Midwest Republican Rep. Bill Allemand, who has served House District 58 since 2023, is facing a primary challenge from one of his former supporters, Peter Boyer, who is wrapping up a term as mayor of Bar Nunn. The winner of the GOP primary, to be decided on Aug. 18, will face Democratic candidat e Keenan Morgan in November. Though initially political allies, their relationship soured last year during a series of clashes at public meetings over a proposed nuclear microreactor manufacturing project that divided much of the Natrona County community. Of particular concern was Radiant Industries’ intention to store spent nuclear fuel at the facility just outside the town of Bar Nunn. The friction included yelling matches between the two and repeated requests by Allemand for Boyer and other town officials to address rumors of “corruption” behind support for Radiant Industries’ project. During one town hall meeting organized by Allemand, the legislator implored Boyer to respond. The slim, mid-40s former-Army infantryman Boyer hadn’t planned to speak at the event, but solemnly walked to the front of the Bar Nunn crowd. “I’ve never taken money,” Boyer said. “I wouldn’t ever take money. I didn’t go to Iraq, serve my country for eight years, bleed, watch my friends die, so I can be accused of bribery. That’s bullshit. And I’m pissed, and I’m tired of this. Everybody has been at everyone else’s throat, and that is unacceptable.” In a recent interview with WyoFile, Boyer said he first joined the Bar Nunn town council because his wife advised him to stop complaining about politics and be part of the solution. His experience on the council and as mayor has changed his attitude and appreciation for elected office, he says. “I’m not a different person,” Boyer said. “My principles, my values, my beliefs, my conservatism, my whatever you want to call it, are the same. But I used to be a cynic. Then I got in here, and I started seeing how the sausage was made, and I was like, ‘Wow. This is a lot more complicated than I thought. There’s actually a lot of important decisions that need to be made,'” he reflected. “The majority of [local elected officials] are just normal people trying to do a good thing. They’re just trying to serve their communities.” He’s running for HD 58, Boyer said, because “we need better representation.” “We need someone who actually is going to educate themselves on the issues,” Boyer added. “They’re going to be a part of the solution. They’re going to work with local leaders on how they can do things better and how they can help the local municipalities. These are all failures that I’m seeing.” Allemand, a member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, says he’s asking voters for a third term, campaigning on his experience in the Legislature, his dedication to HD 58 residents and his ultra-conservative voting track record. “If Peter Boyer thinks he’s as conservative as I am, and he wants conservatism, why is he running against me?” Allemand told WyoFile.  Peter Boyer Boyer is originally from Alabama. He served in the military, including two tours in Iraq. He moved his family to Bar Nunn in 2016, attracted to Wyoming’s “low taxes and less regulation.” He works in the oil industry, transporting crude. His Facebook campaign page declares, “God. Family. Country. In that order. Make babies, guns and freedom great again.” During his tenure as Bar Nunn mayor, and while on the town council, he helped oversee a rapidly growing community of more than 3,000 residents, where manufacturing and tech companies have added to its oil-and-gas industrial service base. Though located just a few miles north of Casper, Bar Nunn retains its own identity as a middle-class, blue-collar town where neighbors know everybody’s name. Bar Nunn Mayor Peter Boyer is running for House District 58. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile) Credit: Dustin Bleizeffer It’s still diverse enough, Boyer said, to make public policy challenging. His approach to those with differing views is to talk face-to-face respectfully and to try to find common ground. “If there is common ground, we can find some way forward,” he said. “And if not, you just have to look at the other person and say, ‘Hey, I don’t hate you. But we disagree.'” Some Wyoming challenges he’d confront as a legislator are extremely difficult, he admits, even if there is common ground — like how to build more affordable and accessible healthcare. It’s something that the state cannot “buy” with taxpayer money, he said. Instead, Wyoming will only attract more doctors and better healthcare competition with a growing economy. “We have to get a booming economy going right now,” Boyer said. “You got to get people good jobs so that they’re making a lot of money, and when they’re making a lot of money, and we have a lot of high-paying jobs, it’s going to attract doctors here.” Regarding public lands, wildlife and natural resources, Boyer said Wyoming already does “a pretty decent job” of balancing sometimes conflicting uses and impacts. “We value our public lands and we’ve got plenty of space to grow. So that’s not a big deal.”   Though he wants to see public lands remain public, he’s in favor of transferring the ownership of federal lands to Wyoming — a policy view he shares with Allemand.  When it comes to industrial development, Boyer says state and local leaders must respect private property rights, and that includes companies that acquire such rights. Communities must have a say because they have rights, too, particularly to health and safety. It can be difficult, though, Boyer said, speaking from experience with the controversy over the Radiant project. Boyer said he asked himself, “Is this a safe technology, and is it going to benefit the community through prosperity, through revenue and through jobs, and is it going to benefit the entire county and the state?” The answer, for Boyer, was yes. Ultimately, Radiant scrapped its Wyoming plans and moved the project to Tennessee, citing uncertainty about whether Wyoming would loosen its ban on spent nuclear fuel. There’s a proper role for the state to engage in economic development, Boyer said. Primarily, in helping communities upgrade and expand infrastructure to facilitate growth. However, he doesn’t support taxpayer money going directly to private companies, which amounts to “picking winners and losers.” His priority, if he wins his bid for HD 58 representative, is to get Wyoming’s economy booming, Boyer said, so kids don’t have to leave the state to find a good-paying job. Growth, and the change that comes with it, makes some people bristle, Boyer said, because they want a healthy economy without seeing Wyoming change at all. “The problem with that is, things change. Things are already changing,” Boyer said. “So let’s be the masters of our own future.” Bill Allemand Allemand grew up on the family ranch near the Naval Petroleum Reserve outside Midwest and Edgerton. He runs a small trucking company that mostly serves the oil and gas industry. Allemand said he ran for the Legislature to serve the small communities in HD 58 that struggle to meet basic needs. “There’s very little income for those small towns and they struggle to make every dime work,” Allemand said.  Rep. Bill Allemand, R-Midwest, sits at his desk during the 2025 general session in Cheyenne. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile) As a member of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, he’s building support for a new community grant program to help small towns like Midwest and Edgerton when they face an emergency, like a water line break. He’s also pushing Wyoming’s congressional delegation to help the town of Bar Nunn get its own ZIP code, because sharing one with other communities can result in “taxation without representation,” he said. It’s a shame, Allemand said, that there are too few maternity care services in Wyoming, and that expectant moms sometimes have to travel outside the state to have a baby. For now, he said, the best path forward to improving healthcare access and costs is for the state to get as much money as it can from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program. Another priority, if he wins reelection, is to continue ratcheting down residential property taxes and eventually “get rid of it completely,” Allemand said. There are several options to replace the revenue that towns, counties, fire districts and other local entities depend on. The state can tap the nuclear and data center industry, for example.  He’s also in favor of transferring the ownership of federal lands to the state. “If we could get our lands home, this would probably put a stop to our property taxes, [considering] what those lands could make us,” Allemand said. “I hear this all the time: Local control. How can we have local control when over half of our state is managed from 2,000 miles away? That does not seem like local control to me.” Serving on the Legislature’s powerful Appropriations Committee, Allemand says he has the opportunity to represent the conservative values of his HD 58 constituents — most of whom, he claims, share his fight-for-the-underdog attitude that is most effectively led by himself and his fellow Freedom Caucus members. The far-right arm of the GOP, he said, has earned a bad rap in the news and on social media because, “The left has done a very, very good job of trying to destroy the Freedom Caucus. “I don’t think they’re getting anywhere,” Allemand added regarding Freedom Caucus critics. “You talk to the people on the street and 90% of us love us. Well, maybe not 90, but we have many, many people in Wyoming who love the Freedom Caucus, and I think they’re going to stand up and vote for us again.” His Freedom Caucus views extend to the group’s recent initiatives to reduce property taxes on homeowners, and to defund and dismantle the Wyoming Business Council — the state’s top economic development shop. When it comes to economic development, Allemand said, the proper role for the state “is to get out of the way.” The agency has “spent $1.5 billion of local, state and federal money since its inception, and today our GDP is the same and we still have all of our kids leaving. They have failed.” Though the effort to abolish the business council fell short during this year’s legislative session, Allemand said he’s not giving up on a major course correction for the agency.  “We need to either get them on the right track and let them prove to us they’re on the right track, or we need to dismantle and try something different.” It’s appropriate to spend federal and state dollars on basic community infrastructure, Allemand said. In some instances, it might be proper to offer loans to companies that prove, up front, they’ll add jobs and contribute to a community’s economy. But he’s against spending taxpayer money on private businesses. One of the worst examples of the state misguidedly handing taxpayer cash to a company, Allemand said, was the $100 million Large Project Energy Matching Fund grant to Lynchburg, Virginia-based BWXT, which plans to build a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in Gillette. When it comes to giving taxpayer money to companies, Wyoming should demand equal value in a company’s shares, he said. Though he staunchly supports expanding the state’s legacy fossil fuel industries, he’s not against new businesses and industries coming into the state, Allemand said. But too often, the state puts its support behind what he considers “woke companies” that don’t benefit local communities as promised. “They’re companies that come in and hurt our people, hurt our environment, give us a little bit of benefit up front, a little bit of property tax money, but we’ve exempted” large portions of their business, Allemand said. Data centers are a good example, he added. He’s in favor of a moratorium on data centers until the state figures out how to properly tax them and hold them accountable for not harming Wyoming communities and the state’s natural resources. The contentious debates over Radiant Industries in Natrona County were a big learning experience for him, Allemand said. He lost some longtime friends and endured a lot of public scrutiny “for standing with the people of House District 58.” Midwest Republican Rep. Bill Allemand speaks at a July 2025 town hall meeting in Bar Nunn regarding Radiant Industries’ plans to manufacture nuclear microreactors. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile) “The biggest thing that I took from that whole deal had nothing to do with Radiant,” Allemand told WyoFile. “It had to do with this: The people get together, the grassroots, they can win. We can beat these woke companies.” Allemand was arrested in December for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol and has vowed to fight the charge. WyoFile asked him about the charge in light of running for another term as HD 58 representative. “On advice of my attorney, I’m not to talk about it because it’s an ongoing situation,” Allemand said. “You can write this,” he added. “I wanted my trial in May, but it just keeps getting pushed back and pushed back. Right now, it’s in September. It may get pushed back to November, and that is not my wish.” The post Former allies, divided by nuclear development, face off for Natrona County’s House District 58 appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less