The Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce holds a monthly luncheon, and I was honored to be the speaker for February. I shared some of our past successes and our goals for the upcoming year. I believe our successes have come from the great partnerships of the folks that were in the room that day at the Met. Cheyenne is blessed to have so many groups and individuals that work to make Cheyenne successful. I am proud to be working with them.
Affordable housing is a huge community need. Last year I met with the YMCA to talk about how we can work together, and they introduced an idea that is working in Colorado. A Company named Celadon leverages building affordable housing to build community recreation facilities. We met this week, and I am excited to see where this relationship takes us.
When a company does construction work for the city, a small amount is withheld until after the project is completely finalized. In some of the worst cases, money is held for too many months. I have met with a company that currently has $17,000 being held for over 530 days now. I met with staff to see what we can do to minimize the financial impact to these small local businesses. The retainage helps ensure the public dollars are protected in seeing these projects to completion.
One of the things that I believe will help make our downtown more successful is having people living and staying in the area. Just north of the Rib and Chop House is an open area that has been planned to be a high-end hotel. 120 rooms of visitors will support the area shops, restaurants, and bars. It was exciting to meet with the group that is looking to build the hotel. I appreciate their interest and can’t wait to see the impact.
During the hotel conversation, we shared the idea of an additional hotel in the downtown hole area. One idea that keeps coming up is the Hynds may not be viable for redevelopment. The way the building was constructed does not lend itself for modern HVAC, elevators, and the other modern amenities. The last couple of developers have asked about the idea of tearing the Hynds down and redeveloping the complete site. The Hynds has been empty since the mid 1980’s and Mary’s Bakeshop burned down in 2003. My goal is to see both sites redeveloped in this term. A community discussion on the Hynds will need to be held very soon.
Fire Chief Kopper has been keeping me in the loop on the upcoming construction of our three new fire stations. We are planning to break ground on the first station in June, with the next ones coming in 30-day increments. We are working on finalizing the property selection, finishing the construction documents, and getting excited to see our firefighters in new digs.
I served for a few years on the Editorial Board of the newspaper. I loved the experience, and the folks I served with. I have coffee with one of them, Jim Weaver, on a regular basis. He was a city manager in a past life, and it is fun to discuss what’s happening in our community.
One of my goals since taking office is to make it easier for our residents and businesses to do business within the city online. Buying a business license should not require a trip to the city. Improving our software will help in that regard and make our departments more productive. Great news, our staff has been working for a year to find a software solution and they believe they have found it. We are now doing our due diligence to make sure it is a good fit. I am so excited to begin this process and am so proud of our staff that has worked so hard to get us to this point.
I have spoken about my admiration for the volunteer spirit in our community. I met with representatives of the noon Rotary club to discuss their desire to sponsor another legacy project that benefits Cheyenne and Laramie County. We shared some opportunities that would help the city and I thanked them again for all they do.
This week has been hard on my waistline. Too many lunches and dinners. One that was very exciting was lunch with Summit Capital Management. They recently invested in property and are breaking ground on 220 multi-family units this spring. They are so bullish on Cheyenne’s future that they pledged to build 1,000 units by the end of the decade. This is an amazing commitment and will go a long way to meeting our housing needs. Amazing!
Our community discussion on race continued this week. I spoke about it at the chamber luncheon, participated in an interview with military members, and met with Dr. James Peebles, Ph.D from Sankofa to discuss the issue of race. Dr. Peebles has spent decades working race issues, and I so appreciated him taking time to share his thoughts. It will take all of us working together to make a difference. Jill and James were wonderful, and I want to make our talks happen more often.
I love baseball and spent dinner with Greg Earl and David Romsa discussing the idea of bringing a minor league baseball team to Cheyenne. Cheyenne has a great baseball heritage and they would like to invest in that heritage. We have many hurdles in between today and getting a team to locate here, but they are willing to do the work and I wish them success.
VFW 1881 is a place where veterans of foreign wars get together to share company and experiences. Our city engineer Tom Cobb and I met with the commander, Rob Courtier, to discuss how we can work together on issues in the area: potholes on 7th Street, drainage issues, parking for the girls’ softball fields, and emergency access to the neighborhood. I enjoyed the visit and hearing some of their war stories. Veteran’s organizations are especially important in Cheyenne where so many of our residents have served our country.
The Lincoln Theater hosted Josh Turner on Thursday night. When a show comes to Cheyenne, it requires figuring out how to manage tour busses and trailers in the downtown area. This has proved to be a harder problem than I would have ever thought. We got Josh’s bus parked and the show loaded in. I have reached out to other cities to see how they handle this issue and hope to have it solved very soon. It is exciting to have live music in our city on a regular basis.
We ended the week working on the homeless issue. I learned a few lessons on the timing required to invest ARPA dollars on this issue and am excited to work on this goal set by the city council.
If you have a question for me, send it to media@cheyennecity.org. I’ll continue to answer them in my following Mayor’s Minute column.
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