Commends budget work, carbon legislation
BEN NEARY Associated Press writer | Posted: Saturday, March 8, 2008 12:00 am
CHEYENNE - The 59th session of the Wyoming Legislature wrapped up Friday with Gov. Dave Freudenthal congratulating members of both houses for their smooth work in adopting a state budget and saying their efforts have set the stage for future state successes.
Freudenthal told both the House and the Senate that he expects the state will have more money to spend next January, when legislators return to Cheyenne for the two-month general session.
Natural gas prices were nudging $9 per thousand cubic feet Friday at the Opal hub in southwestern Wyoming, Freudenthal said.
Last November, gas prices at Opal were 26 cents per thousand cubic feet. The state derives significant revenue from gas production.
Freudenthal joked that the increase in gas prices means "that I'm an incredibly good governor, and you are all very good legislators."
Freudenthal said Wyoming has used the windfall from the ongoing energy boom of the past several years to make up for the preceding 20 years when money was tight.
"The challenge that that puts before us is one in which we have done those things that were essential to restore the state for the things that had not been done for 20 years," Freudenthal said.
Freudenthal said extra money will allow Wyoming to focus on the question of, "How do we use these revenues to continue to advance us on the path of excellence as a state. In prior years, a lot of the funding was really making up for things we weren't able to do when we didn't have funding."
However, Steve Sommers, joint chairman of the state's Consensus Revenue Estimating Group, said Friday the group has no plans to revise its January revenue forecast despite recent increases in natural gas prices.
CREG, a panel of state financial experts, predicted in January that revenues into the state's general fund would be just below $3.2 billion for the two-year budget cycle that begins in July. Sommers said the CREG group won't update its revenue projections until October.
"I don't know what's going to happen with gas prices," Sommers said. "They're good right now, but we still have a lot of downside potential coming up this summer, so we'll just have to wait and see."
Freudenthal congratulated lawmakers for their work in preparing the $3.5 billion budget bill he signed earlier this week. For the first time, he said, all state funds appropriations were included in a single bill, making the whole process easier to follow.
Freudenthal said he was disappointed that the Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have given the state engineer's office more authority over regulation of water pumped out of the ground during the production of coal-bed methane. Industry officials pushed lawmakers to reject the bill, which would have addressed some landowners' concerns about the effects of draining water across their property.
Freudenthal also said he was disappointed that the Legislature failed to pass general property tax relief bills and some health care legislation.
However, Freudenthal said his disappointments were overshadowed by several bills the Legislature did pass, notably two that set the framework for the management of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
The governor and top state lawmakers say Wyoming's carbon-capture legislation is the first enacted anywhere in the country.
One carbon-capture bill specifies that the owners of the surface of the land also own the right to store carbon underneath it. The other bill establishes a framework for state regulation of carbon storage, including requiring companies that inject the gas underground to post bonds.
"It is not going to be enough for us to know how to legally store carbon over the years, we're going to have to learn how to capture it," Freudenthal said.
The budget bill includes $20 million for a joint project between the state and General Electric to develop a coal research facility somewhere in the state. Ultimately, the planned $100 million plant is intended to allow research into carbon-capture technology.