City Of Cheyenne: The Mayor's Minute From Mayor Patrick Collins – June 10th

Cheyenne WY

14 June, 2022

7:47 AM

Description

Press release from the City of Cheyenne: June 10, 2022 CHEYENNE – This has been one tough week for your mayor. I have been so healthy since being sworn into office. Days of high fever and coughing has caused me to miss so many commitments. I missed Miss Stella's kindergarten graduation. Her mom works in our office, and I am so disappointed to miss the big day. I have a son that graduated from Stride, and it killed me to miss greeting the Stride Ride folks and thanking them for all they do for the youth of Cheyenne. Girls State was in town, and I missed the privilege of welcoming them to our community. Another big miss was the Maury Brown Youth Fishing Day. He hosted 400 kids at his lake and provided them with free rods, tackle boxes, lunch, and a great day learning how to fish. Thank goodness for Zoom and the ability to meet remotely, I was able to make many of the city meetings and commitments. Sickness and health are the vow we took, and Judy sure lived up to her part. Thanks honey. Charles Bloom is our City Planner. We are working on so many different projects these days. We met to catch up on the progress of a couple of them. First is the Belvoir Ranch and how we will access the trailhead we hope to build. One of our new fire station locations is owned by the city. It has a Land and Water Conservation Grant restriction that limits the property to outdoor recreation. If you want to use it for another purpose, you have to work with government to incumber new properties. We discussed that process and how to proceed. Last we talked about the city council goal of annexing county pockets surrounded by the city. It is important to make sure it does not hurt the residents inside the pockets, and we talked about creating a model ordinance we could use to show residents to help with the fear this action could cause. Once we are ready, we will make sure to have a robust public process to answer questions and concerns. We hosted a conference call with a team from Casper. They wanted to understand how we handle Animal Control and how our partnership with the Animal Shelter works. We took over the control function in September 2021, and in that time have certified our employees to the national standards and have worked hard to be a good partner with the shelter. The folks from Casper were very interested in our public/private partnership. We offered to host them and make the introduction to the team at the Cheyenne Animal Shelter. City staff charged with managing the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) for the Hitching Post's Urban Renewal Authority (URA) met with the County Attorney, County Assessor, and County Treasurer. As we have discussed, the state laws are not very specific on how the transfer of property tax money from the state to the city should happen. While I know this is very frustrating for the county team, I appreciate their working so hard to find a way forward. The URA is the ultimate private/public partnership we have used to clean up the old Hitch site. Things that seem so simple are never simple. Great news is the site is clean and new development is scheduled to start this summer. This press release was produced by the City of Cheyenne. The views expressed here are the author's own.