Chestek seeks reelection as his opponent avoids the limelight
In House District 13, Ken Chestek is hoping voters will grant him a second term. Republican Shane Swett has avoided interviews, surveys and candidate forums.
In Wyoming’s 13th House District, Democrat Ken Chestek hopes to defend his seat from Republican challenger Shane Swett.
If his constituents send him back to Cheyenne, Chestek said he hopes to work on property tax reform and on toning down the rhetoric that he says is interfering with the legislature’s ability to function.
“The two sides can’t even talk to each other anymore,” he said. “That’s toxic. We’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to respect each other and listen to each other and learn from each other and work together for the better of Wyoming, and we’re losing sight of that.”
During his first term, Chestek was seldom the main sponsor on a bill, but he frequently co-sponsored the efforts of his fellow lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican. He has served on the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Committee on Tribal Relations, and has provided a reliable vote for Democratic efforts, such as to protect abortion, and some bipartisan efforts, such as to adopt the State Indian Child Welfare Act.
Chestek teaches legal writing at the University of Wyoming. Though he is now officially retired from full-time professorship, he continues to teach a reduced courseload. The professor emeritus began his political career with Wyoming Promise, an organization that aims to remove “dark money” from politics.
He said his political beliefs stem from a personal commitment to fairness.
“The appropriate role of government is to ensure that there’s a level playing field so that everybody — and I mean everybody — has an equal opportunity to thrive in whatever endeavors they choose,” Chestek said. “We shouldn’t be telling people what they should or shouldn’t be doing. They should be allowed to choose their paths in life and have equal opportunity to do that.”
House 13 is considered a safe Democratic seat. In 2022, Chestek received nearly 60% of the vote.
But Shane Swett, a local Republican, has filed to challenge the incumbent, hoping to unseat him and represent the district’s south Laramie neighborhoods in the Wyoming State House.
Swett has avoided media interviews, as well as non-partisan public forums. He has no campaign site, nor any social media presence. Reached by email via an intermediary, Swett responded:
“I am running to help with the property tax problem. We do not need to pay rent to the government for what we bought. Tax was ment to be small.”
Albany County Republican Party Chair Roxie Hensley added:
“Shane is a man of little words but get[s] much accomplished.”
The Freedom Caucus, Wyoming’s far-right faction within the House of Representatives, did not endorse Swett ahead of the Primary Election in August, even as it made endorsements for races across the state.
With less than a month until the election, Chestek is looking forward to the next session, and the issues he’ll prioritize if his bid for another term succeeds.
Chestek on the issues
Chestek says one of the most important issues facing Wyoming is rising property taxes. He is hoping voters vote in favor of this year’s Constitutional Amendment A, which will appear on ballots across the state.
The amendment would separate residential property into its own tax class; this would allow lawmakers to set a specific rate for the property taxes paid by homeowners. As the law stands now, residential property is classed alongside commercial property, so raising or lowering the rate on one means raising or lowering the rate on both.
“Right now, anything we do that reduces residential taxes also reduces commercial taxes, and if we can separate commercial and residential into different categories, we can target some relief for homeowners more specifically,” Chestek said.
The Laramie representative supported the suite of property tax reform bills advanced by lawmakers during the last session.
Extremism and brain drain
Chestek has pushed back on various efforts by the state’s Freedom Caucus and other Republicans to institute various social policies.
Since Chestek joined the legislature, his colleagues have passed laws restricting university programs, outlawing abortion and forbidding gender-affirming care.
Earlier this year, the Wyoming Senate attempted to ban gender studies courses entirely. While this was unsuccessful, right-wing senators had more success stripping UW of the funding it previously used to support the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
UW has now eliminated that office and has been restructuring or axing its various diversity-oriented activities. As an educator at UW, Chestek is sorry to see those programs go.
“Monocultures are unhealthy,” he said. “One of the things I hear a lot from my colleagues in the legislature is moaning about how young people don’t want to stay in Wyoming; they’re all leaving. The brain drain — we hear about that all the time. What causes the brain drain? Well, making young people feel unwelcome is one thing that leads to it.”
Attacking institutions like the Multicultural Affairs Office, or scaring off celebrated collaboration — like the now-defunct Black 14 Social Justice Summer Institute — is only making matters worse, Chestek said.
“That doesn’t sit well with the younger generation, and that’s one of the things that makes young people feel unwelcome here,” he said. “So we need to embrace diversity. We need to embrace equity and inclusion, because that makes Wyoming a more welcoming place for young people.”
Alongside his fellow Democrats, Chestek took a stand against the legislation outlawing surgical and chemical abortions. He has also co-sponsored some of the unsuccessful legislation aimed at halting the erosion of abortion rights.
“The government has no business interfering with a woman’s right to control her own body,” Chestek said. “It’s not the government’s decision to make.”
But the Laramie representative is most disgusted by the new laws restricting transgender healthcare and privacy.
One bill has forced school districts across the state to institute new policies mandating that school counselors and others out gay or transgender students to their families — even if those families are not supportive.
Another bill outlaws the provision of hormone blockers, hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery to transgender youth. (Those same interventions are still available to cisgender children for purposes other than gender transition.)
“That, to me, was probably the worst bill we passed,” Chestek said.
Echoing the consensus shared by every major medical and psychological association in the United States, Chestek said this new law has the potential to worsen Wyoming’s already abysmal suicide rate.
He said it’s unconscionable to deny a young person the highest standard of care for a medical condition like dysphoria that is “identifiable, diagnosable and treatable.”
“How can anybody tell somebody their feelings are wrong?” Chestek said. “But that’s what that bill does. It says: ‘You have the body of a male but you feel female. That’s wrong. You shouldn’t do that. You need to feel male.’ That is child abuse, that’s horrible.”
Housing reform and regulation
Chestek said he will support progressive housing reforms.
“We need to allow more density,” he said. “And that’s a local government thing, but I think the state can encourage or permit higher density developments, because that’s the only way to make housing less expensive.”
Housing is likely to be a major topic during the 2025 Legislative Session; lawmakers are already hammering out draft bills to encourage more affordable housing development — usually by deregulating the space or empowering local communities to do it themselves.
Despite this overall push toward loosening housing and zoning restrictions, which Chestek supports, the one-term representative said he also supports Laramie’s City Rental Housing Code, which established health and safety standards for rental units within the city.
“Another way to reduce housing costs would be to allow crappy units to go and stay in service and make things unsafe for people,” Chestek said. “We don’t want that either, so you’ve got to find a happy medium.”
Some lawmakers, with backing from some landlords, have pushed to “preempt” the issue of rental regulations to the state — an attempt to reverse Laramie’s rental code and forbid all other communities from passing their own.
Chestek said rental tenants are often at a disadvantage when dealing with landlords, being the poorer and less experienced party in any negotiation or contract. At the end of the day, Chestek said tenants deserve habitable accommodations, and regulation is sometimes necessary to ensure that.
“Landlords always have more power,” he said. “Tenants are always the weaker party, and they need some more power to make sure that they’re living in safe places. So again, there’s that fine line between too much regulation and not enough regulation.”
Laramie is a city of renters where more than half the population rents the home they live in. Tenant horror stories underpinned the fight for rental regulations and have not disappeared since the rental code’s passage.
A majority of Laramie’s landlords have yet to comply with the new law; some Laramie City Council candidates want to give the code more teeth.
“Renewable is the future”
Chestek said Wyoming can continue its long tradition of powering the nation — but he would like to see the Cowboy State “focus on solar and wind.”
“Wind energy is picking up,” he said. “There’s a lot of new wind farms going in, a lot of new transmission infrastructure going in, and I think we need to keep that up. The demand for electricity is not going to go down.”
Given current market trends toward renewables, the best thing Wyoming can do, Chestek said, is get out of the way.
“We need to make sure that we don’t regulate those renewable industries into oblivion, or make it so difficult for them to grow that they don’t grow,” he said. “We need to encourage growth in the renewable sector … We need to get out of the way of the development to allow it to happen.”
However, the representative added, Wyoming shouldn’t force an energy transition before the state is ready.
“We can’t give up on the legacy industries just yet until we build enough renewable,” Chestek said. “But renewable is the future.”
Apparently Swett is not only a man of few words, but one with distain for his possible constituents. So much so that he can’t be bothered to engage in a discussion with them. Elections are better when there is vigorous debate and multiple views. A solidly democratic strong hold is just as sad - straight party voting is the death of democracy.