The city of Laramie’s former mayor Scott Mullner returns to the polls this year as he runs for a position on Laramie’s City Council representing Ward 2.
In 2008, Mullner was elected on to the city council where he represented Ward 4. Over his period of serving as a council member, Mullner found himself being nominated to be mayor where he then was elected to the position serving the 2011-13 terms.
Being the former mayor, Mullner is not new to politics, especially here in Laramie. Aside from the high political reign he has had in the community, Mullner is a renowned alumnus to the University of Wyoming where he earned both a Master’s and doctorate degree.
Although feeling hesitant towards running for the position, he found that people from the community greatly insisted that he continue on with his campaign. The more thought he put into it, the more Mullner realized that he could not leave his community without fulfilling and finishing all the projects that were started during his time serving.
“My concern is if I didn’t run, we might not get to the point where we complete those things,” Mullner said.
Mullner has a lot of strong visions if elected on the council this year. One major issue that he worked on in his past couple of years was improving the Wyoming Smart Capital Network. This network was set up by the federal government to fund small businesses in a variety of states. Wyoming, however, did not accept the additional money. Mullner wanted to compensate for the money lost in this issue, thus working with city staff and private partners raising an impressive total amount of $13.2 million for a total of 17 cities throughout Wyoming.
Infrastructure is also a important component to Mullner as he has a lot of knowledge on the subject. If elected to represent on the council, he would like to see the Laramie community gain more wealth as the city itself faces capital downfalls. Because Laramie has no mineral royalties like a lot of other areas in Wyoming, we find that our city gets a majority of its revenue from sales tax and property tax. The money given to places like Gillette for their mineral royalties blows Albany County’s amount out of the water as it receives approximately $150 million a year while we receive around only $78,000. Mullner has even been working on trying to bring in more high paying jobs such as technology jobs in hopes that we can bring more people to the community so that we can develop a more solid and permanent tax base for both sales taxes and real-estate taxes.
“We’ve worked very diligently in the last two years while I’ve been mayor spending around 40 million on infrastructure,” Mullner said. “That’s more than what’s been spent in the last six to eight years.”
Tuesday will prove to be interesting as voters begin to hit the polls electing those who will represent the Laramie community for the upcoming term. Mullner hopes that people of the community see that he wants to follow things through making sure that past campaigns go according to plan.
“I just want people to know that my vision for the city is their vision for the city,” Mullner said. “I want us to be more efficient, more functional and much more pleasant place to live really.”
