The Casper City Council convened a special meeting on December 9, 2025, to address critical public safety strategies, opioid fund allocation, new economic development tools, and significant utility rate increases. Key topics included a follow-up on the "Peace in Our Cities" delegation trip to Edmonton, Canada; a review of opioid settlement fund allocations by a task force; the proposal to adopt Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs) for economic recruitment; and the presentation of proposed rate hikes for water, sewer, and solid waste to address deferred maintenance.
Good, how are you? Yes, but there's time. Still a little bit. I was gonna say like engineering office. Yeah. Hello, hello. You can hear us okay, both of you. Yep, just fine on my end. All right, so we've got a pretty long meeting tonight with an executive session. So let's go ahead and get started. Um meeting follow-up, do Lima, do you have anything? Mayor, nope, I do not. Council have anything from the last meeting they'd like to talk about. Bring it up. Okay. Uh Peace in Our Cities recap. Thank you, Mayor. Peace in Our Cities was a program that was initially brought to us in February of this year by former counselor Jayela Sutherland following uh what was a pretty troubling period of time here in Casper where we suffered the tragic loss of several of our youth to violence. Um Ms. Sutherland introduced Peace in Our Cities as a global network that supports cities in reducing violence by up to 50%. Uh the network emphasizes a balance between law enforcement and prevention and tailor support to individual community needs. Counselors at that time expressed broad support for joining the initiative, highlighting the importance of strategic coordination, access to external resources and the city's leadership role. So on March 4th of 2025, you all passed a resolution to join Peace in Our Cities and their initiative with the goal to gain access to that expert knowledge, best practices, and direct um collaboration with cities that are facing similar challenges to what Casper was facing in order to foster a safer, healthier, and more connected community for our residents. And then fast forward in August, uh Peace in Our Cities actually coordinated a trip for a Casper delegation to Edmonton, Canada, where they would learn uh what Edmonton has done to combat violence and related issues in their community. And so this work session is a follow-up to that trip so that council can hear from the delegation what they learned and what their recommendations are for moving forward uh to a more peaceful city. So if it pleases the council, I would like to turn the time over to that group to present details. Awesome. Come on up. Okay. Hi everyone. It's good to see you. Um I will be super quick because you just heard almost exactly what I was gonna say. So thanks, that was awesome. Um it's really good to see all of you. I um I'm really just kind of gonna do a little bit more ground, laying the groundwork, and then you'll hear from others who were present on the city exchange. Um so maybe the only thing that I'll add to what you've just heard is that um we we did we had these um really excruciating events with violence against youth um and among youth, and so uh there was a lot of consensus around doing something. We were talking a lot about doing something, and so this is kind of a step in the direction of having an opportunity to meet with other um communities and learn from particularly Edmonton about what they've done in their community to kind of coalesce around a unified strategy to reduce violence. And so we went to Edmonton and you'll hear um what it was that we learned from them, which was quite a lot. Um so Peace in our cities isn't intended to be a program itself, it's intended to be a space that offers support, um, that offers access to information to expertise um and that can draw um you know create space for those relationships and that networking to happen. Um and so that this city exchange is an example of that. Um and I just want to say that we actually have really wonderful work that's already happening here in Casper. So this was never intended to say nothing is happening. It was intended to be able to build off of the good work that's already happening and to um importantly offer some ideas about a strategic approach that kind of unites the work that's happening and maybe offers some ideas about what could be added on to those efforts. So that's what you'll hear from others who are going to speak today. So we do have a pretty report from the exchange. Uh, to be able to learn more and go more in depth into anything. Um but in terms of peace in our cities, Casper, the trust, um, and the health department are all members, and so Peace in Our Cities continues to be a container for the community to access to learn to ask questions from in terms of being able to provide further guidance or information that's helpful to the work as we move forward. So I will stop and let you speak. Sorry. Okay, okay.