2024 Report: Western Governors’ Association releases annual report under Gordon’s leadership

The Western Governors’ Association (WGA) recently released its 2024 annual report which highlights WGA Chair and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon’s Decarbonizing the West Initiative and outlines work the association has done over the past year, as well as their priorities moving forward.

“This year presented an ideal opportunity to shine a light on the bipartisan – and in most cases nonpartisan – cooperation of Western governors and the meaningful policy which has been developed as a result,” states WGA Executive Director Jack Waldorf in an introductory letter in the report. “It also lent itself to some creative thinking about how we can continue to build on the association’s proud legacy for the next 40 years.” 

Decarbonizing the West 

To start, the report discusses Gordon’s Decarbonizing the West Initiative, which was launched in 2023 to examine how “decarbonization strategies can position Western states at the forefront of innovation and reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere.” 

According to WGA, this initiative analyzed different engineered decarbonization approaches and natural sequestration through several management practices and examined federal policy recommendations in three focal areas.

These include carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and engineered CO₂ removal (CDR); natural sequestration and cross-cutting and regional opportunities.

In regards to CCUS and engineered CDR, Gordon recommends supporting large-scale technology development; creating regulatory certainty for the removal, transportation and storage of CO₂; catalyzing market development; enabling market expansion and investing in the next generation of CDR.

For natural sequestration, Gordon recommends innovating funding mechanisms to support land management projects, improving small farmers and landowners access to federal funding, expanding opportunities for biomass sourcing and ensuring a market for forest products. 

Additionally, the governor believes there are several cross-cutting and regional opportunities, including engaging with communities early and often to promote awareness of and support for decarbonization projects, supporting regional and collaborative decarbonization projects, ensuring fair and transparent voluntary carbon markets and promoting baseline standards for monitoring, reporting and verifying carbon removal projects.

Western landscapes

In addition to launching Gordon’s initiative, WGA has been hard at work protecting Western landscapes through wildfire and disaster assistance, forest and rangeland management, species conservation, invasive species management and energy and mining.

WGA notes their advocacy efforts to expand wildfire and disaster assistance led to several nationwide reforms over the past year.

The agency’s wildfire mitigation and management policy resolutions were mirrored in the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission’s final report, released in September 2023, which calls for integrating federal wildfire management actions, streamlining the process for deploying recovery funds and increasing funding flexibility. 

WGA also promoted these policy resolutions in Congress to expand disaster assistance programs, which led to the 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use grant funding for natural infrastructure projects and strategies to protect against natural threats.

“The governors were also pleased to see their recommendations recognized by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) when the agency announced the Collaborative Wildfire Risk Reduction Program will receive an additional $100 million from the Inflation Reduction Act in 2024 to expand pre-fire mitigation work outside of the 21 designated Wildfire Crisis Strategy landscapes with a focus on non-traditional partners representing underserved and minority-based communities,” the report reads.

In an effort to advocate for forest and rangeland management, WGA signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build on the first-of-its-kind Shared Stewardship and Good Neighbor Authority.

Over the past year, WGA’s species conservation projects focused on Greater sage grouse, and the Task Force on Collaborative Conservation provided early input to the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Greater Sage Grouse Management Plan amendment.

Additionally, the governors urged Congress to “consider long-term funding for transportation infrastructure projects to support critical fish and wildlife crossings” and encouraged the federal government to “advance voluntary, incentive-based and locally-driven initiatives to conserve key wildlife corridors and habitats.”

The report continues, “WGA has always played a critical role in managing the nation’s mineral development and power generation. As technological advancements create opportunities to develop new energy and mineral resources in the West, WGA worked closely with their federal partners this year to streamline the permitting process for energy projects while also protecting the environment.”

With this, WGA’s report highlights Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ The Heat Beneath Our Feet Initiative, which outlined various policies Congress could consider to accelerate the deployment of geothermal energy. 

The BLM responded less than a year later by announcing it would start providing categorical exclusions for geothermal exploration on April 15.

“WGA also voiced their support for the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act and the pilot program proposed in the bill which would protect Good Samaritans from liability exposure,” explains the report.

“However, instead of granting the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to determine an organization’s Good Samaritan eligibility, WGA called for power to be vested in the states,” it continues.

Western prosperity

The WGA report’s chapter on Western prosperity reflects on the 2024 Western Prosperity Forum, held at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Management in downtown Phoenix and touches on the agency’s work regarding rural development, connectivity, fentanyl and opioids, healthcare, cybersecurity, infrastructure permitting, Veterans, missing and murdered indigenous persons, housing and outdoor recreation. 

Most notably, WGA was successful in urging Congress to support rural development programs including Payments in Lieu of Taxes, which received $515 million in the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act; the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which received a $725 million increase and the Head Start Program, which received a $275 million increase. 

In addition, WGA encouraged the federal government to adopt a standard of at least 100/20 megabits per second (Mbp) and allow for it to be scaled to 100/100 Mbps to help connect rural communities through reliable broadband. 

“This year, in addition to updating and renewing several key policy resolutions, including water, species conservation and disaster preparedness and response, among others, the governors also approved an entirely new resolution to address the growing opioid crisis plaguing Western communities,” explains Waldorf. 

“This new resolution reflects the importance of the governors working together to address a shared regional challenge. It also highlights how the governors have expanded WGA’s policy portfolio beyond the traditional natural resource issues which originally brought them together back in 1984,” he adds.

The WGA Policy Resolution 2024-04, Combating the Opioid Crisis, addresses fentanyl trafficking and overdose prevention and treatment. 

“In response to the growing popularity of outdoor recreation, the BLM and USFS began developing new agency-wide outdoor recreation strategies this year,” the report concludes. “Throughout the development process, WGA engaged with both agencies and hosted a call with BLM, USFS and the state offices of outdoor recreation to discuss the implementation of these new strategies.” 

Check out next week’s edition of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup for more information on the nine policy resolutions passed by WGA in Fiscal Year 2024. 

Hannah Bugas is the managing editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup. Send comments on this article to roundup@wylr.net.