Wyoming Lawmakers Decide the National Groups Are Worth It After All

The original story by Maggie Mullen for WyoFile.

For a second there this year, it looked like Wyoming might be heading for a breakup with two of its long-time national policy partners. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and the Council of State Governments West (CSG West) have been in the Legislature’s orbit for ages, feeding lawmakers and staff research, training, and a steady stream of “here’s what other states are doing.” But when the bill came due — a couple hundred grand at a time — some legislators started asking whether the memberships were still worth it.

On Tuesday, they got their answer. And it was basically: yes, keep the memberships.

Wyoming pays these dues every two years as part of its operating budget. The totals are not pocket change:

• CSG West: about $271,300 per biennium;
• NCSL: about $293,500 per biennium.

That’s more than half a million dollars across two cycles, and it’s automatically baked into the budget lawmakers approve in even-numbered years. So when the Management Council started poking around in April, the question wasn’t just philosophical — it was fiscal.

The dues debate grew out of something almost mundane: the Legislature’s reimbursement policy for out-of-state travel.

The rule covers up to two off-season meetings per lawmaker for “national or regional organizations in which the Legislature participates.” Historically that meant groups like NCSL and CSG West. Everything else, lawmakers have to get pre-approved by the Management Council.

In April, the council voted to expand that policy to cover travel to American Legislative Exchange Council meetings — ALEC, the conservative, corporate-funded group famous for pushing model bills into statehouses across the country. Adding ALEC to the reimbursement list opened the door to a larger argument: if lawmakers were paying dues and travel costs for NCSL and CSG West, were they getting fair value back? And were those groups ideologically neutral?

Senate President Bo Biteman didn’t sugarcoat his feeling at the April meeting:

“I went to one of them and wasn’t impressed… it did have kind of a liberal bent to it. I didn’t enjoy any of the programming.”

That line stuck. It turned what might’ve been a routine budget gripe into a bigger culture-war-adjacent question about whether Wyoming was subsidizing national outfits that didn’t reflect its politics.

To settle the question, lawmakers invited both organizations to Tuesday’s Management Council meeting to make their case. And they came ready.

Edgar Ruiz, director of CSG West, started by drawing a bright line between his organization and the caricature some lawmakers seemed to have in mind:

“We’re not a federal program. We’re not a think tank. We’re not a lobbying group… CSG West is a member-driven, member-led organization that services you.”

Ruiz leaned hard on structure: bipartisan leadership rotation, policy committees co-led by Republicans and Democrats, and an executive committee made up of legislative leaders from the 13 western states. In other words, if a political tilt is showing up, he argued, it’s because the member states brought it into the room.

He also reminded the council what CSG West actually does with Wyoming: convening lawmakers around western priorities like water, agriculture, energy, and public safety — stuff that doesn’t stop at state borders.

Then Senator Tara Nethercott stepped in with a concrete example: back in 2018, Wyoming needed to understand why its Department of Corrections budget kept ballooning. Nobody was sure if the culprit was sentencing, law enforcement patterns, or statutory gaps. CSG West, working with Pew and federal agencies, helped pinpoint the problem — probation revocations — and guided lawmakers toward fixes that saved Wyoming $18 million in contract bed costs.

Nethercott’s takeaway wasn’t “they gave us a PowerPoint about other states.” It was “they helped us solve our problem with our data.”

On the NCSL side, Montana State Sen. Barry Usher, the group’s president-elect, basically showed up as living proof that conservatives belong there too.

“NCSL is the only bipartisan organization dedicated solely to America’s state legislatures,” Usher said. “Whether you’re a deep conservative member like myself, or a liberal member, NCSL is the place where we can come together, compare notes, and share what we are working on in our states.”

Usher said one of his goals is to change the perception that NCSL leans left. The conversations, he argued, “lean whatever way those in attendance take it.” If conservatives show up in force, conservatives shape the room.

He also made a pretty practical point: Wyoming and Montana run lean legislatures. They have some of the lowest staff-to-legislator ratios in the country. So any external research muscle matters more here than it might in bigger, better-resourced states.

That argument landed hardest when it came from home.

Legislative Service Office Director Matt Obrecht told lawmakers that staff rely on these groups in ways most people never see. He gave a straightforward example: about ten years ago he hit a wall researching a niche legislative ethics question. No court cases. Nothing online. So he called NCSL:

“The organization gave me the help I wouldn’t have found otherwise.”

That’s the kind of quiet support staff remember. And for Obrecht, the cost-benefit question wasn’t close:

“What we pay in dues to NCSL and CSG is an absolute bargain for what we get in return.”

By the end of the meeting, the tone had flipped.

House Speaker Chip Neiman admitted he basically didn’t realize how heavily Wyoming staff use these memberships:

“I had no idea how much our Legislative Service Office utilizes NCSL and the amount of value that it evidently brings…”

Biteman echoed him and thanked Usher for pushing them “out of our echo chambers,” framing the debate less as “these groups are liberal” and more as “maybe we didn’t understand what we were paying for.”

Then the council voted unanimously to sponsor the legislative budget bill with the dues intact.

This isn’t totally final yet. The full Legislature still has to approve the operating budget in the 2026 budget session in February. But a unanimous Management Council vote is about as strong a signal as you’re going to get that the memberships aren’t going anywhere.

Also worth noting: even critics didn’t really claim the groups were useless. The concern was a mix of sticker shock and vibe. Tuesday’s meeting replaced vibe with receipts — actual examples of savings, policy help, and expertise Wyoming wouldn’t easily duplicate on its own.

So for now, Wyoming stays at the bipartisan table. And after Tuesday, it looks like lawmakers are less worried about who else is sitting there with them — and more focused on whether the table still helps them do the job back home.