Wyoming's Own Pay Study Predicted the Trooper Shortage. The Overtime Bill Was the Proof.

Wyoming's own compensation office had already written the diagnosis before the overtime bill arrived.▸ A Department of Administration & Information memo filed with the Legislature's Joint Appropriations Committee put the Highway Patrol's vacancy rate at 15% and warned that "turnover is already costing the state more than" the raise it was asking for. Two months after that memo was revised, Wyoming Department of Transportation auditors opened a review into why the Highway Patrol had blown through its overtime budget by 226% — troopers covering the gap the state's own study had already measured.

Then-Colonel Tim Cameron put it plainly: troopers logged "more than 50,000 [overtime] hours" in 2025, "a cost of over $4 million" against an annual overtime budget of roughly $1.6 million — a 226% overage.▸ The precise paper trail comes from an internal WHP Executive Command Staff memo dated December 11, 2025, obtained under Wyoming's public-records law and reported independently by Cowboy State Daily and by the Wyoming News Network, both citing identical figures: WHP's full 2025-26 biennium overtime allocation was $3,197,383 — and the agency had already spent $4,884,838 by December 9, 2025, with roughly six months of the two-year cycle still to run.

Cameron, who has since retired, didn't soften the finding: he called it "unchecked, unfettered misuse of overtime by all levels of personnel."▸ WYDOT's office of audit and compliance opened a review, and WHP's own office of professional standards ran a parallel internal investigation; neither had published final findings as of this writing. The agency's interim fix was blunt — a December 2025 order restricting paid overtime and capping troopers at 400 miles a week — the kind of measure an agency reaches for when it has run out of people, not just money.

The overtime spike wasn't a mystery inside the building.▸ Months earlier, Wyoming's Department of Administration & Information had told the Joint Appropriations Committee that the Highway Patrol carried a 15% vacancy rate — nearly double the 7% rate the state reports for its own attorneys or highway-maintenance crews, and in the same range as the 16% vacancy rate across the entire executive branch. Only nurses, at 28%, ran meaningfully higher.

The same memo showed the mechanism: Highway Patrol Trooper I pay averaged $21.73 an hour before the state's 2022 compensation overhaul began, rose to $29.34 an hour through three phases of raises, and — under the pay-table adjustment A&I was requesting — was projected to reach $33.03 an hour, a request A&I costed at $3,677,243 a year for the full Highway Patrol officer corps.▸ Wyoming Highway Patrol's own pay page confirms the raise landed close to that mark: the starting wage for a newly hired Trooper I rose to $32.99 an hour effective July 1, 2026 — the same month WYDOT auditors were still trying to explain how a $3.2 million overtime budget became a $4.9 million one. The state had priced its own fix before the bill for not paying it came due; it funded the fix seven months after the bill arrived.

Vacancy and pay-table figures are drawn from a state workforce memo revised in January 2026; overtime figures reflect an internal command memo dated December 2025 as reported by two independent news organizations, since WYDOT's own audit had not been published at the time of writing.