Shannon Brennan

Shannon Brennan's career experience includes working as an energy consultant.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I am running to give a voice to WY District 23 and to draw a more effective relationship between Teton County and the rest of the State. I recognize an urgency, locally and in Cheyenne to address population-triggered issues. I believe in government managed by the people close to home, and I support lower taxes, protecting public lands, encouraging employers to provide better access to housing, and supporting a more affordable Jackson.

I am a proud American, a conservative, and a strict constitutionalist. I stand for fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free-market capitalism – i.e. national security, lower taxes, smaller state government, protection of public lands and private land rights, election integrity, gun rights, protection of human life, and individual self-reliance as opposed to government involvement. Healthcare, education, housing, and traffic management are critical to the quality of life but are best addressed by local leadership in the private sector to own.

I have had a 35-year career in energy research and development and public service. I own Shannon A. Brennan & Associates LLC — an SBA-certified Women-Owned Small Business in energy management consulting. I am Stanford certified in advanced project management and energy innovation, am a Senior Fellow with the Partnership for Public Service, and serve or have served on the Teton District Board of Health, St. John’s Health Board, and the WY Governor's Groundwater Advisory Committee.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Energy has been Wyoming’s leading industry for many decades and has funded our hospitals and schools. The Mineral Severance Tax should continue to be managed closely as a special corpus fund without modification. We should expand the University of Wyoming’s extractive industries degrees, hire the brightest minds, support energy innovation, and strive to become the nations’ leading mining and earth sciences center. We should expand our state energy programs to include research and development, partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop energy hubs, thereby creating many more jobs for scientist, engineers, and energy industry workers. We should streamline permitting and NEPA. Let’s make Wyoming the national energy leader.High taxation in Teton County and throughout Wyoming are creating notable hardship and forcing many to downshift in their way of life, or even leave their homes for cheaper destinations. I support applying zero-based budgeting to prioritize critical goods and services. We need to inventory what we are paying for and decide, as taxpayers, what we are willing to fund on a priority basis. Let’s find that nexus between acceptable levels of services and the amount of taxes we are willing to pay. There is no sense cutting taxes and only then inquiring about the impacts. We need the state budgets to be made available and digestible by citizens with transparency and simplicity in order to responsibly lower taxes. This is the Wyoming way.Wyoming is a healthcare desert. Three-quarters of our hospitals are designated as critical access or rural (if a service is lost, you do without). 100% of Wyoming is medically underserved in mental healthcare. This is dire. Many Wyoming hospitals are facing severe financial threats or closures due to uncompensated care, severe challenges in healthcare worker retention, and soaring insurance premiums. In Teton County, our hospital is navigating these vagaries on a daily basis. I strongly support the training of Wyoming clinicians both in-state and through our reciprocal agreements regionally. I will fight to preserve our rural hospitals, remove barriers to third-party coverage, and prioritize the accessibility of primary care.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Energy development; minerals extraction; taxation; conservation, environment, and water quality; public lands and wildlife management; water rights; rural healthcare access; economic diversification; sustainable growth and housing; education; and state and federal constitutional rights.

I strongly support the Wyoming culture of simplicity, bringing back the automatic sunsetting of state agencies, as previously encoded in Title 28 of the state statutes. This required legislative review and termination of state agencies every six years. Further, I support the sunsetting of laws themselves to maintain limited government and focused compliance. An additional 70 laws were put into effect in July – how critical are these to our everyday lives?