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About the City by Councilman Kingery I have just completed my third year on the City Council and have one year to go. I have enjoyed it very much and hope you will consider running for City Council later this year to replace me next January. If you believe in honesty and integrity, have an open mind and believe all sides of a situation should be considered before making an important decision, then a City Council position is the place for you! It isn't easy, it takes a lot of time, and it won't make people like you more, but you will know you are doing a service for the people of this great community! If honest people don't do the job of making good decisions and looking out for what is best for the community, then other people will be having decisions made that may be good for them, but not necessarily good for the community. The City of Douglas has had another great year economically which makes the City Council job a lot easier. When I started serving on the City Council back in 2011 we had a real shortage of money to work with to accomplish what the City needed to do. We were looking at a problem of municipal waste disposal and had no funds to work with. We now have made plans to start shipping our municipal waste to Casper and will be building a transfer station during 2014 to make this possible. We were looking at replacing our spring house to protect our spring that supplies a large part of our city water. Plans have been made and I still hope this will be accomplished before I leave the Council. Both projects now have money available to do them and are important for our community. We have been able to pay off long term debts for the City as well as complete street, sewer and water upgrades that have been needing to be done. While there is still much to do, we are continuing work on those projects and hopefully can have them in much better shape before the present "boom" cycle ends. The City has a new web site that should be adequate for a long time into the future; we are finishing up some long-range planning that will help us move into the future and, wisely handle growth and development that will come to our community. The City, County and School District are working together to determine the feasibility of a new Recreation Center for the community. The study will help determine what might be feasible, how much it would cost to build, how much it would cost to operate and how the community would choose to pay for a new recreation center if it so desires. Another project being studied is a possible joint law enforcement dispatch center for the City of Douglas, the Town of Glenrock and the Converse County. Both of these projects are being studied so that we can try to make intelligent decisions for the future of our community. As always there are people on both sides of the issues. It is not easy to make good decisions that involve the future of our communities. It costs to be informed, but it costs ---PAGE BREAK--- a lot more to be uninformed! Nothing is free and you cannot prepare for the future by refusing to look at possibilities. We have our problems and we have moved forward with some of them. We have had lots of growth in our community and that has put a load of work on the Planning Department. Decisions have been made that some people liked and others were not happy about. Hopefully, decisions were made that are good for the best interest of the community and the people who live here. Our Police Department has had some struggles for several years, and right now things are going very well. We believe decisions made recently will take us into a long future of success for the Police Department. Both our employees within our Police Department and our community members need and deserve a well operating Police Department. I know from my three years on the Council that Council members and City staff all want things to work well, and want our city government to be the best we can make it. We are committed to correcting things that are not right and planning ahead so that things do not "get wrong". We have had some good "feedback" from the public over the years and that is very important to us. We need your feedback! We cannot promise that we will do "what you want" because not everyone wants the same things. We have to weigh all the sides and try to make decisions that we sincerely believe are best for the community as a whole. Do we make mistakes? YES! The only people that don't make mistakes are liars and those that don't do anything! (That is my opinion!) We will do our best to learn from our mistakes and correct them as soon as we can. So keep your feedback coming and consider running for City Council. If it isn't the "thing" for you, think about who should run and encourage them to be ready when the time comes. This is a government that we can make work for us and within which you can make a difference with your influence. Thank you for supporting your government.