Longtime senator challenged by Cody businesswoman

Posted 11/3/16

“I stepped over the fear of going against a giant, and it’s like David and Goliath,” Baldwin said of running for Senate District 18. “I stepped over that fear, so I’ve already won, no matter what the numbers come in (on Election Day). I …

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Longtime senator challenged by Cody businesswoman

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Cindy Baldwin frames her race against longtime state Sen. Hank Coe in Biblical terms.

“I stepped over the fear of going against a giant, and it’s like David and Goliath,” Baldwin said of running for Senate District 18. “I stepped over that fear, so I’ve already won, no matter what the numbers come in (on Election Day). I showed the average person you can do this.”

Baldwin is running as an independent against Coe — the Republican Party’s nominee — but she’s registered as a Republican and describes herself as “very, very conservative.” Baldwin said she hopes her run can inspire change in a world where immoral things are increasingly seen as OK.

“If I can make a difference in a city and a county and a state, just one person, … I believe maybe it could pass across this country, and the average person can believe, ‘I can make a difference,’ and maybe a revolution or a revival could take place,” said Baldwin, who owns a realty business and inn in Cody.

Coe, meanwhile, cites his 28 years of legislative experience in seeking an eighth term in office.

“When we go down there to deal with the problems that the state of Wyoming has, we need experienced legislators with institutional memory (who) understand the different agencies (and) how they’re funded,” Coe said. “Primarily, though, it’s (knowing) where the money comes from and how you can make the adjustments that you have to make in lean times.”

The Cody incumbent says he’s got that memory and knowledge — noting he helped the state through two different economic downturns in the past.

“This is the most critical,” Coe said of the current budget crunch. “Because this, I think, might have the possibility of being the longest downturn that we’ve seen.”

State budget

Coe said there’s “no question” the mineral industry is going to be down for “a while” and that the state must “make ourselves … absolutely as lean as we can.”

He said he hopes the 2017 Legislature will support changes to the funding model for K-12 education to meet the constraints of having less money.

In this year’s budget session, lawmakers cut education by 1 percent in 2017 and by 1.4 percent in 2018. Coe has opposed efforts to back off of those cuts.

“That’s just the way it’s going to be,” Coe said. “Like I told everybody, ‘Show me the money; show me the money.’ We don’t have it out there — we just don’t have it.”

Beyond cutting the budget, “economic diversification, I think, is really the key to get away from our dependence on minerals, which is about 65 percent of what we do at the state level,” Coe said.

In 2014, he sponsored legislation that helped put Cody Labs on the verge of receiving an $11 million, low-interest loan from the state.

Coe said the dozens of jobs the pharmaceutical manufacturer would create are significant for this area and a “good deal” for the state. (Two other businesses also have preliminary approval for loans under the program Coe helped create.)

Baldwin similarly said Wyoming’s first reaction to the tight budget should be to “look where we can cut” and “try to make things leaner.” Beyond that, she said Wyoming should market itself to bring in more industry.

“We have such an amazing state with clean air, the best schools (and) amazing infrastructure,” Baldwin said.

She said there are many areas where the state could bring in and build up businesses — from wind energy to film production.

“Natural resources, of course, is one of the largest, because ... we are so richly blessed with natural resources, but when things get rough, it’s sometimes time to look out of the box, get people together and say, ‘What can we do different? What can we do different to bring more funds into this area?’” Baldwin said.

She also wonders if Wyoming could recycle its old, beautiful school buildings instead of tearing them down.

“What would it cost to turn that into a rec center, turn that into a retirement center, turn that into a place where you might be able to have businesses?” Baldwin asked, wondering what kind of return that would yield for taxpayers.

She also wants to decrease the amount of federal “meddling,” suggesting, for example, that Wyoming could establish its own environmental regulations instead of accepting rules from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Both she and Coe cited unease with the federal government in explaining why they do not support expanding Medicaid coverage in Wyoming.

Guns in schools

Coe has come under fire from some gun rights advocates for his involvement in the defeat of the “Wyoming Repeal Gun Free Zones Act” in 2015.

House Bill 114 would have allowed citizens with a concealed carry permit to bring firearms into schools, government meetings and other places that are currently gun free.

The bill passed the House by a supermajority, but “when it arrived in the Senate, it was dead,” Coe says.

“It was not going to get assigned to a committee; it was not going to see any action in the Senate. That was a leadership decision,” he said.

Coe said he asked then-Senate President Phil Nicholas if the education committee could consider the bill, and Nicholas agreed — if the bill was amended to let local leaders decide whether to allow guns.

Coe then proposed a completely rewritten bill in committee that, he said, called for “local elected school boards, local elected city councils, local elected county commissioners, local elected trustees at Northwest College, let them make that decision, rather than have it be guns everywhere.”

Some gun advocates objected to the change and the rewritten bill died on first reading in the Senate.

“We took a bill that was dead and gave it new life, but we haven’t gotten any credit for that,” Coe said.

Baldwin has been endorsed by Gun Owners of America because of Coe’s role in killing the “Wyoming Repeal Gun Free Zones Act.” Baldwin described Coe’s reworked version as a “watered-down counterfeit bill.” However, she could not say whether she supports allowing people with concealed carry permit to carry guns in schools — one of the key tenets of the bill.

“I think at this moment, it’s something to be looked at down the road,” Baldwin said, adding, “I cannot give you an opinion on that right now.”

She did say she wants the Legislature, and not each local government, to decide the issue, saying a mishmash of policies “will not work.”

“We need to have an overall, ‘You do or you don’t,’” Baldwin said. “Because people like myself, who carry — you’re going to need to know, ‘I can carry here, I can’t carry there.’”

Coe rejects that argument.

“To have a standard policy where it just says, you know, ‘Bring guns whenever you want, to and do whatever you want to,’ I don’t want to make a decision at the state level that supersedes what local elected officials have been elected to do: to make that decision,” he said.

Baldwin said she does not support giving guns to teachers or students, but she does want every Wyoming school to have an armed expert in firearms to help protect children.

“I believe in a school resource officer … and then I’d like to see possibly somebody that’s been in the (military) service that is used to something happening, used to some trauma, used to being on guard,” Baldwin said. She said these people would need to undergo psychological testing, training and monthly firearms proficiency tests; she said they could be inconspicuous, comparing the role to that of an air marshal. As for the need, Baldwin said small towns are no longer immune to any kind of emergency.

“God help us if something happens and we haven’t taken this time to put that in now. How many people are going to feel guilty? I’m not, because this is how I believe,” Baldwin said.

The race has become a heated one, with a couple of dueling political action committees — the “Republicans for Unity” criticizing Coe and “Concerned Republicans of Park County” supporting him — joining the fray.

Campaign finance reports showed that, as of last week, the two candidates had raised more than $26,500 between them.

Through Oct. 25, Baldwin had raised more than $14,600 and Coe nearly $11,900; that included Baldwin chipping in around $9,600 of her own money and Coe personally committing $2,100.

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