17 Building a Bright Future: Mayor Rich Bridger Talks Sheridan's Growth

In this engaging episode, we dive into the heart of local leadership and community initiatives, uncovering the stories and visions that shape our neighborhoods.

We chat with Mayor Rich Bridger from our picturesque town of Sheridan, who gives us an insider's perspective on managing a city. Hear about the challenges he's faced, the proactive approaches taken to solve them, and exciting upcoming projects that promise to enhance the community. We also touch on the power of local education foundations, state support, and innovative opportunities for students.

Drew then reflects on the transformation of the town over the years, discussing the impacts of optional taxes, local amenities, and engaging events like the Christmas Stroll. Find out why this charming community is a magnet for its residents, where everyone, young and old, can enjoy a swim, shop, and connect at a local level.

Join us on this insightful journey through the heart of Sheridan, where community leaders and engaged citizens work together to create a vibrant, thriving, and connected town.

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Transcript

All right. Hey, guys. How are you guys doing today? We have with us Rich Bridger, mayor of City of Sheridan, yeah, thanks for having me, Drew.

I appreciate the time. I'm glad you could make it. Yeah, it's nice.

Tough getting out here. This is like a labyrinth out here, man. I found it.

Well, thank goodness after a phone call. Well, and then too, then you finally do get here. Well, not finally because you were actually on time, but you get here after you finally found the place and then you get a walk through the rain.

It's downpouring outside right now. It's a duck weather out there today, but it's all good. It's not snow, so that's the big thing.

Oh, I bet you it's dumping in the mountains right now. Oh, yeah, they're getting it bad, but luckily it's just rain here. Yeah.

Well, hey, welcome aboard. I was kind of hoping you could give us an introduction of who you are, where you've come from, what you're doing. I already said that you're the mayor, but what about before that and how'd you get there? All right, so it's quite a long story, actually, but I'll try to simplify it.

But basically it all started with my daughter going to grade school and so she decided she was well, she got old enough and she was going to go to kindergarten and school board had openings. And so I was like, well, my daughter's going to school, I should probably be involved. And so I ran for a school board.

And at first time I failed, I lost, and then I decided to run again and then I won that race. And so I was on school board for like twelve years. It was until my daughter graduated, basically.

And then I was like, it's somebody else's turn. I've done my twelve years and she's getting out. And I just thought it was good timing.

And in the past I'd always had Senator Kinsky, who was then at one point the mayor of Sheridan, he had always wanted me to run for council, and so I was, you know, I'm done with school board, I still want to serve, I still want to in some sort of way. And so I'll run for council. So I ran for council and I became a councilman.

So I did that for one term. And then it just seemed like I had a lot of people asking me if I would like to run for mayor, and it's not something I ever really considered until it got real. And then I was like, well, go ahead, I'll run for mayor.

And I was like, luckily I got the position that I have now. And so I've been mayor for two and a half, almost three years. But it's been a good gig, I don't mind it.

I like serving the people of Sheridan. I like the work and so doesn't pay worth a squat, but it's been a good public service for me. That's awesome.

Yeah. Well, we sure appreciate it too. Yeah, thanks for that.

It's been good. Sheridan's my home. It's a place I love and I don't mind being a part of.

Well, you know, one thing about this is you are on the front lines to help shape what she you have, you have you are heavily involved in the goings know, but there's a fine line there that drew. I mean, government has its place, obviously. It's keeping the streets clean and get the trash picked up and make sure the water is good and do disposal of waste and all that sort of business stuff that the city does every day.

But then there's also private entrepreneurs like yourself who are out there building and doing and making things happen. And so it's kind of a partnership. I'm glad you brought that up because you think about the federal government.

The federal government, there are certain types of people that want to have the federal government just their fingers and everything. They want to grasp onto this power. That can be a dangerous situation in my opinion.

The people should have the power, the people should have the freedom to run the country as far as businesses and all that. And then the government should handle, just like you said, the administrative functions of the country, the safety, what would you say, the foreign affairs and all these things that I believe the government should take care of. Yeah, we're not that complicated.

We're at a local level, so we're not at a federal level. There's not much power to be had there, so to speak. I like to let entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do.

We just serve our function. We do the streets, we keep things clean, we keep business rolling. Sanitation, water, that sort of thing.

That's our job. Obviously, we want to put some sideboards on things that would be bad, like in your business. We want to make sure that things are constructed and constructed well.

But we're not going to tell you what you can or cannot construct unless it's something that's just entirely out of place with what the rest of the neighborhood is everything's zoned. So you have R ones, R two S, R three S, B ones, that sort of thing where you have limitations on what you can and can't do in those areas. But other than that, I think that government should just kind of stay out of the way and let people do what they need to do.

Yeah, amen to that. Well, I'm glad that and that's one of the reason I felt comfortable calling you here is because I knew that we've talked a few times in the past and whatever, and I knew that I felt like it'd be an easy conversation to have where we can kind of carry on with oh, well, I know that you believe this way, and then it makes it easier to carry on a conversation. But speaking of business development, so you're part of CEDA, right? Right, I'm a member of CEDA, which is shared in Economic Education and development authority.

Okay. So part of our charge is education, but part of it is business as well and promoting business and having people come to our community to do business. And we've been fairly successful on the north end of town there.

We have quite a few manufacturing areas out there. I think there's over 300 people that are in manufacturing out that direction now. That's awesome.

Yeah. So Cedar has been a part of all of that and so that's sort of our charge, education and economic development. So how does CEDA go about? For example, CEDA helped with bringing weatherby here, right? Is that, you know, they're getting mayor Kinsky had a large part to do with that, but CEDA had a large part to do with that as well.

We had land available so that they could build. The state helped out with that. It was quite a project actually to get them here.

But it was a partnership between Cedar, the city, the state that brought that franchise here, and it's been very successful and it employs quite a number of people with good paying jobs. And so it was a good partnership with all those entities to work together to get them to come out here. Yeah, I agree.

I think as far as it being a good company to come here, I think all the people in Sheridan are excited about that. Yeah, I know, like I said, they're a large employer, they're a good employer. And it wasn't just the city of Sheridan, it wasn't just CEDA.

It was all those plus the state that brought those folks here. Okay. So I understand CEDA recently is under agreement to buy some more property out there.

Yeah, that was quite the process and we're not quite there yet, but we looked at, I think it was a total of four sites that we could possibly purchase for our next campaign, so to speak, because basically we have one lot left in the current commercial park and so we wanted to look at the future. So you're going to run out eventually, so you need to pick a new spot. And we think we found that spot and that's what we're out at the north end of town again.

And so now we're in the process of acquiring that so we can start our next business park. Yeah. So here's a question for you out there.

There's the Gateway Corridor zoning. Right. Do you know how that came about? Obviously when you drive into, let's just say a lot of oil towns have you drive into one of those smaller oil towns and say North Dakota and stuff like that, you get this vibe and you know that it's an oil town or you get this vibe that it's a very physical working town.

You see a lot of big shops and big trucks, and the energy has not gone into the beautification of the city. It's gone into expanding on those types of jobs. But the Gateway Corridor for Sheridan, when you pull in eventually when the landscaping grows up, because there's certain landscaping requirements and stuff like that, when that landscaping grows up, people will pull into Sheridan and say, I want to be here.

Right. And I think that was a thought behind the Gateway, was that we have some expectations of building codes and what you can and can't build in those areas. Just for that reason, we didn't want an ugly factory in the middle of our entryway.

So we want people to come in and think, this is nice. Sheridan's a nice place. And so even with I think we have the big car dealership that's out there mean they had some expectations of fascia and those things that they could use for building materials just for that reason.

We want that to be a place that's welcoming, it's industrious, but it's also at the same time, it's nice. Yeah. Well, I'm actually building my own office out there.

And one of the things that we're doing is my property is not part of Cedar property, but it's right across the road from some of the Cedar property. And things that we've done that are one of the codes is, for example, 15% landscaping. And you put your landscaping in your trees and stuff, and our office is not done.

So we're not to the landscaping stage yet. But I have to be honest with you, when I first started reading through the Gateway Corridor covenants, I was thinking, man, 15%. I just lost 15% of my land to planting trees and bushes and grass and whatever.

But you know what? To be honest with you, the more I thought about it, the more I realized, but that's what I would be doing anyway, because I want it to be pretty. Yeah. I don't think it's onerous, but it does have some minimum expectations that when you build something out there, we want it to basically look nice.

So that's kind of the bottom line on it. Yeah. And then a couple of other things.

We'll have wood siding and some stone and some natural finishes. It will appear nice. It kind of made me realize that, you know what? I shouldn't take my first judgment glance and run with that.

I warmed up to the idea after a little bit when I really, actually thought about what those zoning regulations are. And to be honest with you, I'm actually quite thankful for them, because now I'm going to have a nice building next door as well. Right? Yeah.

And you won't have a refinery right next door. Yeah. And speaking of values, then the values are held up, right? Exactly.

I don't mean to bag on billings, but when you go into billings and the first thing you see is the refinery. We want it to be a place. So when you drive in you're like, this is nice, Sharon's, a nice community.

And it doesn't stop industry, it doesn't stop people like yourself from having their businesses out there. There's just some minimum expectations that we want it to look decent because I'm a builder. I want to talk to you for a second about some of the recent building action that's going on.

There's a bunch of developments in process. I don't know the number of units, but it's well in the hundreds of potential units coming up. As far as lots for sale, single family and stuff like that.

How do you see the growth of Sheridan and being able to sustain these developments coming? Know that is a very good question and I don't know the answer to that. I'm always amazed at just the sheer amount of potential buildings that can be built and the developers that want to develop these lots. Literally, we have stuff being developed on every side of our community and then there's stuff being developed out in the county.

And so I don't know what everybody does. It just simply amazes me. It's like this area out here.

Until I drove to your house, I didn't realize how extensive this whole area is. This neighborhood is massive, isn't it? It is massive and it's just like, what are all these people doing? But some of it's retirement, some of it they just wanted to get out. We saw a lot of it with the COVID that people just wanted to get the heck out of wherever they were at and move to someplace a little more sane.

And some of it's that but others of it is just, I think people can work from home now. But just the sheer amount of potential building just quite frankly amazes me. But that being said, everything seems to be getting sold and getting consumed and so I don't know where it ends.

So speaking of if these subdivisions and developments fill up, how's our infrastructure? It's good. I mean, we look at all that stuff, obviously it adds on, obviously. But as far as our sanitation is concerned and our water is concerned, we have ample amount of both those right now.

Water might become an issue a couple of decades down the road because quite frankly, it's unlimited source resource right now. We pull everything from the mountain at the reservoirs that we have and so at some point you're going to hit capacity on that. But then that's where the discussion about Lake DeSmit comes in.

And pulling water from Lake DeSmit. Oh, is that part of the plan? Well, tentatively. I don't want to get Johnson County mad at me, but that's been a discussion point.

Oh, interesting. But we realized that that's a limiting resource and at some point if you get enough people, then you have to look at where you want your next water treatment plant. Right now, one of our discussion points is with our capacity and everything moving out towards that north end of town, we might have to look at an ancillary fire department.

But all that being said, none of that's cheap because you got to build the firehouse. You got to employ those people to be the firemen. Everything has a cost, so you have to be very cognizant of what you're doing.

Is there a specific distance that they want from fire department to edge of town? There is, and I don't want to make the firemen mad at me and misquote, but yeah, they have time to the amount of time it takes you to get from the fire department to the fire incident, I'm really getting squishy here, but I think it's like five minutes. Yeah, it has to be quick. Yeah, it has to be quick.

And so there's a range there, and once you get out of that range, then you might lose your fire rating, which affects everybody's insurances. It's a little more complicated than I ever thought. Yeah, I wouldn't have known that either.

Yeah. I'm curious if this really isn't a question for anybody, but it just spurred a thought. I'm curious if fire sprinkler systems help with that when you're talking about the distance from a fire department that your building is located.

Well, I don't know if it makes any difference in the city's fire rating. I think fire suppression equipment is always a good idea. If you can do it, like with me, with my old house, that'd be more problematic than anything else.

But I think with new construction, if you can afford it and it's never a bad idea. But as far as affecting our fire ratings, I don't think it does any that way. Yeah.

So another question back to CEDA. Is there any public knowledge or anything publicly available that you could share with us as far as potential businesses moving to the area that you know about? Because here's the problem with a small town is there's all these little whispers of, oh, did you hear so and so is going to be moving to town. As the mayor and taking a part of know, you might actually have the most accurate information as long as it's publicly available.

I don't really have any deep, dark secrets as far as that is concerned. Robert Briggs is the person that's our point man for CETA, and people make inquires with him all the time about potentially coming to Sheridan, which is part of the reason we're thinking about creating the new business park. But as far as just they're moving here for sure, I don't have any of that.

It's always kind of a moving target. We do still get inquiries from people about moving to Sheridan and coming here, but there's nothing in concrete, right? Yeah.
Well, I'm excited for the future of Sheridan.

I feel like this is a good place to be. I'm super happy with the city overall. There are certain challenges, obviously, and I would say one of the challenges that I face personally is that I would say affects me personally.

When a small town starts growing, the city grows, goes through I can't talk growing pains. Right, right. And what affects me is, say, the building department, there are certain things that processes maybe aren't as good as they could be because you're going from this, I guess you could call it a hometown building department to what would you say? Well, oiled, I guess.

And there's not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but what that does is it causes a person to go out of their norm and into something new, which then causes potential areas for issues as far as the cleanliness of the city and stuff like that. This is a nice, clean place. And you know what's actually interesting? This is the only place I've been to a lot of places, and this is the only place that I actually see people literally outside picking up garbage.

And that's obviously a citizen thing and take responsibility for your actions. But you go to a lot of big cities, by the way, I'm sure that the city department is actually doing a ton of work on that as well. But you go to a lot of these bigger cities and there's trash everywhere, and some of them almost look third world.

You drive in the grass medians between highways is just littered with trash and tires. And I think I'm so glad I live in Sheridan, and it's a clean, healthy, happy, and safe place to live. No, I think we're blessed.

And you're right, it's a beautiful city. I'm going to go way, way back now. My dad was a highway patrolman, and we moved around quite a bit.

And so I lived in places like Rollins and Rock Springs, and I lived in Cody, which was nice, but then his goal was always to get, oh, okay. And so he transferred to here when I was in grade school. And then he had a chance to go to Cheyenne to move up in the ranks, so to speak, and he was like, no, I'm staying here.

And so Sheridan is just a gem, and people here, I think, realize what a great community they live in, and they take pride in that, I think. And so they try to keep it nice, and it's not a place where people want to trash it out, they want to take care of it, and it's pretty special that way. So I'm always happy dad chose this is our place to stay, and I don't want to live anywhere else.

I've been to other places, but I always want to come back. Yeah, I love my community, which is part of the reason I decided to run for mayor, was that I wanted to contribute and keep Sheridan. Sheridan, yeah.

You know, another thing that I've noticed with Sheridan is I feel like the people with money have confidence in Sheridan. You see these old buildings downtown getting remodeled and some of these nice new offices, multi use type buildings over by the skate people. There's some people who have some money and they're confident enough in our little town city that they're building these awesome buildings and they're really putting some money into our area.

Yeah. And I don't know where it's going to end. Like you say, I'm always amazed at all the building that goes on here and the amount of people that come here, and I always wonder what they're doing.

But then there's always new construction, like down by the ice rink there. They're building that new facility down there and there's stuff going on the north end of town. There's stuff going on now.

There's stuff going on the east end of town. Yeah. Which we never had before.

And so that's going to be a huge development. It just amazes me. So tell me this, what do you think has been I'm curious of most impactful moment of maybe not the most, because sometimes that can be hard to think of on the spot.

And just for the listeners, this is totally unscripted and we're just having a conversation. We're winging it. Yeah, but I'm just curious, as a mayor of Sheridan, you obviously come up to a lot of challenges and things that a person has to overcome and obviously you have the support of the public or maybe not.

And you have the city workers and you have all these people. A lot of times you have to bring a whole bunch of people together in order to figure out an issue. Since you've been mayor, has there been an issue where you're like, you know what, this is kind of a doozy.

And you've been able to get through a situation involving the city that you're like, that was pretty awesome that everybody was able to come together and make this happen. Oh, wow. That's kind of an off the cuff one I don't really have an answer for.

Generally. I haven't had anything that was a major tragedy or a major issue that everybody was up in the arms about. And I think that just speaks well to what we do as a city.

We do our part, we do what we're supposed to be doing. So like I said, we don't get too far down in the weeds as far as your business, which is building or anything else, but we just make sure that there's processes there for people to be successful. Again, the day to day stuff is just the day to day stuff.

We make sure that everything's done. People have their trash picked up, people have their roads cleaned. So no, I haven't had any major controversies.

So maybe I should just knock on wood with well, and that's a blessing because what that means to me is that people are actually doing their jobs right. People are planning ahead and people they have foresight. We know that sometime in the future.

The riverwalk, right, that's been planning forever. We know at some point this needs to be remodeled, and Beautified say the city was not doing that. Then you would end up with having these big reaction moments where you have to figure it out.

You don't want reaction moments where you have to figure it out if you can help it. So try to be a bit proactive. Our big thing of Berkshire, you know this as well, but our Main Street reconstruction that's going to probably this portion of it will wrap up the end of this month.

That's exciting. So that is exciting. And I'm really glad that it's going to get open before Christmas so those merchants downtown can have some success with their Christmas sales.

I know that it's been a tough time for all those people downtown, so I've always promoted that people should go downtown anyway and shop downtown. I'm not a big fan of Internet, so I think if you can support your local merchants, you should support those merchants. But as far as getting back on topic, I really haven't.

I mean, everything's just kind of been business as usual for us. Awesome. Yeah.

We haven't had any town hall meetings where they rushed us and everybody was mad. That probably the last thing that was Wood Bidden when the discussion was on fluoride. Oh, that's a hot item.

It was. Goes way back before I was mayor. But at some point they put fluoride in the water, and it was making everybody mad or not everybody, but it was like a 50 50.

And so we had people come into the council with their toothpaste tubes and whatever else to complain about the fluoride, and we finally just said, okay, we're going to just put it out for a vote. And whatever the vote is, that's what we'll do. So we sent out a survey with the water bill, and it came back almost 50 50.

People wanting it, people not wanting it, but the people not wanting exceeded the people that wanted it. And so it's like, fine, we're going to get rid of fluoride. There's no fluoride in our water.

No fluoride in our water. I actually didn't know that. Yeah.

One thing I just touched on is the riverwalk. Do you know what kind of plans do we have on that? I know that at one point there was a drawing up there, and it looked awesome. I think that the idea is phenomenal.

Do we have any plans to actually start that? We do.
We actually have the Corps army Corps of Engineers. That's their floodplain.

All that river area is considered core floodplain. So all the work that's being done down there, if you haven't been down there, the Corps really done an extensive work on both ends of that river. Thornrider park where the rec offices are, they changed the path of the river.

It used to just be this straight shot canal that was really not very fish friendly. But they came in last summer and they put in ripples and they changed the oxbow so it kind of went back into the hillside and they've just done some extensive work. And then if you go down by Lewis Street where the falls are at, the drop structure is at.

They're turning that into a fish ladder so fish can navigate the streams. But as far as the concrete chutes, that's kind of the next plan there is to redo those because they are an environmental disaster. So make that more fish friendly.

But then when they're doing that, that's when we're talking about putting in the riverwalk and putting in some benches and picnic tables and making that a very nice area for people to enjoy. And actually if you go down on the Goose creeks now, a lot of that has pathway. So this will just be an addition to that.

Yeah. And you know, actually I love those pathways. We use them quite frequently even though I don't even live in town.

We'll actually bring our bikes into town and we'll start on South Park and ride all the way down through and past Thornrider, all the way down to North Park. And then there's the bike trails that go through the bushes. The actual little single track bike trails.

Yeah, north end of town. I didn't even realize how extensive the pathways were down there. But you go across the interstate, underneath the interstate there, there's pathways that wind all the way through the Attic area town.

You have the North Park there where those pathways, you have those dirt bike trails that they can ride. It's amazing. So if you want to get out and take a walk, you don't have any excuses because you have lots of places to go.

Well, I personally think that that is a job that has been very well done. Yeah, I do too, and I'm super excited about that. Really good foresight when looking at that and realizing that as we extend our footprint, we need to extend our pathways as well.

Well, if you think about, let's just say the city grew up without doing that and it would be nearly impossible to add it in later. Right. The land would be taken or whatever to have it available now and people use it.

It's used really well. It is. People are always using it.

So if we hadn't done it now, it may not have been an option in the future or it would have been way more complicated or way out of the way. The way that worked out I think is awesome. Well, the nice thing too is now it's ingrained kind of with the community.

So as we extend out, it's like, oh, well, we need to put some pathways out there. So. People have places to walk.

And so it's just part of the culture of Sheridan, which I think is tremendous. Yeah. So tell me this.

Why would somebody move to Sheridan other than somewhere else? Well, I think you know that as well as I do. One, it's just a beautiful place to live, right at the foot of the Big Horns, clean air, clean water, nice schools, which is another thing I think people don't realize is what a great school district we have. And even the other school districts in the region, one, two, and they're they're all exceptional.

And so I look at some of these things that are the horror stories I hear about some education back east and in big cities, and I'm thinking that, wow, we are way lucky that we have the school district that we have. And then you want to go to Sheridan College after you get out of high school. Just we're so I think those amenities and then just the beauty of the area and the great people that live in our community, it's a very friendly, very welcoming place.

I go to big cities and I always have to readjust my know, don't make eye contact, don't say hi, whereas here it's know, yeah, hey, how's it going today? And nice to see. So it's just a great place. Speaking of good people and schools, the combination of the two, there's Whitney Benefits, right? Whitney Benefits, it's a great organization.

There's that and the Perkins Foundation. There's several educational foundations in town that provide money for kids to go to school and go to college. And Sheridan College has great opportunities for grants and those sort of things.

I know the girl that works at the rec office, she's going out to college now, and she's basically, after all the grants and opportunities for money, that she's actually making a little money while she's going to school. Isn't that unbelievable? It is unbelievable. So my wife, she grew up here.

I moved here in 2008, but my wife grew up here and graduated high school out at Bighorn. My understanding is that the majority of local kids who graduate here actually could pretty much go to our local not university, our local college, for free. Right.

The state has what's called the Hathaway program. And the Hathaway program is for kids that are in Wyoming that provide them with funding to continue their education. And between the Hathaway, like I said, and then you have Whitney Benefits, which will provide money for kids to go to school.

And then there's other entities in town that do the same thing as well. And then the college itself has programs available to apply for grants and those sort of things where you can actually go to school out here at Sheridan College for free. It is unbelievable.

I'm always amazed why kids don't take more advantage of that. Because one thing, Sheridan College is a great institution, and if you can get your first two years of education in and it doesn't cost you a dime. That's just amazing.

And plus the mechanics department, the welding. Yeah. If you want a vocational job, you have those available, too.

They have carpentry, they have welding, they have mechanics, vocational jobs that you can come out and as a mechanic, I don't know what the heck those guys are making these days, but it's not pennies. Yeah, it's not pennies. You can make a pretty good job turning a wrench.

I know you can. Same with welding and a lot of actually physical jobs. I think what has happened is a lot of the more, what would you call them, office type jobs or engineering and those types of jobs, they became so popular that kids stopped wanting to be mechanics and welders and carpenters and et cetera, et cetera.

So it automatically forced those wages way up. Right. They were not that well paying previous to now.

Right. But when there's scarcity provides value or an area to increase value. So when people aren't doing it, the wages have to go up.

And now they're really well paying job. I think welders, I think pretty common to make 45 $50 an hour as a welder. Right.

And same with mechanics. I take my car to the shop here a little while ago and I was like, oh my goodness. So it's not a cheap proposition anymore.

Do you think about all of our and then all of our schools, too, the K through twelve? I mean, what's the oldest school in our entire school district? One and two? Probably right now it'd be the high school. And that was done in the I think it was that was in the 80s that that was built 1980s. And so like bighorn bighorn has a new school.

Dayton is fairly new. Yeah, Ranchester. All of our elementaries have been replaced and that's all state funded.

So it didn't cost taxpayers, they didn't have to go out and solicit to a vote to pay for those schools. It was all just state funded. It blows my mind that we can live in a place where there's enough state dollars, a lot of it's from minerals.

Right, right. Enough state dollars in a conservative state nonetheless, to pay for all these things and actually provide value to the public. A lot of times dollars get wasted and the public really doesn't even see it.

No, we've been really fortunate again that we have places like Campbell County that produce coal and minerals again, like Green River and Rock Springs that do a lot of minerals and that sort of thing that provide that income for the rest of the state. So it's a mixed bag. When my daughter played sports, I hated Campbell County because those damn camels.

But then I think they really have done the state of world of good because they brought so much money into their state via minerals. So I take my hat off to those places because they've really eased the tax burden on everybody else. And a lot of that money has been used for good things like building.

So Wyoming in general is just a very fortunate place to be able to live in something else. I wanted to touch on that. I have forgotten about the one set optional tax.

What's that going to these days? So there's two optionals, one's a cap tax, and then one which is capital projects, and the other one is an operational tax. And so every four well, the cap tax, it's a vote and it doesn't always happen. The cap tax happens when that money runs out and you have to re allocate for it.

But basically it's two optional pennies that the voters have voted on that support it, that have always continued to support it that we use in our community for various projects. And we've been very fortunate that the taxpayers have decided to continue those because I think they see there's a lot of good in those and so they're not wasted, they put to good use. But as I said, it's the vote of the people, and the people decide if they want to continue to support it or not.

And you know what's funny is I'm actually not for high taxes, and I vote for that every time. I'll tell you the reason I do is because I can see what it does. You'll see, like at a park, hey, this was provided by your $0.01

optionals tax. I think, you know what, I'm happy to pay for that. Yeah, it stays in our community and so it does a lot of good.

One of the things that the cap tax is going to do here next summer, hopefully, is borrow 1945 or 50 Kendrick Park outdoor pool. Oh, yeah, we're going to be remodeling that next summer. That's a big project works out.

And that's used by literally thousands of children every summer. I think that's awesome because as you know, that thing is it is old. I didn't realize it was that old.

1940s, it's got to be a bear to maintain at this point. It is, and I'm well aware of that because I've taken care of that silly thing for decades now. And it really is on its last leg.

So that it's going to get rebuilt and repurposed and new filtration systems and all that sort of thing. I think it'll be a great benefit to the community in general because like I said, being so close to it, I realize how many people use it during the summer. What a gem it is for those folks, mom and dad, to take their kids down to the pool.

I think over the course of its lifetime, it's literally taught thousands and thousands of children how to so, and you can pick a better location. Oh, isn't it pretty down there? Yeah. And then where else in Wyoming can you swim and then look out and see a bunch of buffalo.

So how much is the project going to cost? We don't know yet. We're going to put it out for bid as packages. And so we're going to see what each one package is going to be, the pool and the bathhouse.

One package is going to be what it would cost to put a water slide in. One package is going to be how much it would cost to put a spray ground in. And so then it's just, well, this is what they cost.

How much money do we have? So I don't know that answer yet. What about cost? Is the fee to go swim there current and is it going to go up? It'll probably go up a little bit, to be honest. But we've always maintained that we don't want to charge $10 for a kid to swim a day.

We've always tried to keep our fees really reasonable just because of that. We want people to use it and enjoy it and mom and dad be able to take the family down there and not break the bank. Well, it's a nice place to hang out and I know that myself and our family, we appreciate that and we used it a lot more and we lived in town and we moved out of town.

Now we haven't unless there's a special event, like a birthday party or something like that. Sure. Or you know what the other thing too is? Sometimes people will actually rent it, right? And they'll have a private event there.

That's turned out to be a big thing for us down there, actually, because in the evenings we'd have evening swim and a lot of times it was not profitable. You didn't break even because it was kind of a dog and not a lot of people would evening swim. And so a few years back, we decided, well, let's just open it up for if people want to have a birthday party or if people want to have a celebration.

And so we moved kind of away from evening swims more to special events, and that's proved to be a good choice. Yeah, I know some people have done that and my wife has gone to some of them things and she really likes it. Yeah, it's nice.

So that was a good choice on our part, I think. And people enjoy that. And I think it's an amenity that where else can you have a birthday party and have the park pool to have your birth celebration? So we try to keep these to about 45 minutes ish okay.

We're not super strict on it, but we are coming up on time. And I want to ask you two more things. One is, yes, I have, but not recently.

So are you okay? So first of all, is there anything you want to say to our listeners that pertain to anything that you want to say. And once again around you being mayor, anything coming up in the city that you feel like people might want to know about, for example? I don't know. Is there anything? And the answer can be no.

I don't know of anything offhand, actually. Well, I'm just winging it here, but like I said, end of this month, the main street is going to be completely open again and all the barriers are going to be taken down. So I would promote people to go downtown and shop downtown and enjoy the new street that they'll have.

We'll have Christmas stroll this year, day after Thanksgiving, which is kind of an annual event for us. But as far as anything of major consequences, not really. I mean, why dot's looking at coffee and Brundage and potentials for that coming up in the near future? We're just kind of business as usual, so no surprises.

That's a good thing. Yeah. I'm excited for the Christmas stroll, too.

We go to it every year. We do too. And take their rides and get some hot cider and it's pretty awesome.

Yeah. And there's always cocoa and hot cider and hot dogs and do some shopping. Yeah.

What I like about it is I just see a lot of people that I don't normally see. That's what I was just going to say. And you know what? I go with my wife and she's like, okay, let's keep moving.

And you're just blabbing the whole time to everybody and it really is a good time. Yeah. Okay, last question.

Are you going to run for mayor again right now? Tentatively, I do plan to run for a mayor again. I'll probably announce in January. But I always say tentatively because you never know what the future holds.

So what, that'd be a year and a half away? Yeah, well, no, I declare probably in January mean the actual election. Correct. Okay, awesome.

Well, I thank you and I feel like you've done a very well job as being a mayor. Thank you. And we really appreciate your work that you've done for us.

No, I appreciate it, Drew. Thanks for having me. You bet.

Yeah. Okay. See you.