Cheyenne planning multi-pronged effort for sixth-penny public education effort

Feb. 16--CHEYENNE -- With only a month to go before early voting begins countywide on the next slate of sixth-penny sales tax projects, the city of Cheyenne is planning to use old and new media alike to educate the public.

The city has 10 projects on the next sixth-penny list, which are intermingled with 34 other projects submitted by Albin, Burns, Pine Bluffs and the Laramie County Commission. Most of those projects are bundled together in a series of five propositions, which voters will approve or reject individually.

Four other large-scale projects will stand alone on the ballot, with each receiving its own proposition. These include an $18 million renovation of the Laramie County Courthouse, including funds to relocate Cheyenne's Municipal Court, as well as $15 million to extend Christensen Road over the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, connecting the northern and southern sections of east Cheyenne.

While the city, county and rural communities cannot legally advocate for any of their projects, it's nonetheless important for voters to know what they're getting and why these projects were selected by their respective communities. And that's the job all five entities will have in the coming months, with the formal election set for May 2.

"We can't tell them to go to the polls, and we can't tell them how to vote," Cheyenne Mayor Marian Orr said Wednesday. "But we can certainly provide educational information. In fact, it's our duty to provide information to the voters, to the end we need to be good fiscal stewards and make sure the money we do raise is spent carefully."

To that end, Orr said the city is planning on a multi-pronged approach to informing voters in what is likely to be a very tight timeframe. The first idea, she said, is to do a traditional mailer campaign using an informational pamphlet being drawn up by the city's project information officer, Scott Smith.

"We'll do a pamphlet to include all the projects (from the city, county and outlying towns), and we have that almost done," Smith said. "The idea is we'll get those printed locally and get them mailed out to all registered voters in the county around the 15th or 16th of March."

Smith said the city has seen success in the past with direct mail campaigns on the fifth penny, a separate one percent sales tax county residents vote on every four years, which goes mainly toward street maintenance. The last fifth-penny tax was approved in November 2014.

Alongside that effort, Orr and Smith said they plan to work with the county and rural towns to hold three open house meetings, which will aim to give voters a one-on-one opportunity to review the projects on the sixth-penny list and ask questions of officials and advocates.

While those open houses are still more than a month away, Orr said she envisions setting up multiple kiosks -- one for each of the nine propositions on the ballot -- with voters able to go between them to peruse design documents and proposed funding levels.

Finally, Orr plans to launch an informational campaign over social media, mirroring, in part, her own campaign for office last year. In addition to being low-cost, Orr said social media has the added benefit of being a way to quickly produce and publish videos, testimonials and other informational pieces and get them out to a large audience.

"We could feature not only the department heads, but people in the community whom the projects will really impact," Orr said. "Like the Christensen overpass -- that will provide better response times for our first-responders, so I can see including fire and police personnel in that particular video."

Orr said social media could also give the city a chance to demonstrate some past sixth-penny success stories, such as the Laramie County Library or the ongoing expansion of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, to show people what is possible through the sixth-penny ballot.

"It's done so much good for the community, but we simply don't have the tax base to take care of these needs without the sixth penny," Orr said. "So it's an extremely critical tax."

Orr said social media could also make it easier to quickly dispel any confusion or misconceptions voters may have developed if they haven't been closely following the sixth-penny process. For example, the $18 million proposal to expand the Laramie County Courthouse now differs considerably from what the city and county were discussing just a few weeks ago, and it will be important for voters to know how and why the project has evolved into what it is -- and also what it isn't.

Orr said it will also be important to clarify the timeline of some projects on the list. While it will take several years for all of the sales tax money to be collected for approved sixth-penny projects, Orr said many of those projects can be started sooner by borrowing the money and then using the sixth penny to pay it back.

At the same time, some projects -- such as a future park in east Cheyenne, which is on this ballot in the form of $3.2 million to buy the land -- will not happen overnight, or even in the next decade. In those cases, Orr said it's just as important that voters know when they're being asked to make a long-term investment and how it may unfold in the future.

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