How a progressive slate dominated the Laramie City Council primaries

Powered by a relatively new local PAC, the co-campaigners articulated a vision for renter and aquifer protections that brought voters out to the polls.

One of the clearest results from the Primary Election last week emerged from the Laramie City Council races, where a slate of progressive candidates dominated in their respective wards, winning by significant margins over their opponents.

In Ward 1, incumbent Vice-Mayor Sharon Cumbie and newcomer William Bowling earned 977 and 893 votes respectively — far more than the third place finisher, Paul Montoya, who earned 587.

In Ward 2, newcomers Melanie Vigil and Jim Fried earned 489 and 450 votes respectively — each far more than that ward’s third place finisher, Brett Glass, who earned 336.

“I think the vote very much tells us where the people of the community are in their thinking,” Cumbie said. “I don’t know that we did anything, as far as campaigning goes, that others didn’t do. But I think the unique thing is we worked as a team. We supported one another. If Will [Bowling] was going out, he carried my stuff. He talked about me. If I was out, I talked about him.”

In other words, last week’s stark election results were no accident. Instead, they reflect a coordinated effort on the part of the candidates, extensive get-out-the-vote efforts ahead of and during Election Day, and the support of a relatively new political action committee called the Albany County Tomorrow PAC, or ACTPAC.

A mailer promoting the progressive slate across Wards 1 and 2, paid for ACTPAC.

ACTPAC is the brainchild of Albany County Rep. Karlee Provenza (HD-45) and University of Wyoming student Tanner Ewalt. It united the candidates under the same banner, website, and mailers.

Provenza said running as a slate alleviates a common problem in non-partisan local races: voter education. In a race without easy partisan identifiers, becoming an informed voter often means sifting through public appearances and published questionnaires to evaluate candidates one by one.

“If you look at the number of undervotes in these races, people just aren’t necessarily sure who to vote for,” Provenza said. “When you coalesce people together, it gets a little bit easier to disseminate information, to be able to educate people in a meaningful way, or at least in a numbers way.”

On the morning of Election Day, Provenza said 20 volunteers gathered before sunrise to distribute 1,200 pieces of voter education lit, as pictured on the right, which included information about how, when and where to vote. // Courtesy photos

The progressive slate endorsed by ACTPAC swept the primaries. But the election season is far from over. Voters will return to the polls in November to decide whether they approve of ACTPAC’s vision or whether they prefer some other direction for the city of Laramie.

Presenting voters with a slate of candidates united by a common vision only works if voters approve of that vision.

A slate of progressive candidates

The 2024 elections will decide five of the Laramie City Council’s nine seats. At least four of those five seats will be filled by newcomers.

Mayor Brian Harrington is leaving the council, opting to run for a seat on the Albany County Commission this cycle. Pat Gabriel is not running for reelection. Jayne Pearce and Andi Summerville were running for reelection, but lost their seats during the primary last week when they received the lowest vote tallies in their ward.

Sharon Cumbie, a member of the progressive slate, is the only incumbent still capable of holding her seat. She’s positioned strongly to do that, having received more votes in the primary than any other candidate in any of the three wards.

Progressive slate candidates Sharon Cumbie, Will Bowling, Melanie Vigil and Jim Fried pose for photos while canvassing. // Photos courtesy of Micah Richardson and Jessi Colehour.

Cumbie, who was first elected in 2020, said she’s hoping to continue the work of her first term. In the last four years, the council has passed housing reforms to encourage affordable development, approved basic health and safety standards for rentals, and adopted a city-county aquifer protection plan.

“Those are huge projects that are in their beginning stages and they need nurturing,” Cumbie said. “And if we get a group in that doesn’t work as a team, and it’s full of adversarial types of interactions, we’re going to lose our momentum.”

Cumbie said she has found her team among the ACTPAC slate. Alongside Cumbie, Bowling, Vigil and Fried have each stressed the importance of these core projects — housing reform, rental regulations and aquifer protection — during their campaigns. (Albeit with individual variations.)

A progressive victory in the general could lead to more work on all of the topics Cumbie listed. The council is already weighing its next steps in the push for affordable housing, and several candidates have talked about giving the City Rental Housing Code more teeth. But those aren’t the only issues on the ballot, Cumbie said.

“Some who were running are against the police advisory board, are against the aquifer protection plan, are against rental ordinances and the city ‘getting in their business,’” Cumbie said. “So we had people running on opposing views, and those were not accepted by our community. The vote spoke.”

Cumbie said she is proud of the work the council has accomplished but she’s also excited to “pass the torch.”

None of her fellow slate members have run for city council before, although Vigil was a contender for an open council seat during a 2021 vacancy appointment process.

“This is a younger generation, and I think we get to pass the torch to progressive-minded people that will bring some of our initiatives that we’ve really fought for, marched in the streets for,” Cumbie said. “And it may not be everything we want, but we have a beginning that we can nurture.”

Big tents, internal tensions and a rival PAC

Ewalt said he and Provenza were not looking for “a slate of radicals” when they helped to gather the candidates under one banner.

“I’m a very, very progressive person, and we have disagreements on approaches and policies,” Ewalt said. “But our tentpole issues — clean air, clean water, affordable and livable places to live, protections for tenants — those central issues for our community, as long as we can agree on those, any other policy disagreements we can solve over a beer.”

There are tensions between the candidates’ various stated goals.

For example, some proposals to protect renters, the aquifer, or the West Side’s historic character conflict with the underlying logic of many affordable housing proposals. Such proposals frequently focus on deregulating development, so as to encourage more of it, while other progressive goals tend to require placing new, more restrictive rules on landlords and developers.

Like Ewalt, Cumbie said it’s important to have a team on council who can work through disagreements.

“I just feel really hopeful that we’re building a group that will work collaboratively and work within the community,” she said. “That’s my hope.”

Provenza added it’s less about having every policy worked out ahead of time and more about asking, “how do you govern?”

“We chose these candidates because they believe in conserving our clean drinking water for future generations,” Provenza said. “They’re protecting renters from dishonest landlords, or they want to, and they will work hard to find solutions for our housing issues — which is a really complicated issue that’s going to take a lot of willpower to work on.”

ACTPAC wants to make sure the next council has that willpower.

“They [the slate candidates] are all strong leaders on their own with proven track records of working hard on behalf of our community,” Provenza said. “If you have a council that doesn’t know how to exercise their power and know what their power is, then you have a council that maybe doesn’t do things that are hard, even though they’re worth doing.”

Before the slate can exercise any power, however, it will have to survive the General Election. The slate’s primary vote totals are promising, from ACTPAC’s point of view, but those with an alternative vision for council have also started mobilizing.

“Time For a Change Laramie” is the only other PAC to file a county-level campaign finance report in Albany County during the 2024 primaries. An email attached to the PAC did not respond to a request for comment, but a Facebook group bearing its name has 15 members, including Ward 1 candidate Paul Montoya, former Ward 1 candidate Norbert Kriebel and Ward 3 candidate Matt Lockhart. It has paid for at least one digital ad targeting Sharon Cumbie with misleading information.

Cumbie and Bowling are facing Paul Montoya and Roxie Hensley in the General Election; Melanie Vigil and Jim Fried are facing Brett Glass and Brett Kahler.

The incumbents who lost

Two incumbents running in Ward 2 — Andi Summerville and Jayne Pearce — lost their seats this primary. Only four of the six total candidates from Ward 2 could advance to the general and neither Summerville’s nor Pearce’s vote tallies put them in the top four.

Both Summerville and Pearce supported rental and aquifer protections. Summerville consistently supported affordable housing measures, while Pearce supported some. Both incumbents opposed — and helped to crush — the proposal to establish a Civilian Oversight Board for the Laramie Police Department.

The five candidates who win the General Election — whether or not they include the four from the progressive slate — will join Councilors Erin O’Doherty, Brandon Newman, Micah Richardson and Joe Shumway, who were not up for reelection this year.

A brief history of ACTPAC

The 2024 primary was not ACTPAC’s first election.

Provenza and Ewalt formed the PAC during the 2022 general, with an eye toward influencing that year’s school board elections.

Like city council races, school board elections are non-partisan, meaning there are no easy partisan identifiers printed on the ballot. And due to a confluence of factors — the normal expiration of terms and two recent resignations — seven of the board’s nine seats were on the ballot. In total, 20 candidates across four races were seeking a position on the Albany County School Board.

From a voter’s perspective, it meant there was a lot of information to wade through in a year that also demanded voter decisions on nine countywide positions and five statewide races.

Out of this environment evolved a slate of conservative and right-wing candidates. They started campaigning together on a platform that promised to prohibit critical race theory and ban books they labeled “pornographic” from the school library.

A pair of 2022 mailers promoting rival slates of school board candidates.

In opposition, ACTPAC put together its own slate, grouping together candidates — some incumbents, some challengers — and began promoting them with mailers of its own.

Provenza said they weren’t necessarily “progressive” or “left-wing” candidates, though some were.

“When we backed the slate for the school board, it was basically all those people who believed in public education,” she said. “We’re facing times where some people are attacking public education, and it was important to us that we had people that believed in the institution of public education and believed in creating opportunities for young people.”

The ACTPAC-supported slate endorsed eight candidates — of which seven could and did win. The conservative slate failed to place any of its seven members on the school board. It was a clear result amid a complex election.

Echoing Provenza, Ewalt said what happened in 2022 was not a triumph of left-wing politics over right-wing. For Ewalt, it represented something more basic.

“The thing most Wyoming people want is community,” he said. “They don’t want a bunch of angry people who are telling you why everything sucks. They want people that are willing to discuss issues, at the very least. And that bar for entry, it opens the door to a lot of folks, a lot of rational, normal people.”

In 2024, Provenza and Ewalt turned their attention to city council — and the non-partisan races that will decide a majority of the city’s elected leadership. The primary demonstrated that ACTPAC candidates have a path to victory in the general. Ewalt is hoping history repeats itself.

“Community is only possible with people that are willing to sit down and talk — that’s what we promised with the school board, and that’s why the people of Laramie elected our slate overwhelmingly,” he said. “The same has happened in the [2024] primary, and I’m very hopeful it will happen in the General Election with our city council candidates.”

Bridging the town and gown divide

Ewalt said his own interest in local politics is informed by his lifelong Wyoming residency and his continued affinity for the state, rather than any liberal script.

“Being a kid who was fed off of oil like I am, I am fully aware of how quickly you can go from being an upper middle class family to dirt broke and on the verge of being on welfare,” he said. “So [we’re] making sure that there is a robust and good social safety net that protects people.”

Now a political science major at the University of Wyoming, Ewalt is an outspoken activist in op-ed columns, interviews and public demonstrations. He said he has been accused of being an “outside agitator.”

Tanner Ewalt addresses the UW student senate in 2023. // Photo: Ashton Hacke

“I’m a product of this state and of its community as much as any of these people who are claiming to be protecting this state and protecting this community,” he said. “Born and raised here, I’m a product of this state. No California in me. No New York City in me. I’m sorry, the call is coming from inside the house.”

The imagined divide between homegrown and outside influences has colored many debates in recent years. But it’s not the only division debated in Laramie.

There’s a widespread perception that Laramie life and campus life constitute distinct worlds — the so-called “town and gown” divide. But Ewalt said that perception is harmful. UW students and other Laramie residents drink the same water, rent the same units, confront the same housing shortage, and face the same decisions about whether to stay and build a life in Laramie. Ewalt said that gives students a direct stake in local politics, whether they recognize it or not.

“Even the kids that are only here for a semester before they decide that somewhere else is a better fit are members of this community for the time that they’re here,” he said. “They deserve a modicum of say in this conversation. And most importantly, in my mind, they deserve protection from people that would take advantage of how short their time here will be.”

That’s a not-so-veiled reference to the subset of Laramie landlords who take advantage of students and other young, inexperienced and poor renters. Ewalt has no complaints about his own landlord, but knows his experience is not universal.

“I weirdly have avoided truly awful landlords, but I have a lot of friends that haven’t,” Ewalt said. “I know a lot of folks that have been put into, or have gone through, incredibly awful, stressful, dehumanizing situations because of landlords in this town.”

Young people are less likely to participate in politics, local or otherwise, but Ewalt is not the only student to take a stand on rental regulations. The UW student government surveyed its constituents about rental issues in the lead up to the City Rental Housing Code’s ultimate passage; horror stories recounted in that survey informed the debates before city council.

The student government has also defended the rental regulations against legislative attempts to unravel them.