is that in the 90's we had two years worth of revenues saved and we burnt through the whole thing and then some. Right now, we're only sitting on about a half a biennium's revenue in savings. Then there is the game within the game, which is, in this two year biennium coming up, many of us feel we need to save some money to cushion this thing because the second year may see less revenue then the first year. So out of the first year we ought to save back some money to the second year.

"Believe me, there's room in the budget. The argument I make is in the last ten years our state grew by 50,000 people, but the standard budget doubled. So if we can't find a way to live within our means, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves."

-How could this budget session affect the University of Wyoming/Laramie/Albany County?

"The pay raises are off the table for the University of Wyoming at this point. The Governor pulled them back off the table, he just had to, they aren't sustainable.

"You kind of lump them together: the University of Wyoming, Laramie and Albany County. That's one of the problems. The University gets a big shot of money and it gets imputed to Laramie. Then we turn around and say Laramie needs some and they say 'no, you already got some' and we have to make the argument that 'no, that went to the University.'

"A couple of my real emphasis never change. One is Laramie and one is Albany County. We're a poor county, we don't have mineral development and the revenue other counties do. We've always managed one way or another to get ourselves some special treatment in the legislature. Frankly our city and our county are running on money that's generated in Campbell County and Sublette County. My emphasis never changes that we've got to take care of Laramie and recognize it, take care of Albany County and recognize it, and not allow the legislature to impute funding to the University of Wyoming to those two needs because they're separate. We'll have a fight again this time, we do every time. Every time so far we've won and it's a good thing. But we are receiving from the state, way more revenue than our county contributes, so we have to be vigilant.

"I think the two real struggles in the budget are going to be cities/towns and highways. The Governor has thrown the gauntlet out there. And especially with respect to highways, we've got to be really careful with what we're doing. We can't spend too much, but we can't spend too little."

-Are there any areas of the budget you will be strongly pushing to limit or expand?

"Laramie is my emphasis. That is my biggest concern every time. I spend a lot of time on that, everybody in our delegation does. Just trying to protect that extra funding that Laramie needs in order to be on equal footing with other communities in the state where they have all this mineral wealth and revenue and we don't."

If you would like to contact Rep. Brown about the upcoming budget session, you can do so by writing to him at P.O. Box 817, Laramie, WY 82073 or sending him an email at kermitbrown@wyoming.com. You can also listen to his interview on Laramie Live from Thursday, February 2nd below.