The Mayor’s Minute from Mayor Patrick Collins – Feb. 20, 2026

Published on February 20, 2026

The Wyoming Association of Municipalities’ winter conference ended with the top five elected officials spending time talking about their positions and answering questions from municipal leaders from around the state. Wyoming is blessed to have access to our elected leaders that you just don’t see in most states in our country. It is fun to hear them answer questions from the perspective of their elected positions.

Judy and I spent our Valentine’s Day with 700 people who got together to support the Cheyenne Frontier Days Volunteer Crisis Fund Dinner. Frontier Days has thousands of volunteers and each year some of them face a crisis. The VCF is volunteers taking care of volunteers in their time of need. I spoke with a friend who is a CFD volunteer who fought breast cancer. The VCF helped her when she really needed it. So much money was raised during the evening, ensuring the next time a volunteer or their family is in need, the resources to help will be there. Thanks to everyone who made the evening happen.

President’s Day seems to be the day each year the fire union gives me the letter that officially starts the labor negotiations with the City. We have 10 days to schedule the first official meeting and a month to conclude negotiations. Over the past five years both sides have worked hard to create a level of trust that has allowed our talks to be positive. Hoping this year’s talks are productive.

I have spent some time at the Capitol meeting with legislators and testifying during committee meetings. Senate File 125 is a bill that deals with the Wyoming Business Council and efforts to pause their efforts while the future of economic development in Wyoming would be discussed this summer. I testified that the WBC has been an essential partner in developing the North Range Business Park where today we have Walmart’s distribution center, the NCAR supercomputer, and our first Microsoft campus. I don’t know what the Legislature will decide, but our communities need a statewide agency to help provide necessary funding for infrastructure that will support our economic development efforts.

I also went to testify on House Bill 178. This bill would prevent the City from collecting union dues from our firefighters. We live in a right to work state where belonging to a union is voluntary. If our Cheyenne firefighters voluntarily ask the City to collect their dues and send them to the union, I want to honor their request. We have firefighters who choose not to belong to the union, and we also honor their request to not collect dues. Frankly, I don’t understand why the Legislature wants to be involved in this issue. Unfortunately, the House Education Committee voted to move the bill to the full Legislature.

Senate File 116 deals with the ability of a city to collect a fee to deal with stormwater maintenance. Cheyenne passed an ordinance to do just that in December of 2024. This new bill would require a stormwater fee to be approved by a vote of the people before it can be implemented. The Judiciary Committee voted 5-0 to make the vote a requirement. I was hoping the Legislature would not pass the bill and would instead work on the issue during the summer interim, which would give all parties time to work out differences. Cheyenne was built on two creeks and our flood risks are high. From my perspective, stormwater infrastructure is public safety infrastructure. We will continue to work with the Legislature to find a way to fund these public safety measures.

Annexing the last county pockets in the city took another step forward during the Public Services Committee meeting this week. We define these county pockets as unincorporated county property that is 100% surrounded by the city. In 2022, City Council made it a goal to annex these properties to remove potential jurisdictional challenges to public safety responses. These latest annexations have been complicated with one pocket being an urban farm. I have been working with staff to put a definition of an urban farm into our development codes to ensure they will be able to operate as a farm as long as they want. We finally got a list of questions from the farm addressing their concerns. Staff are collaborating on the answers, and we look forward to assuring the farm that we want them to succeed. The annexations are scheduled to be completed on March 9.

It seems like each week I spend some time with a data center or a company that wants to be in Cheyenne. The investment and scope of these projects are unbelievable. I want to assure you that we understand the potential challenges data centers may present and I want to share how we are handling them. First, water. Historically data centers have used a lot of water for cooling. In Cheyenne, we know water is a precious commodity. In my discussions with data centers we let them know our concern for water usage and our insistence that they use modern technology to reduce water consumption. Closed loop systems reduce cooling water usage to almost zero once the data center is in operation. In Cheyenne, all our data centers combined consume just 1.2% of our entire water usage. Second, Cheyenne is blessed to have a utility like Black Hills Energy that has a tariff, or a rule for electricity purchases, for data centers that requires the data center to pay 100% of the cost for electric infrastructure for their operation. In many parts of our country, data center development has caused residential and small business electricity bills to skyrocket. That can’t happen here because of the way BHE has structured their data center program. We are blessed that companies are investing in Cheyenne and creating quality jobs for our residents. We will continue to make sure this development is positive for Cheyenne and Wyoming.

Admiral Rich Correll is the Commander United States Strategic Command at Offutt AFB in Nebraska. He oversees our nation’s nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines – a huge responsibility. He was in town this week and invited Global Strike civic leaders to dinner. USSTRATCOM commanders rotate between the Air Force and Navy. Admiral Correll made his career in submarines before coming to command in Nebraska. Johnny Galbert was the commander at F.E. Warren just a couple of years ago and he joined us as part of Admiral Correll’s staff. It was so good to catch up with him. Every time I get a chance to spend time with our military leaders, I come away so impressed with their expertise and dedication. Colonel Holmes and Chief Mosely, our local leadership team at F.E. Warren, were amazing hosts as usual.

Judy and I are watching the Winter Olympics as I write. Finally having some snow on the ground makes it feel like winter for the first time in a while.  Praying for more moisture and successes for our American athletes. Go, USA!