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Merav Ben-David, a retired wildlife ecologist, said she’ll bring a scientist’s eye to decision-making if elected to the Albany County Commission.
Ben-David is one of four Democrats competing for her party’s two available nominations this primary election cycle. The party’s two nominees will advance to the general election where they will face two Republicans in a race that will decide the partisan balance of county leadership.
Amid that crowded field, Ben-David argues her career as a researcher gives her a unique focus. She said her lifelong professional and personal interest in the effects of climate change has shaped how she views the world and her role within it.
“Everything that I do personally and try to implement in the community comes from the fact that we are heading headfirst into a disaster, an ecological climatic disaster, and we are not preparing for it,” Ben-David said. “My goal is to help my community.”
Ben-David is no stranger to the campaign trail, though the commission seat she now seeks would be her first elected role.
In 2020, Ben-David was the Democratic nominee for one of Wyoming’s U.S. Senate seats. She ran against and lost to Cynthia Lummis. In 2022, she was the Democratic nominee for House District 46. She ran against and lost to Ocean Andrew, who remains the district’s representative.
The following year, Ben-David was appointed to the county’s planning and zoning commission, which recommends policy changes to the elected county commission. She was reappointed in 2025, and will serve until 2028 unless she is elected to a higher role this election cycle.
Ben-David said her work on aquifer protection and other regulations has given her the experience to be an effective county commissioner, while the local nature of that role made her realize she could do more good in the county than in Washington, D.C. or in Cheyenne.
“I’ve done already quite a few things to help my neighbors and make sure that we are living to our standards, protecting wildlife, and property rights,” she said. “But working in the planning and zoning commission, I realized that I could probably do a lot more for the county.”
Ben-David said she won’t be accepting financial donations this election cycle.
“I’m using money I’ve saved to run this campaign,” she said. “I do not want people to donate money. If people want to help me, they can volunteer — stuff envelopes, write postcards, but I do not want money from people.”
Ben-David added she would accept endorsements, but not contributions, from PACs.
A contested primary
Ben-David will go head to head with three other Democrats seeking the party’s two available nominations this primary election.
The other candidates are Pete Gosar, a current county commissioner seeking re-election; Klaus Halbsgut, chair of the Albany County Democrats; and Erik Boss, head of the Young Democrats of Wyoming.
The primary election is Aug. 18.
The top two vote-earning Democrats will be the party’s nominees and face two Republican nominees in the general election.
The Republican nominees are likely to be Commissioner Terri Jones, who is seeking re-election, and Chris Cleven, a former Laramie Police Officer. Jones and Cleven are the only two GOP candidates who filed to run for county commission and are therefore likely to become their party’s two nominees in August.
Jones, Cleven and the two victorious Democrats will face off in the general election for two available seats.
The two who win in November, whatever party they claim, will join Republican Thad Hoff to fill out the three-member commission.
Hoff was elected in 2024 to a four-year term. Of Albany County’s three commissioners and seven countywide elected offices, Hoff’s is the only seat not on the ballot this year.
Career and decision-making
Ben-David was born and raised on a family farm in Israel, and completed her two years of mandatory military service with the Israeli Air Force from 1977-1979. During the 1982 Lebanon War, she was called up for reserve duty. She said she was “just behind the front lines” but did not see active combat.
“My job was to coordinate the operation of the air force with ground forces including directing bombers to enemy convoys and helicopters to evacuate our wounded,” she said.
Ben-David earned her bachelor’s, then a master’s in zoology, from Tel Aviv University. She came to the U.S. to complete her Ph.D. in wildlife management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Eventually, she took a job as an assistant professor of wildlife at the University of Wyoming, advancing to associate then full professorship, heading the wildlife and fisheries ecology and management program and serving as department head for a spell.
She became a U.S. citizen in 2009. In December 2025, she retired and is today an emeritus professor.
Ben-David’s research focused on the way climate change has affected wildlife populations, from chipmunks to otters to polar bears — the last of these leading her to the Arctic as chief researcher on a 2009 expedition.
Ben-David’s academic interests have colored her worldview.
“I’ve been interested in the effects of climate change on wildlife for many, many, many years — actually, even before I finished my master’s degree,” she said. “Everything that I do, even in daily personal life, but also politics, relates to climate change and what I know about it and have learned about it over the last 40 years.”
These interests led her into the world of local politics, where water availability, renewable energy and other environmental concerns regularly demand consideration and action.
But a career in scientific research has also shaped how Ben-David approaches decision-making.
“I rely on data,” she said. “I rely on establishing relationships between different components of the system, and then building what we call projection models … My approach would be to gather all the facts, understand what they will do, and then use that understanding to forecast the future. Based on that, you make a decision.”
What the future holds for the county commission in the next four years is unknown, but a few running topics are likely to emerge at some point: Data centers, water availability, renewable energy development, housing and more.
Ben-David said she’ll approach each with a scientist’s eye, and with a mind toward getting the best deal for Albany County.
Renewables
Renewable energy developments have sharply divided locals, even as the community has started to see significant tax benefits from their construction.
Ben-David said she supports renewable energy and when it comes to solar, she’s all in.
“We put solar panels on every single public building … not to mention options for private homes, and we don’t need anything else,” she said. “We can meet all our needs from solar power with battery storage.”
Ben-David said she drives a Rivian, an electric truck, and produces her home’s power with the solar panels on her roof and the batteries connected to them.
Her relationship to wind, however, is more complicated.
“I am obviously a huge proponent of renewable energy with a main focus on solar,” she said. “As a wildlife biologist, I have a few issues with wind turbines, especially with raptors and bats.”
Turbines do kill eagles and other raptors. There are efforts to reduce these dangers — and counterarguments from the pro-wind side about the greater number of birds killed by society’s reliance on fossil fuel extraction — but as of now, the number of raptors each new wind farm will “take” is something that must be factored into official environmental assessments.
That doesn’t mean Ben-David would automatically vote against wind farms, however. She said she would just demand a better deal.
“I would have voted against [the] Rail Tie [Wind Project] under the conditions they were willing to give us,” Ben-David said. “They gave us nothing in return, nothing in return, and that is not acceptable. You want my resource, you have to compensate me for it.”
That compensation could take the form of a community benefit agreement, and might involve demanding that the power produced is used locally, that the wind company pay for local infrastructure improvements directly, or that the company make outright payments.
Community benefit agreements would also be a key component of Ben-David’s policy on data centers.
Data centers and water
As next-door Laramie County goes big on big data centers, Albany County has yet to receive any proposals for the kind of massive AI-powering data centers that have been grabbing national headlines.
But the issue is front of mind for many in Albany County. It featured as a central question for Ben-David and her commission candidate competitors during a recent public forum. As others took a range of stances toward the possibility, Ben-David was among those most critical. But she did not say she would reject such a proposal outright.
As with wind, she said, her approach would involve drafting and securing a community benefit agreement. One component of any such agreement, Ben-David said, should require the company behind the data center to generate their own electricity.
“They can make ours as well,” she told the forum audience. “We don’t have to pay for electricity. They are billionaires, and they can pay for ours as well.”
Referring to her career as a wildlife ecologist, she said any data center looking to set up shop should go beyond this as well, perhaps funding wildlife overpasses.
“Why not?” she said. “They’re the billionaires, let them pay for it.”
But before weighing any such agreement, another issue is paramount for Ben-David: water availability.
Data centers use a lot of water. This is one of the main concerns driving popular opposition to their development in rural areas.
“Right now, if a data center proposal came across my desk, I would say, ‘You can take that away. I’m not even going to look at this, because I need to make sure people get water in their tap,’” Ben-David said. “I want everybody in Laramie to be able to open a tap and have water.”
Ben-David said her chief concern at the moment is water availability, a focus shaped by her time poring through local data as a member of the county planning commission.
The Casper Aquifer, largely located east of the city, provides about 60% of Laramie’s drinking water, and aquifer protection has long been the focus of water advocates in Albany County. In 2023, those advocates secured long sought after victories: the passage of the Casper Aquifer Protection Plan and the adoption of an overlay zone restricting what can be built on the land above the aquifer.
That work began before Ben-David joined the commission in 2023, but she was involved in seeing it through.
Following the warmest winter in Wyoming’s recorded history, which was also one of its driest, every inch of Albany County is facing either “severe” or “extreme” drought conditions. In that environment, Ben-David said water-hungry data centers are simply a non-starter.
“If we have five more years of 2026 in terms of precipitation, all our ranchers are going to go out of business,” she said.
But Ben-David added these challenges are not a reason to panic. They are, she said, a reason to be prepared and to approach AI data center development with extreme caution.
Housing and other topics
Renewable energy and data centers might have taken center stage in the county commission primary, but they are not the only issues facing the candidates and the county.
Alongside water security, energy independence and protecting “wide, open spaces,” Ben-David’s campaign site also touts her commitment to government transparency, fair treatment and quality healthcare for those imprisoned in the Albany County Detention Center and public safety — from maintaining roads to supporting the county attorney’s office in prosecuting animal cruelty cases.
When it comes to housing, most of the most impactful efforts will come at the city- and state-levels. But in some instances, having support from county commissioners can aid those efforts.
Ben-David once again said that her experience on the unelected planning commission has shown her commitment to the issue. During her tenure, the planning commission endorsed two new zones to the county’s zoning tables.
Zoning determines what can be built on a particular patch of land and how much density is permissible. In the county, the residential zones run from “Agricultural” at one extreme (only one home allowed per 35 acres) to “Urban Residential” at the other extreme (one dwelling per 10,000 square feet).
There were already a couple of gradations between these extremes, but during Ben-David’s tenure and with her support, the planning commission added two more: “Agricultural Residential” and “Ranchette” zones.
“We made more categories that allow people to divide the properties, but not into city-level types of densities,” Ben David said.
The goal, she added, was to enable the construction of some housing while also protecting the county’s wide open spaces — without forcing landowners and county officials to pick one extreme or the other.
The primary election is Aug. 18. Every Democrat in Albany County gets to vote in the county commission primary.
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