By the measure of the American Conservative Union, Powell Republican Dan Laursen was the Wyoming Legislature’s most conservative lawmaker last year.

Laursen recently received the ACU’s “Award for Conservative Achievement” for voting in-line with what the organization saw as conservative positions some 83% of the time.

He was officially honored at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., in February, where he got a chance to hear President Donald Trump and other conservatives speak.

“It was pretty cool,” Laursen said.

Although Laursen was humble, Park County Republican Party Chairman Martin Kimmet called the honor “very significant” and “well deserved.”

“I’m very proud of him [Laursen] and I’m very proud of his voting record and I think he’s doing a great job down there,” Kimmet said last month.

The ACU graded representatives on 30 different votes in the 2019 Legislative Session. It determined that Laursen voted in-line with the organization’s positions 25 times — one more than anyone else.

Among other votes, he was credited for opposing a new corporate income tax on large companies and a tax hike on nicotine products and for supporting the elimination of gun-free zones, a new photo ID requirement at the polls and a 48-hour waiting period for abortions.

As for the votes where Laursen was dinged, a couple of the measures were widely supported.

For instance, the ACU took issue with a bill that prohibits businesses from labeling cell-cultured food products as “meat.” While it passed the Legislature by a combined margin of 83-5, the ACU opined that the bill “interferes in the marketplace by enforcing a government definition of ‘meat’ in consumer labeling in order to protect the farming and ranching industries from competition.”

The ACU similarly faulted Laursen and other lawmakers for requiring state agencies to generally use Wyoming firms for architectural, engineering and land surveying work (or, as the organization put it, “Increasing Taxpayer Costs through Protectionist Procurement Mandates”) and for requiring utility companies to try finding a buyer for their coal-fired power plants before decommissioning them (“Driving up Electricity Costs by Subsidizing Coal Fired Power Plants”).

Laursen has been a consistent opponent of tax increases in the Legislature — and he voted against a new lodging tax in the recently concluded budget session.

“I’m just not ready to do taxes,” he said. “I think my side of the [Legislature] seems to want to spend money and it’s almost like they want to spend money to make sure we have to have more taxes.”

Laursen, whose wife is a teacher at Powell High School, also expressed concern with continued growth in education funding.

“I think we have great education, but at some point we’ve got to get control of it,” he said, adding, “Our teachers in Powell have been getting raises every year — which is good — but you don’t see the private industry being able to do that quite [so] often. I think they’re struggling, especially the minerals.”

Laursen hopes that Powell area voters appreciate his conservative voting record.

“They’ll let me know,” he said. “If they don’t like it, they’ll throw me out.”