Continuing the Crook County News Since 1884
Continuing the Crook County News Since 1884
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GILLETTE - The last several months have been a whirlwind for Crook County ranchers Shondah and Randall Otwell. They have been putting the finishing touches on their product, the water rippler, which they hope will make life easier for ranchers all across the country when it hits the market this fall. The water rippler solves a problem that has plagued the agricultural industry for generations. In the winter, water tanks freeze over and ranchers have to go out to each tank and break the ice...
GILLETTE - Justin West stopped bull riding in 2010. He'd recently had a bad fall, and doctors told him that if he had one more accident he would likely be paralyzed. A few years later, he was in the Big Horn Mountains for his brother's birthday. They were riding snowmobiles when they came up on what they thought was a 5-foot drop. It turned out to be a 40-foot drop. "I closed my eyes, and all I thought about was, I'm dead," he said. Miraculously, West survived the fall. But he knew instantly tha...
GILLETTE - While coal is still king in Campbell County, oil and gas are still the second and third largest contributors to the county's economy, as far as taxable value goes. Across the state, natural gas production has been on a steady decline since 2009, while oil production has been more up and down. According to a report put out by the Wyoming State Geological Survey this month, the state's oil production has not yet surpassed its 2019 high, while nationwide oil production has surpassed...
GILLETTE – Uranium production looks to be back on the upswing after years of dormancy. A report recently completed by the Wyoming State Geological Survey found that Wyoming is primed to take advantage of the expected expansion of the domestic uranium industry. And Campbell County should be right in the thick of things. Wyoming leads the country in uranium mining and has the largest economic uranium ore reserves in the U.S. which are located across the Powder River Basin, Great Divide Basin, S...
GILLETTE - A few years ago, life was good for Jacob Smith. He had a construction business, two homes and "all the cars I needed." Now everything he owns fits into a storage container that sits in the hallway of the Way Station at the Council of Community Services. Smith moved to Gillette when he was 16 years old, and he's lived here for 23 years. For the last year and a half, Smith has been homeless. He's bounced around, staying at a friend's house for a bit before going to another friend's home...
GILLETTE — Inflation and staffing shortages have hit the Wyoming Department of Transportation hard, and nowhere else is feeling the crunch harder than in northeast Wyoming. WYDOT has 1,734 employees around the state, and there are 313 vacancies. In District 4, which is northeast Wyoming, WYDOT employs 170 people, and it has about 40 vacancies, the highest of any district, said WYDOT District 4 Engineer Scott Taylor during a presentation to Campbell County Commissioners last week. It’s down mechanics, resident engineers, maintainers and str...
GILLETTE — A bill that is making its way through the state Legislature would transfer treatment courts from the Wyoming Department of Health to the judicial branch. Senate File 23, sponsored by the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee, passed its third reading in the state Senate on a 24-7 vote Wednesday, and has now been introduced in the House. Currently, treatment courts are part of the Wyoming Department of Health. The directors of the court-supervised treatment programs in Campbell County are big supporters of the bill. Chad Beeman, the c...
GILLETTE —Campbell County Commission Chairman Del Shelstad claimed that a fellow commissioner and a county resident are conspiring to take him down. “Cancel culture has infiltrated this board, and that’s sad,” he said. “I’ve seen it in the last four and five years.” Earlier this month, Commissioner Rusty Bell sent out an email with screenshots showing Shelstad and Commissioner Colleen Faber, along with two library board members, as members of the Wyoming MassResistance Facebook group. Shelstad claimed he received threatening text messages from...
GILLETTE — The future of two library board members is up in the air after Commissioner Rusty Bell revealed their membership in the Wyoming MassResistance private Facebook group and called for their removal from the board. Commission Chairman Del Shelstad said Thursday he has no issue with putting that on the agenda for Tuesday’s commission meeting, but that he wanted to run it by the other commissioners before making it official. In an email written Tuesday morning to deputy county attorney Kyle Ferris, who was recently hired by the com...
GILLETTE — The political action committee that was the subject of an official complaint by the Campbell County clerk has filed a complaint of its own, accusing the clerk of allegedly intimidating and silencing “dissenting political opinion.” In September, County Clerk Susan Saunders filed a complaint with the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office and the Federal Election Commission about the Coal Country Conservatives Political Action Committee because the group hadn’t filed reports about where it was getting its money or how it spent its money l...
GILLETTE —As summer comes to an end and kids are back in school, the end of tourism season is nearing. Traditional tourism, that is. The season for sports tournaments is just beginning. Just in the past five or six years, sports tourism has grown in Gillette, thanks to the support of the community and local governments. It’s brought visitors and tax revenue into the community during parts of the year that otherwise would be slower. The summer historically has been the peak season in terms of visitors, with people driving through Campbell Cou...
GILLETTE - The sounds of metal against metal rang out Saturday morning, with two-and-a-half pound horseshoes clanking against stakes in the dirt after traveling more than 25 feet in the air. Forty-two competitors took part in the Wyoming Horseshoe State Championship at Fireside Horseshoe Club behind Fireside Lounge Saturday and Sunday. The tournament, put on by the Wyoming Horseshoe Pitching Association, included nine people from Gillette, but it also brought in people from all over the state,...
GILLETTE — A county resident who has been involved in some large public records requests is claiming that the county’s new public records policy is illegal. Jacob Dalby made a public records request in May that the county is saying cost $4407. Dalby questioned why he was singled out when there were nine other people who had signed the request, including Kimberly Glass Dalby, Terri Glass, Roger Glass, Josh Glass, Jeff Raney and Rodney Hopson. Campbell County’s new policy was put in place to help departments recoup the costs, mostly in staff...
GILLETTE — A Gillette man who shot and killed his friend in 2020 will serve three to ten years in prison. Joshua Lewis Campbell, 22, was charged in the death of 21-year-old Tanner Miller on June 2, 2020. In October 2020, Campbell pleaded not guilty, but in June, he changed his plea to no contest to one count of manslaughter. On Thursday, District Judge Thomas W. Rumpke went along with the prosecution’s recommended sentence of three to 10 years in prison. Campbell’s defense attorney, Steven Titus, asked Rumpke to suspend the prison sente...
GILLETTE — A year after its prices dropped below zero, oil seems to be on the rebound, but a lot of work remains to be done under the Biden administration. That was the message that three state officials had for people Wednesday morning at the Energy Exposition at the Cam-plex Wyoming Center. Tom Kropatsch, the deputy oil and gas supervisor for the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, said 2019 was a great year for Wyoming oil, with 101.8 million barrels produced, which was the highest figure since 1991. In 2020, despite the p...
GILLETTE — Campbell County’s assessed valuation has dropped to a level not seen since the mid-2000s. The county’s assessed valuation — or its taxable value — for 2021 is about $3.4 billion. That is a decrease of about $850 million, or 20%, from 2020, when it was $4.24 billion. It is the first time since 2005 that Campbell County’s assessed valuation has dropped below $4 billion, and it’s the lowest level seen since 2004, when it was at $3.2 billion. It’s the largest year-to-year decrease since 2017, when it dropped to $4.18 billion from 20...
GILLETTE — Campbell County Commissioners will not adopt a resolution against the state’s coronavirus public health orders. At a directors meeting Monday, Commissioners Del Shelstad and Colleen Faber said they had received questions from residents about whether Campbell County would pass a resolution against government overreach similar to what has been done in other communities. The city of Sheridan adopted a resolution July 20 “declaring all legal businesses and personnel in the city as essential.” The resolution was necessary “for the purpose...
GILLETTE — If Gillette is going to have its own community college district, it will ultimately be the voters who have the final say. But before it reaches the ballot, it must cross two hurdles. The first is getting approval from the Wyoming Community College Commission. The second is getting approval from the state legislature. State Rep. Eric Barlow, R-Gillette, met with Campbell County Commissioners last week to go over the process of forming a new community college district in light of the recent loss of athletics at Gillette College. On Jun...
GILLETTE — It was a cold December morning, and Cody Nehl stood in a lot off of Little Powder River Road, waiting for a customer. A large pile of stoker coal was stored in the back of a truck, ready to be sold. After a few minutes, another truck pulled up and drove onto a scale. Nehl powered up a conveyor belt, which transported the coal and dumped it into the bed of the truck. The coal would be used to heat someone’s house and shop north of town. That day, Nehl, operations manager for GMHR LLC in Gillette, completed his first sale of sto...
GILLETTE — Circuit Court Judges in Wyoming are not supportive of the state Public Defenders Office’s decision to not represent people who have only been charged with misdemeanors. It’s been a month since State Public Defender Diane Lozano informed Circuit Court judges in Campbell and Natrona counties of her decision, citing staffing shortages. Circuit Judge Brian Christensen, president of the Wyoming Circuit Court Conference of Judges, wrote that he and the other judges are “very alarmed and distressed” that Lozano would go this route. “W...
GILLETTE — For the last five years, Bill Fortner and Frank Latta have tried to convince Wyoming that “hemp” isn’t a bad four-letter word. Latta, the director of the Wyoming chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said hemp “is the best possibility for diversity” for the state. “We were trying to get the powers that be interested, to have a little vision that there might be something different to look at other than energy,” he said. “That’s been a very hard sell.” But recent legislation at the fe...
GILLETTE — A Gillette man’s appeal of his murder conviction has failed. In September 2017, Joseph Nielsen was convicted of abusing and killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old son, Caiden Fedora. In January, District Judge Michael N. “Nick” Deegan sentenced Nielsen to life in prison. Nielsen, 23, appealed the ruling based on what his attorneys believed to be improper testimony by the prosecution’s expert witnesses and improper questioning of the defense’s expert witness. They claimed the prosecution used expert witnesses to get around provin...
