Wyoming Property Tax Repeal Wins First Victory!

Wyoming Liberty Legislators delivered an 11-3 victory to start the process to repeal Wyoming’s confusing and tangled web known as the property tax.

The Joint Revenue Committee met Tuesday, June 3, 2025. 

After listening to bureaucrat after bureaucrat talk about property taxes, and exemptions for long-term homeowners exemption, exemptions for veterans, a 4% exemption cap, and the homeowner’s property tax exemption, Senator Bob Ide said:

“I mean we have got layers upon layers of exemptions: we’ve got caps, refunds, sunsets, primary residence, minimum eight months, CAMA systems, business personal property exemptions, pollution control, fire control exemptions—I mean, the list goes on. 

“For the common person to understand what their property taxes are, you’d have to hire teachers to bring them in there.”

Then he made a motion to direct the Legislative Services to draft legislation to repeal the property tax sections of Article 15 of the Wyoming Constitution.

He also added a directive to draft legislation on changes in the sales tax laws to accommodate the changed source of funding for counties and other districts.

As in most states, Wyoming property taxes are used to fund local government. This includes county, city, schools, police, and fire. 

The funnel through which property taxes fund these functions varies from simply putting these funds directly into the treasury of the entity, such as county governments, to funding school districts through a very complex set of formulas.

This system is rife with wasteful, boondoggle spending, bloated reserve swamp funds, and with top-heavy administrative school districts.

We have $200,000 train station projects in Cheyenne for dreamed-of passenger railroads, county reserve swamp funds that have enough money to fund budgets for one year, and an average of 56 students per administrator in Wyoming school districts.

Wyoming has the 8th largest per-pupil spending in the county, and yet, a full 64% of Wyoming 4th graders and 71% of 8th graders are LESS than proficient in reading. 

Math scores are not much better: 55% of 4th and 70% 8th grade students are LESS than proficient.

Senator Case, who was one of the three no votes, commented and asked a question:

“And just to say, ‘Well, take the words out of the Constitution,’ (will spark) a popular bandwagon for this,” Case said in an interview Thursday. “People would love (eliminating property taxes), but what will they get in its place?”

To answer Senator Case’s question: Wyoming property owners will get $2 billion dollars, because that’s the amount of money property owners paid in property taxes in 2024.

The property tax system in Wyoming is a tangled up ball of yarn with no seeming way of untangling it.

Senator Ide wrapped up his debate by saying:

“It’s the only way we are going to muck out all of this layered minutia of property taxes. It’s really the only fair way to go, at least you have a choice on a consumption tax… but I think that it’s a shift that we need to start looking at.”

And so they are.

Email Senator Bob Ide at Bob.Ide@wyoleg.gov thanking him for leading the charge to repeal Wyoming’s Property Tax and encouraging him to keep up the fight.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates on this fight.