I currently live in Gillette Wyoming. I have lived here since 2008. I grew up in Thermopolis and have lived in Wyoming the majority of my life.

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I have been an educator in Wyoming the past 20 years. Please consider sending a teacher to Cheyenne to represent our students and public servants. I"m an avid user of our public lands and desperately want to protect them for posterity's sake. Consider sending someone who is out there on the prairies, rivers or mountains every chance he gets.

Retaining and recruiting great state employees is one of the biggest challenges I believe Wyoming state government faces today. Recently there has been such an emphasis on cutting taxes and cutting services. It truly feels like an organized effort to defund Wyoming. Things that attract great businesses to a state are much more than just a low tax rate. People are looking for other things such as bike paths, great parks, fantastic roads, beautiful communities, airports and superior school systems before they will relocate their business to our state.

I would advance the publications and research of Stephen Brill. He authored A Bitter Pill and a great novel Tailspin. He details how this industry has built moats around its empire to protect it. Should insurance companies and monopolized healthcare distributors be labeled as nonprofits? Should we look at setting a cap for CEO pay at these businesses if they are labeled as a nonprofit? Transparency in pricing would be fantastic? Being able to compare four or five x-ray places in a town and one site for research would surely help. I too am tired of walking in for service and being told that they won’t file with my insurance company or that if I pay with cash, it’ll be cheaper than filing it through my insurance company.

I oppose the giving away of our public lands. Our public lands are too often given away to adjacent landowners when county roads are abandoned. In the name of reducing County spending, think gravel and grading, roads are abandoned. By law, public land users can only reach most public lands via a road. There is already a pretty decent system for reviewing the sale and exchange of state public lands. Sometimes these exchanges do benefit the general public. Finding a better way to inform people, transparency, is paramount, as it takes a lot of research and many clicks to find what you are looking for on government sites. Getting access to over 2.5 million landlocked acres is essential to improving quality of life for our residents and children.

I am a family of four, single family home on a half acre lot and the amount I pay in my property tax and the return I get is absolutely amazing. The numbers I read estimate that for every one dollar I spend on property taxes, due to the severance tax on minerals in the state, I get $13 in return services. Our property taxes are the lowest of any of our neighboring states. I honestly don’t see what everybody is complaining about. Do these people absolutely not want a fire department? Do they want to have the worst education system in the whole United States? Do they want our state highways to fall apart so they can just buy new tires and shocks? I appreciate all the services I get in this state and in my community and if elected I will work to keep those dedicated individuals paid fairly and competitively.

This question seems to be loaded towards should we keep the Wyoming Business Council? I would say yes. Attracting big companies to our state and making our state enticing in order to relocate a company takes time, energy and focus. Some legislators were furious when they were told that the Wyoming business council had a 50% success rate. If my success rate at fishing was catching a fish, every other cast, I would be ecstatic. If every other day of fishing was a good one I would still be very, very pleased. Should economic development teams be held accountable and have to report their successes and failures, yes. But again, cutting an entire organization without offering up a valid solution is irresponsible.

This campaign season I plan to collect no money from any donors. I’m just using the free app Facebook to send out my message. I plan to write to every publication that sends me a request for information. And finally, I will talk to anybody who wants to visit with me, answer any email or return a phone call because by golly’ we live in Wyoming and we should know our neighbors better. Money corrupts. It also sickens me that outside political action committees can just throw out half truths on a whim and I’m saddened by how well that negativity works and influences voters. The best way to fix this issue is to strengthen libel and slander laws.