Ex-council member Johnson: Why would anyone want to be mayor of the Capital City? Not me.

BY RICHARD JOHNSON

How many of you go into work every morning knowing that the next 15 hours requires you to provide horrible customers with exemplary service? 

How many of you have a job where you constantly get crapped on by your colleagues and are hated by employees in

Cheyenne’s living mayors gather for the city’s 150th birthday.

between 10 meetings of the day, a luncheon and a dinner soiree where you're seated next to lying snakes and packs of wolves? 

Oh yeah, and how many of you have worked 75 days straight without even getting one of them off? 

Have you ever been a guest speaker for an event, yet you know nothing about the topic, or worse, on a topic you don’t support? 

Have you gone without home-cooked meal for over a month and looked like hell because you’ve been on the meat-and-cheese food tray diet?

If this sounds a lot like your job, it's highly likely that you are the mayor of Cheyenne. It’s one of the most thankless jobs with the lame perk of having your name stickered on every public building entrance.

Most people think being mayor is kissing hands and shaking babies. It's hardly that simple. 

In order to prevent hurt feelings, you have to say “yes" to everything. 

You’re the head of the executive branch of city government, but what are you supposed to execute? The council is supposed to provide the vision, but members have other jobs, and being a council person is a part-time gig. Hell, one of them has missed nearly 55 percent of meetings in his first year, so what do you expect? 

You could ask the public, but they are either starstruck by the title or just bitch to you without providing actual solutions to their problems. This explains why so many get this job running on lowest common denominator topics. 

Then you have meetings, meetings, meetings and then a meeting to schedule another meeting. All a mayor does is meet, and the same talking heads spew what they think you want to hear and then scramble when you say you’ll get back to them. I guess that means we'll have another meeting. 

Heaven forbid any more mayor's councils are added to the list. Seems there is a council for everything these days, including your pathetic meat-and-cheese diet.

Let’s not forget that the mayor must formulate and present a budget that meets the needs of the city and every department that needs more of this and that. There is always a shortage of money. Tax projections are lower than expected, building permits are down, good thing the police department is self-sustaining with all the citations they issue. 

Firefighter union negotiations will mean another 2-3 percent raise to avoid arbitration, which means the Police Protective Association will feel slighted and they’ll need a 2-3 percent raise, which means the Cheyenne Public Employees Association will feel slighted and they'll need a 2-3 percent raise. The bell curve evaluation came back again that all the staff is great, so everyone gets raises. 

Did I forget to mention the mayor has to deal with a fire truck smashing into the station, a garbage truck flipped into a house, some sanitation workers getting into a knife fight in the parking lot, an employee's wife emailing them about her husband having sex with a coworker, the former city attorney suing the city, a dude who got screwed over by the police when he was a teenager suing the city, complaints about the same pothole for the ninth time this week and a snowplow that just pushed snow back onto someone’s sidewalk? 

If that seemed like a run-on sentence, it was. This job is just one run-on sentence. No breaks for punctuation.

Heaven forbid there is a real natural disaster during a mayor's term, like the tornado of ’79 or flood of ’85. One would need to have outstanding leadership qualities to pull through that. (I’d probably have a heart attack due to the stress.)

What about me running for mayor? I've asked around and it was upsetting to me that all my picks for city attorney, engineer, clerk, public works director, treasurer, police chief, fire chief, events director and judge said they would all turn me down if I was elected. No one wants those jobs or the insane burdens that go with them. 

It’s kind of hard to move forward when the people you really want to appoint say "no" because they like where they are in their lives and don't want added headaches. If they’ve turned you down, why have the confidence you’ll do any better? They are all smarter than you. Maybe you should take their advice once more and not do it either.

I hope this article shows that being the mayor sucks. You never win. You just end up hating yourself and drinking yourself to sleep. I’ve had over 40 people in the last year offer me money to pay my entry fee to run for mayor. I gotta wonder: Are these people even my friends? 

As I’ve stated before, my friends and family don’t deserve to be ridiculed and publicly shamed for political gain of an opponent. I’m still too immature to be an effective manager of 600 people. Remember the alligator? Do you really want a person who says he'd run for mayor on a platform of never having Boogie Machine play in Cheyenne again? 

Give it a couple years or a decade. I’m not going anywhere. For the time being, I’m happy with my life and my career. 

Running for mayor would be a distraction I don’t need. I’m tossing around the Ward 3 seat since City Council fits with my work schedule. We'll see how I feel in May.

            Richard Johnson is a former City Council member from east Cheyenne.