Two-thirds of the Sweetwater County Commission seats will change in January after incumbent Commissioners Roy Lloyd and Jeffrey Smith lost their re-election bids during Tuesday’s Republican primary. Commissioner Randy “Doc” Wendling, whose term expires this year, did not run for re-election.
Barring some unlikely victory from a write-in candidate in November, the commission will be joined by Robb Slaughter, Island Richards and Keaton West.
The top three candidates from the Republican primary advance to the general election, where they’ll face an easy path to victory because there are no Democratic candidates.
Lloyd and Smith earned the 4th and 6th highest vote totals, respectively, of the nine candidates on the ballot Tuesday.
Slaughter served as the county’s treasurer for more than three decades before retiring in 2021. With 5,051 total votes — 557 more than the next highest voter-getter — Slaughter easily won a seat as a Republican on the county board Tuesday, even though he had served as a Democrat during his tenure as treasurer.
Richards, who previously served on the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission, earned the next highest vote total with 4,494. Keaton West, with 3,898 votes, earned the third open commission seat. He currently sits on Rock Springs’s city council and has been critical of how the incumbent commissioners have handled negotiations to maintain the county’s ambulance service. In 2021, commissioners abruptly told the city councils of Rock Springs and Green River they’d cut their contract with Sweetwater Medics if the cities didn’t imminently help fund the service.
The shakeup on the county board comes as commissioners have faced scrutiny in recent weeks regarding closed-door talks about the possibility of creating a county administrator position.
During their Tuesday meeting, commissioners downplayed the level of authority they would consider bestowing on a hypothetical administrative position they’ve been discussing.
The county board made plans at the beginning of August to have a public discussion about the possibility of hiring what Commissioner Mary Thoman described as a “CEO” position. On Tuesday’s agenda, the potential position to be discussed was described as “county administrator.” Wendling said it can be problematic when commissioners get involved in “middle management” and a new position could help take on some of those responsibilities.
During their Tuesday meeting, however, other commissioners suggested that, if they were to create a new administrative position, the job would not have nearly as much executive power as some in the public have feared.
“This discussion never started as a CEO discussion or a CFO discussion,” Commissioner Lauren Schoenfeld said, adding that commissioners were merely looking to fill an existing “gap in a few things that the commission needed to be successful, to be transparent, and to effectively communicate with our constituents.”
Schoenfeld said she’s not imagining the position to “be a supervisor or a boss.”
Instead, she said the county might need someone to serve as a type of public information officer, issuing press releases and handling some internal communication among commissioners and department heads.
“I’m not looking at creating a high-level position that’s responsible for running the county,” she said. “That’s our job as a commission.”
Sweetwater County Commissioners, as is the case in nearly all of Wyoming’s 23 counties, handle the administrative responsibilities of county government that aren’t delegated to specific department heads or preempted by the authority of other countywide elected officials — like sheriff or assessor. Only a handful of counties have an appointed position with the title “county administrator.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners agreed that no decision should be finalized until a new commission is seated after November’s election. In the meantime, commissioners made plans to begin informal discussions with the county’s elected officials and department heads regarding the county’s needs that such a position could address.
Last week, the Sweetwater County Republican Party hosted a debate with candidates for the county board.
Both West and Slaughter expressed outright opposition to the idea of creating either a CEO or administrator position.
“I was a part of the county government the last time that was tried, and it was part of the reason that we went from three commissioners to five commissioners,” Slaughter said. “We mucked up what was going on in the county.”
With an appointed CEO trying to mandate how elected officials handled their duties, Slaughter said the situation created “complete chaos.”
“We had people from every department that were upset with what was going on,” he said.
Instead of spending money on an administrator, West said he would prefer to “spend it on the county employees who are keeping that operation functioning.”
“They’re the true backbone of the county’s operation and it’s fiscally more responsible to spend it on something like than continuing to create bigger government,” he said.
At both the GOP debate and at Tuesday’s commission meeting, Lloyd acknowledged that the topic of creating an administrative position had previously been discussed in executive session. He said initial talks were done behind closed doors because the possibility of creating a new position “could affect other people’s positions.”
The Sweetwater County Commission, as do many governing boards in Wyoming, broadly cites the term “personnel” as justification for executive session. The Wyoming Open Meetings Act, which governs the use of executive sessions, outlines 11 specific circumstances in which governing boards may — but are not required to — meet in executive session. In none of those 11 circumstances is the word “personnel” ever used; instead, the law states such human resources issues can be discussed privately only when the matter-at-hand is “the appointment, employment, right to practice or dismissal of a public officer, professional person or employee, or to hear complaints or charges brought against an employee, professional person or officer.”
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