After more than three decades of service, Sen. Coe to retire

Posted 4/9/20

State Sen. Hank Coe is calling it a career.

On March 12 — the final day of his 32nd legislative session — the Cody Republican announced that he will not seek re-election in 2020.

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After more than three decades of service, Sen. Coe to retire

State Sen. Hank Coe, pictured here during the 2019 Legislative Session in Cheyenne, is retiring from the Wyoming Legislature after 32 years.
State Sen. Hank Coe, pictured here during the 2019 Legislative Session in Cheyenne, is retiring from the Wyoming Legislature after 32 years.
Tribune photo by Mark Davis
Posted

State Sen. Hank Coe is calling it a career.

On March 12 — the final day of his 32nd legislative session — the Cody Republican announced that he will not seek re-election in 2020.

“Serving in the Senate has been a true honor and a privilege. I’m eternally grateful to the people of Park County who put their faith in me to represent them for so many years,” Coe said in a statement.

When Coe won his eighth term in office in 2016, he had said it would be his last, but until last month’s announcement, some speculation had remained about whether he would change his mind and run again.

“I actually had a lot of people encouraging me to run before the session and during the session,” Coe said. “But I finally decided I needed to make my mind up.”

Ultimately, the retired investment executive said he concluded that, at age 73, “it’s time to move on.”

 

Leaving a legacy

Coe served as Senate president in 2001 and 2002 and has carried significant clout in the Legislature’s upper chamber.

As an illustration of Coe’s long, distinguished tenure, his retirement announcement included glowing statements from Gov. Mark Gordon, current Senate President Drew Perkins and Speaker of the House Steve Harshman.

“As chair of the Senate Education Committee for the past 17 years, Sen. Coe has led the charge to improve the quality of education here in Wyoming,” Gordon said. “His legacy will be felt in Wyoming for generations.”

Coe cast votes on literally thousands of bills during his tenure. But he was quick to cite the opportunity to work on the state’s Hathaway scholarship program as a highlight. Created by the Legislature in 2005, the program provides $16 million worth of scholarships to more than 5,500 Wyoming students each year, helping them attend the University of Wyoming or one of the state’s seven community colleges.

“That’s just been really a magical thing that’s just been wonderful for the state of Wyoming, wonderful for our young people,” Coe said, adding, “I’ve had some other successes and some other things that stick out, but nothing quite like Hathaway.”

That was just one part of his extensive work on education, which has included helping figure out how to fund K-12 schools equitably and working on ways to improve the state’s education system.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done with K-12 and I’m proud of how we’ve been able to figure out to pay our educators better … but overall performance of the kids going through the system, I guess is what is the most gratifying to me,” he said. Coe noted that Wyoming has ranked highly in recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores.

“We’re doing quite well,” he said.

As Coe winds down his time as a lawmaker — he’ll continue to lead the education committee through interim meetings this year — the state is facing significant budget challenges; he said recent projections estimated that the state would need to pull $202 million from its “rainy day” account to fund K-12 education over the next year. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the economy.

Coe said he doesn’t know the answer to the funding challenges facing Wyoming’s schools and “I’m not sure I know anybody that does,” but he’s hoping this year’s recalibration process will provide some solutions.

 

Five easy and three difficult elections

Coe was first elected to the Legislature in 1988, when he was 42 years old. Just two years earlier, Coe had narrowly lost his seat on the Park County Commission. His election to the Senate from a three-way Republican primary represented “a political comeback,” the Powell Tribune reported at the time.

Coe’s political fortunes only improved from there. Park County voters elected him to seven more terms after that. From 1992 to 2008 — a span of five elections — he didn’t even draw a challenger.

Things changed in 2012, when Cody tea party activist and businessman Bob Berry ran an aggressive campaign for the Senate seat; after coming up just 117 votes short in the Republican primary, Berry mounted a write-in campaign in the general election, but didn’t come close on the rematch.

That wound up being just the start of a contentious period in Coe’s political career.

In the 2013 Legislative Session, Coe sponsored a controversial bill, Senate File 104, which stripped many powers from Wyoming’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction Cindy Hill and gave them to an appointed director of education within the governor’s office.

The bill, widely seen as a direct attack on Hill, passed the Legislature by a relatively wide margin, but it was controversial around the state and particularly unpopular with conservatives. Ultimately, the Wyoming Supreme Court found the bill unconstitutional on a 3-2 vote.

While Coe said the legislation turned out to be a “downer,” the senator said that, given the circumstances at the time, he “would sponsor the bill [again] in a heartbeat.”

“We were going through an awful time down there with the Department of Education,” he said.

Still, Senate File 104 created trouble for Coe back home. Berry and other local Republicans began calling on him to resign, and the Park County Republican Party came close to censuring him.

The episode served as a flashpoint in an ongoing fight between the more moderate and more conservative factions of the Park County Republican Party. It continued through the 2016 election, when Coe faced a general election challenge from Cody businesswoman Cindy Baldwin, who ran as an independent. A group of former Republican party officials, including Berry, targeted Coe with negative ads, but he wound up winning by 14 percentage points.

Things quieted down after that.

“I don’t think much about it and I haven’t heard much about it for awhile,” Coe said. “I have a tendency to think that the tea party people and all the people ... just don’t seem to have the stroke or the support around here that they used to have.”

 

A Wyoming statesman

Coe announced his retirement in a joint statement with longtime state Sen. Eli Bebout, R-Riverton, who is also exiting the Legislature after 26 years of service. Bebout split his time between the House and Senate, where he served as both speaker and president.

Gov. Gordon called the pair “conservative giants” in the Legislature, thanking them for their “tremendous” service.

Senate President Perkins praised them as “Wyoming statesmen.”

“They’ve made a lasting mark on not only the Senate, but the entire state of Wyoming,” he said.

Speaker Harshman also thanked the pair.

“Senator Bebout and Senator Coe have made service to our great state a priority throughout their entire lives, setting a high bar for all who follow,” he said in the statement.

As he prepares to exit the Legislature, Coe said it’s the people that he’ll miss the most, “whether or not it’s your constituents back home or the people that I’ve had the pleasure of serving with.”

“You make so many good friends down there,” he said, rattling off a long list of lawmakers and governors he’s served alongside.

In his retirement announcement, Coe called the Wyoming Legislature “one of the most effective and civil deliberate bodies in the nation.”

“It is my sincere hope,” he said, “that this tradition will continue and Wyoming can be an example to the rest of the nation.”

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