Senator Bill Landon was elected chair and Representative Angelos was selected as vice chair of the School Facilities Select Committee during the committee’s statutorily required quarterly meeting on Feb. 28.

The committee’s staff framed the interim work ahead: reviewing a recent court decision addressing school capital construction, examining charter-school facility needs and leasing, reassessing major maintenance funding and formulas, refining facility condition scoring (FCI) practices, and updating adequacy standards and commission contracts. Tanya Heitrich, operations administrator, told members that “This select committee actually has statutory duties to undertake, during the interim, and those can be found in 28 11 3 0 1.”

Why it matters: the committee compiles the state’s K‑12 capital construction budget recommendation to the Joint Appropriations Committee and the governor in the late fall; its interim work will inform that recommendation and any potential legislation the committee may sponsor.

Tanya Heitrich, operations administrator for education committee staffing, summarized the committee’s statutory role and next steps. She said members will be expected to “develop knowledge and expertise about the process for prioritizing buildings, how those come forward, what the role of [the] state construction department and the school facilities division is,” and noted staff will support questions about the prioritization process. Heitrich also told the committee they had received “a decision, I think 2 days ago, that also addressed school capital construction,” and that staff were not yet prepared to comment on the document but that members would be required to respond in some manner.

Matt Wilmarth, LSO senior school finance analyst, described his role as the committee’s finance expert and noted staff capacity additions in the budget fiscal division. Wilmarth said he is “your in house expert on the major maintenance and formulas and historical appropriations and and how we actually finance these projects from the school foundation program account.” He and other staff said they can provide district‑level detail on expenditures and project histories.

Del McComley, director of the State Construction Department, and Shelby Carlson, school facilities division administrator, briefed the committee on agency work. McComley said the department and division maintain an extensive database on district facilities and will provide data and briefings throughout the interim. Carlson said the division is managing about 19 “most cost‑effective remedy” studies and expects more projects to surface following updates to the facility condition index (FCI) and capacity reports. She described one implementation issue the division will track: “How do we adjust some of those scores when work has been completed? … if we just go in and do repair work, what type of adjustment do we make to the score, which then in the end affects that final FCI score.”

Stakeholder groups offered to help. Brian Farmer, executive director of the Wyoming School Boards Association, urged members to learn the technical vocabulary used in the field — “there’s routine maintenance. There’s major maintenance. There are component projects. There are capital construction projects” — and flagged the term “suitability,” which he said appears in the court decision and has been a recurring challenge in past work. Carrie Klein of the Wyoming Public Charter School Association asked the committee to study “how charter schools fit in the process that the state uses to fund, to build, to maintain, school facilities,” and said her association does not seek direct state construction for charter schools but wants clarity on where charter facilities belong in the system.

Committee priorities and schedule: staff recommended and members accepted May 30, Aug. 20 and Oct. 27 as interim meeting dates in Casper (subject to change). Members identified the court decision on school capital construction, charter‑school facilities and leasing, major maintenance funding and formula review, adequacy standards and design guideline updates, FCI methodology, commission contract updates, and cooperative purchasing as topics for the interim work plan.

Votes at a glance

• Motion to select Senator Bill Landon as committee chairman — moved by Senator Rothfuss; voice vote; outcome: approved.

• Motion to select Representative Angelos as vice chairman — moved by Representative Geringer; voice vote; outcome: approved.

What the committee will do next: the chair and vice chair will finalize a proposed interim topic letter for review by management council; staff said they will provide background materials, data reports and briefings to support the committee’s study of the court decision, major maintenance flows, and charter‑school facility questions.

The meeting included public and stakeholder testimony from facility managers and association leaders who offered to be resources during the interim. The committee signaled it will treat the court decision and its implications for statutory duties as the top priority for this interim cycle.