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What makes Jayne different from the others?
(Wyoming Tribune-Eagle (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Aug. 11--CHEYENNE -- As Jayne Mockler prepared to leave for college, she had three simple goals for her adult life:
1. Don't live in Wyoming
2. Don't volunteer for anything
3. Stay far away from politicians
Looking back on it, "That's all my family instilled in me, and I think I wanted a break from it."
Today, she is finishing her career in the Wyoming Legislature -- two terms as a representative, followed by three in the Senate, with a rather lengthy list of committees.
And she's campaigning to be Cheyenne's first woman mayor.
Once she got to Wellesley College outside of Boston, she got straight to work in escaping her homeland. She was inspired to study Chinese by President Richard Nixon, who had visited China a few years earlier.
At the time, the communist nation was in a decidedly different era from the one of openness today. Nixon's visit was groundbreaking.
"I was going to open up China," she said with a mocking air of innocent exuberance. "Nixon was there, and I thought that was the direction we were going to go."
Everyone knew, it seemed, except her, that she wasn't going to China.
Mockler said she had a "twang," and her classmates lampooned her Western accent in plays.
With her political science degree -- with an Asian studies minor -- she went to work at a Denver law firm, first as a legal assistant, then as a legal administrator.
Still, the pull to foreign lands was there. She -- and her cat, she believes -- learned Russian. It was during this time, too, when communism in the Soviet Union seemed to be on shaky ground.
When Mockler was 30, she returned to Cheyenne "for a very private family obligation." Because she was single and lived nearby -- her two brothers lived farther away and had their own lives -- she was the natural choice. By then, her desire to be away had ebbed.
Being home afforded her some unique opportunities to have an "unconventional, nontraditional" career. That includes serving for 16 years in the state Legislature, which began when she was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1992.
Her resume says she has worked as a consultant for a number of years. Much of this, she said, has been for law firms that needed help with research on cases -- a specialty that is being eroded by the Internet.
Mockler did get her chance go abroad. In 1994, in her second year in the House, she traveled to Hungary as a member of the American Council of Young Political Leaders -- right after the country's first open election. She also traveled to Indonesia and the Philippines.
"I got to talk about democracy," she said.
Local govt. funding
In her years as a Cheyenne Democrat in the state Senate, she describes herself as a "socially conscious fiscal conservative."
Mockler has been criticized for a lack of support of issues that would support Cheyenne and Laramie County.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reviewed Senate bills from recent years, which show that Mockler was almost always a yes vote for local projects and for bills of local interest. She said last week if it were justified, she supported it.
For instance, in 2007 she voted in favor of a $20 million contract for the National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputer -- a project that is expected to have a great economic development impact on the city and county.
This year, she supported giving counties the authority to regulate subdivisions larger than 35 acres, as well as the authority to intervene when there are health issues on private properties.
When asked about her reputation of a lack of support, she owed it her role in de-earmarking the budget, which "changed local government funding forever."
It was necessary because the state was $360 million in the hole, and "we had no way to find the money." Only 30 percent of the state's budget was free because it was beholden to various funds, many of them at the local level.
This was in the 1990s, when a barrel of oil wasn't worth much, and no one was talking about coal-bed methane.
"Basically, we said, 'No, the Legislature gets the funding, the Legislature will appropriate the funding,'" Mockler said. "My priority was to budget the state of Wyoming."
That was her constitutional mandate, she added.
Right now, the Legislature is doing a "huge study" on local government funding, she said, and that's because local governments have been "incapable of articulating what they do with the money."
For instance, a city will say they need funding for roads -- that's their No.1 priority -- yet they find ways to fund less-important projects, which, she says, tends to baffle legislators.
Bills that passed
As a senator, Mockler has put forth a number of bills. Like any lawmaker, some passed, others didn't.
There were Senate Files 4 and 5 in 2006, which allowed legislators to delete e-mails and choose whether they will share drafts of bills with the public. Of the latter, she said earlier this year it was a way to formalize into law an already established bill-making process.
That year she also sponsored bills that would allow pharmacists to administer immunizations and give fire districts and fire departments the authority to conduct criminal background checks on firefighters. Both of these succeeded.
One of her final bills was to allocate money to renovate the State Capitol.
In her 16 years in the Legislature, she said, the state has racked up $3 billion in infrastructure needs, a figure that includes highways.
"Here's one little $50 million building -- let's get it fixed," she said.
One of her hot-button issues is the Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund. The interest is used for general operations of the state, but it requires a constitutional amendment to get to the body of it.
In these times of energy wealth, many legislators want to increase what goes in. Mockler said she supports the trust, but she disagrees with the apparent goal that it should one day operate the state -- it would make the government less accountable.
"We have all these roads we need to fix," she said. If the Legislature postpones road repair in favor of putting away more money, the cost of lost opportunity goes up.
Mockler favored building a rainy-day fund, so the Legislature "can control the money, move it and get it to where you want it to be in an emergency."
One of her bills called for reviewing the projected income from the trust fund and put the excess in reserves.
Bills that failed
This year she sponsored a bill that would tax the export of energy. Already the state taxes drilling and mining of raw materials, but it doesn't tax the electricity when it goes to California.
"The second it hits the grid, it's gone," she said.
Other bills might be considered rather quixotic for Wyoming.
She put forth a living-wage bill in 2005, which called for raising the state minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $8.75 and required annual raises based on the state's cost-of-living index.
When that failed, she followed up in 2007 with a version that was somewhat gentler to conservatives that would raise the wage to $7.25, which would be adjusted every five years. They died in committee both times.
"I always found it unconscionable that people can work so hard for 40 hours a week but are unable to support themselves," Mockler said. She argued that paying higher wages would mean people are more likely to stay in their jobs. Wyoming women often must work two jobs to support their families, she added.
"Turnover costs a lot," she said. "You will have fewer turnovers if you actually pay people and value them."
She also has attempted to lower the costs of prescription drugs.
"In 16 years, we've done nothing to make health care more affordable," she said.
In 2005, a drug bill would have made the Wyoming Department of Health the exclusive wholesale distributor of prescription drugs, the price of which could not exceed 17.6 percent above the cost of production.
She said this was based on the state's liquor distribution system, which results in lower prices for consumers.
"Why can't you do this to drugs?" she asked.
This bill, she remembered, certainly got the pharmaceutical lobbyists into the State Capitol -- and it failed in the Committee of the Whole.
This year, a follow-up went after the middleman, asking that distributors reveal their markup to prescription drugs. It failed in the House.
Life on the outside
Life in the Senate means most people aren't very interested in what you're doing, she said. State government is "intangible -- you don't know what they do."
People just don't get wound up over the Wyoming Department of Family Services budget, she said.
There were three that she could think of that did get the chambers packed with regular citizens.
Annexation laws had that effect. Property taxes also fill the chambers: "You know they're too big, and local government can't do anything about them."
And there was 2001, when the Legislature was looking at taxing bingo. She remembers the room was hot, and people waited for hours to testify.
"That was an absolute grassroots citizen effort, and that doesn't happen," she said.
Holding a local office, she said, would get her closer the issues people care about.
To see more of Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wyomingnews.com/.
Copyright (c) 2008, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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