Cheyenne Mayoral Candidate: Cut The Mayor’s Salary
Cheyenne Mayoral candidate James Johnson says that if he is elected in 2020, one of his moves will be to try to cut his own salary.
The mayor of Cheyenne currently makes $95,000. But Johnson says he thinks that should be cut to $75,000, and that is he is elected, he will try to do just that. But he says his attempts to save money would not end there.
Johnson would propose a two-percent across the board cut in all departments. Johnson says the recent controversy over incumbent Mayor Marian Orr apparently spending money given to the city by the Bloomberg Philanthropies for flowers, going-away parties for city employees, trips to Hawaii and Cabo San Lucas and other non-essential expenses highlights the fact that the city is making some poor spending decisions.
Mayor Orr says the misspending was the result of an accounting error.
He says he would work hard to cut non-essential spending and to get ethics regulations passed to curb such abuses in the future. Mayor Orr recently said the city would be returning roughly $56,000 of the $100,000 the city received from the Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2018 through the ''Mayor's Challenge" program.
That includes $33,000 that the city has not spent, as well as $23,000 that the Bloomberg organization says was misspent under the terms of the award. The mayor has blamed the questionable expenditures on an accounting error.
Johnson, in an interview on the ''Weekend In Wyoming'' program on KGAB this past weekend, said he specifically wanted to run for mayor to correct some of the mistakes Orr has allegedly made during her term in office.
You can hear the entire interview with Johnson in the video above.