Olmstead challenges Cooper for Senate District 20 seat

Two Republican candidates are facing off in the primary election for the State Senate District 20 seat representing Hot Springs, Washakie, Big Horn, Fremont and Park Counties. The top vote earner will move onto the General Election in November where they could still face a write in candidate from either party.

Here we are including candidate bios/submitted descriptions and information from the Thermopolis-Hot Springs Chamber sponsored candidate forum held in July.

Ed Cooper

Ed Cooper is running for reelection for the Senate District 20 seat. Cooper has lived in Wyoming his entire life and been a lifelong Republican. He voted in his first election in 1972 and consistently voted on the Republican ticket.

According to Cooper, he has sponsored close to 10 personal bills, all but one of them has passed. In the last session, he worked on two bills. One was brought to him by the Hot Springs County Commissioners about resolving an issue of the dissolution of the special districts in the county, particularly the fire district who was slow in turning in their paperwork. The bill would allow the commissioner’s discretion to see when a special district would come back in compliance. The bill passed and affects special districts throughout the state.

The second bill Cooper brought forward dealt with veterans’ exemptions in property taxes and brought the exemption amount to $6,000 of assessed value. Prior to this, the amount was $3,000.

Cooper said, “Property taxes will continue to be an issue. I am encouraging people to consider voting for the Wyoming constitutional amendment to separate residential property as a fourth class of personal property. That’ll allow us to make some permanent long-term fixes to property tax to really reform it.”

Cooper also said he wants to bring back some bills. One refers to Senate Bill #45, which deals with property taxes and the other bill is about gun free zones. This bill is controversial in particular to school districts.

Tom Olmstead

Olmstead and his wife of almost 20 years and their two boys live in Basin where they operate a small RV Park. After his enlistment in the US Navy in the late 90s, he continued his aviation career in the private sector for another 22 years as an Avionics technician, manager and engineer.

“Unfortunately, my career was cut short due to COVID mandates, as I am very principled and would not concede to the unethical and unconstitutional mandates. Throughout my career and life, I have created successful businesses, managed budgets and worked with individuals and enterprises for common sense solutions on a variety of issues. Though I believe my strongest attributes are my faith and unwavering principles, ending any state funding to this DEI and woke gender ideology is high on my list,”said Olmstead.

He added, “I believe the people of the Big Horn Basin want strong conservative representation they can count on to defend our state’s rights and push back against the federal alphabet agencies and bureaucracies that are looking to destroy our agriculture and legacy energy industries with ridiculous regulations and federal land use plans. Whether it’s preventing the illegal invasion of our country (and subsequently Wyoming), fiercely defending Wyoming’s legacy energy industries without selling out to federal and special interest dollars or protecting our Second Amendment rights and the unborn as the only candidate endorsed by both Gun Owners of America and Wyoming Right to Life, I will be a dependable conservative voice for the people of Hot Springs County.”

Answers to questions asked during the candidate forum

When it comes to wildlife management in Wyoming, what do you think are the biggest issues that need to change? 

Ed Cooper:

One of the committees I’m on is the Wyoming Wildlife Natural Resource Trust Fund. And what that committee does is we oversee the largest project spending part for that trust fund. That one is a $200 million fund. The proceeds of that fund are used for wildlife habitat improvements across the state. The director takes that money out and leverages it six to eight times to one, and we have some unbelievable wildlife habitat projects going all across the state. Some of them are right here in Hot Springs County. We’re all bothered by this wolf situation. It’s very important that we have predator control. That’s something we have to continue to work on very hard. We’ve got to get control of our large carnivores. It really is the wolves. They’re devastating our ranchers. It’s critical that we stay right in the middle of that. Thank you.

Tom Olmstead:

Thanks to all the sportsmen. I hunt, I fish. That’s what I do. We’re supporting most of that wildlife management through our own licenses. They do a pretty good job. But one big one is grizzlies. I know that Harriet Hageman is working out that on a federal level to bring the management into Wyoming. I mean, the federal government has no idea of the grizzly population, the impact it has on livestock, the impact it’s having on elk, moose. I’ll be honest with you. Two years ago, I hunt in the Tetons. I won’t hunt a lot over there anymore. I’ll be honest with you, I’ll be going out there in the middle at 4:30, 5:00 in the morning going through the mountains. And I’ve got grizzly tracks left and right, left and right. And it’s a noticeable impact that they’ve had on our wildlife. On the elk and moose population specifically. I’m hunt over here in the Big Horn parts. I drew my tag and they said, well, there’s no grizzlies in the Big Horns. I think they had one here not long ago. It was down low. So they’re there. We all know they’re there. And they need to leave the wildlife management up to Wyoming, not the federal government. I think everybody here knows what’s best. It’s kind of the same thing with wolves. Testing is a big one. There’s a lot of diseases out there. I fully support all of the testing that they do. The big one is this federal land use management. 

Governor Gordon’s initiative for decarbonizing the west was launched last year, is this good use of our federal dollars?

Tom Olmstead:

My quick answer is no, it’s not. I understand the carbon sequestration, and I understand the special interest and federal money attached to it. And I understand that a lot of our energy industry is hurting. But it’s not hurting because we don’t have carbon capture. It’s hurting because of all the EPA regulations. They’re constantly changing the regulations throughout. And they basically stifle our industry. It wasn’t like the whole world suddenly decided that they don’t want our coal or natural gas. That isn’t the case. It’s that they’re making us jump through bureaucratic hoops, through the EPA. They’re stifling our industries and trying to strangle them out. I foresee that if we accept this carbon capture money is going to do exactly

what we did to the auto industry. What, all that federal money did to the green new energy to the auto industry. They brought billions of dollars into the auto industry, and they made green vehicles and nobody bought them. So now the auto industry is completely dependent upon these federal subsidies. You’re going to do the same thing to Wyoming’s energy industry. You really need to be fighting. I don’t care if it’s litigation from the EPA, but you need to be pushing back to expand leases in production, not taking the easy way out with strings attached money and pushing the carbon capture.

Ed Cooper:

The federal dollars involved are minimal to the state. The federal dollars involved are for carbon capture. The people that are out there doing  it are our generators, our potential business in the future. The answers my opponent gave are good answers, but I’ll explain it different. The whole carbon capture sequestration thing has nothing to do with the Green New Deal. It has nothing to do with wind. It has nothing to do with solar. And it really has nothing to do with the structure of carbon capture. What we’re talking about is capturing CO2 from the generators. In Wyoming our generators today are emitting 57.4 million tons of CO2 a year. I’m pretty much a flat earther on global warming. I think we are probably not hurting a thing. But what’s happened with that CO2, what we can do with that CO2 is use. Carbon capture sequestration and use. The use end of it is where we need to be looking. That is tertiary recovery and ancillary recovery and what that does for this basin is brings the oil fields all the way around the rim here back to life. We need the carbon to be put in the ground, the CO2 put into the ground. Thank you.