About Brett

Issues

• Affordability and quality of both owner-occupied and rental housing (negatively impacted by recent City Council actions) and tenants' rights;
  
• Making local government open, accessible, friendly, helpful, ethical, efficient, and responsive to the public;
• Maintenance and development of infrastructure, including streets, long neglected water and sewer facilities and paving and flood control in West Laramie;
• Solving parking problems downtown and near the UW campus;
  
• Provision of quality, affordable city services and facilities, including trash collection, recycling, water, sewer, policing, animal control, the Laramie Recreation Center and Ice & Event Center,snow removal, parking enforcement, and street maintenance;
• Economic diversity and business development, and restraint from unnecessary regulation which hinders them;
• Creation of high quality, permanent, well paid jobs which allow residents to afford high quality of life despite inflationary pressures from outside Laramie;
• Other quality of life issues, including retail diversity, planning, and zoning;
• Decreased funding from the state due to reduced mineral royalties;
• "Town vs. Gown" concerns, including the lack of PILT (payments in lieu of taxes) by the tax-exempt University, potential closure of streets due to University expansion, failure to patronize local businesses and/or competition with them by the University;
• Open spaces and bicycle friendliness;
• Avoidance of the importation of toxic culture to local law enforcement (to ensure that Laramie's police never exhibit the hostility to the public or systemic racism that urban police departments in other cities do);
  
• Broadband and cell service availability; and
  
• Accessibility, especially to the aging portion of Laramie's population.
  

Policy Positions

• Local government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Most Laramie residents who have had to deal with local government have encountered unexpected and unnecessary obstacles, needless delays, arbitrary decision making by unelected bureaucrats, and a disdainful attitude on the part of all but a few city officials. City Council must ensure that Laramie remains a democracy, not a bureaucracy. It must cut red tape, not create it.
  
• In Laramie's "council and city manager" form of government, which works well only for very small cities, not a single person who is elected by the public works full time in City Hall. The City Council - the public's only input into the workings of city government - serves in an oversight role as a Board of Directors. Unfortunately, the current Council has often failed in this role, leading to debacles such as the recent near loss of service at our local airport due to malfeasance on the part of the Airport Board.
  
• Too often, our current City Council hastily "rubber stamps" items brought before it, following blindly the recommendations of City staff without performing independent research. Members of Council are frequently overwhelmed by long agendas and meetings that stretch late into the night, and pass items simply to get them off their plate. As a result, many items are railroaded through - sometimes being approved as part of its fast tracked "consent agenda" - without adequate consideration or public comment. As Laramie grows, it will become ever more important for Council to avoid this.
• Decisions by Council must be evidence-based. Actions based on fads, anecdotes, and unproven assertions have proven to be harmful to Laramie's quality of life and must be avoided. 
• City employees who attempt to manipulate City Council decisions by withholding relevant information or providing false information to Council should be immediately disciplined and/or dismissed.
• City staff has flouted state statute by claiming that many purchases of commodity goods and services are contracts for "professional services" when they should, by law, go out for bid. As a result, it frequently awards no-bid contracts, overpays for goods and services, and bypasses worthy local suppliers. The City Council should direct staff, by ordinance, to discontinue this practice.
• The City of Laramie has also attempted, on multiple occasions, to override or modify state laws, imposing its own bureaucratic regimes upon local residents and businesses. As the Wyoming Supreme Court has ruled many times in the past, this is not legal except under very specific circumstances. If the City finds generally applicable state laws to be inadequate, it should petition the Wyoming Legislature to change state statutes rather than engaging in attempts to bypass them - a practice that has, in the past, resulted in expensive lawsuits that waste taxpayer money.
  
• City Council should give priority to the needs and concerns of the general public and maintain a healthy skepticism about the intentions and motivations of interest groups, lobbying groups, out-of-town "consultants," and outside corporations. In discussions of all issues, the public should get the first and the last word, and should be invited to speak before Council begins to deliberate, not after. If meetings are held electronically (e.g. via Zoom), members of the public should be given the same ability and time to present information as city bureaucrats and should be fully visible on video.
• Council should refrain from signing a "work for hire" contract with any organization which is bound by law to serve the interests of its members rather than those of the general public.
  
• The University of Wyoming is an absolutely invaluable asset to our community. However, one important role of Laramie's City Council is to "push back" against the institutionally selfish ambitions of the University when they go too far and threaten to harm Laramie's quality of life or tax base. UW can destroy local businesses by competing unfairly with them; incur large expenses for the City while failing to pay commensurate taxes; and impact our quality of life by creating congestion, parking issues, noise, pollution, and other nuisances. Closure of arterial streets which pass through or near the UW campus would severely impact public safety. Because the employment and careers of UW employees may be directly impacted if they serve on Council and support citizens' interests rather than voting in accordance with the University administration's wishes, they are likely to have irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Voters should therefore think twice before electing them to serve on Council.
  
• Council must listen carefully to the actual residents and small businesses of downtown Laramie - not to lobbying groups which purport to represent them but in fact represent a few monied interests as well as their own selfish interests. It must work to add, not destroy, downtown parking and not overburden downtown businesses with arbitrary and needless regulations. The City must keep downtown Laramie safe and hospitable by taking measures to fight overserving of alcohol and discourage vandalism and other problems to which this practice has proven to lead.
  
• City government must be fully transparent and readily accessible. Now that Laramie's local newspaper has been bought by an out-of-state corporation and is a mere shadow of its former self - with only one and a half reporters, large quantities of "filler" (articles from out of town papers), and only occasional coverage of Council activities - Council itself should publish synopses of its meetings and notify the public well in advance and in clear, simple language of the items it is considering and the ways in which they will affect the public. It should be active on social media, publish blogs and articles, and actively notify affected parties of its actions whenever possible.
• Proposed changes that can dramatically affect quality of life or the character of neighborhoods - such as changes to zoning regulations - should be noticed via mail to all affected residents and property owners. City ordinances should require all boards, commissions, and joint powers boards to do likewise.
  
• Reasonable requests for public records should, as per state law, be honored immediately without unnecessary red tape or expense.
• Laramie has outgrown its current form of city government. Currently, Laramie's Mayor is not elected by the public but rather selected by the Council from among its members. As a result, not a single person who works full time in City Hall is directly accountable to citizens! This must change. Laramie should move (as Cheyenne has) to a form of government with a full time Mayor, elected directly by the public, as its CEO. Council should have an independent legislative staff, similar to the state's Legislative Service Office (LSO), to do research for it and provide drafts and unbiased evaluations of proposed ordinances.
• City Council is a nonpartisan body and should remain so. Partisan polarization sets neighbor against neighbor precisely when all community members must work together to make our city a better place. Members of Council have a duty to advocate what is best for our city and its residents, rather than imposing agendas dictated from afar by organizations which do not and cannot consider our unique needs and concerns. Members of all of Wyoming's major and minor political parties, as well as independents, have supported Brett's candidacy. If elected, Brett will be 100% dedicated to serving our city's best interests, not outside interests.
  

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