The Town of Guernsey Wyoming, trying to utilize the mask of public interest, exemplifies self-interest and bolstering the interest of the governing body. The town council meeting held on Tuesday May 20, 2025, has evidenced the very statement that the Town Council and the Mayor have no interest in the preservation and general welfare of the town.A municipally owned corporation is a corporation owned by a municipality. They are typically “organizations with independent corporate status, managed by an executive board appointed primarily by local government officials, and with majority public ownership”.

Some municipally owned corporations rely on revenue from user fees, distinguishing them from agencies and special districts funded through taxation. Municipally owned corporations may also differ from local bureaucracies in funding, transaction costs, financial scrutiny, labor rights, permission to operate outside their jurisdiction, and under some circumstances, in rights to make profits and risk of bankruptcy.

This is particularly concerning when it comes to the use and operation of Guernsey’s golf course and the municipal pool. Councilman Michaels has noted that the annual budget far exceeds the operational offset of the course by about $140,000 (one hundred forty thousand dollars). But, as the Town Administration has repeatedly noted, the town is a not-for-profit entity. While true, municipally owned corporations are instituted to regulate and offset costs incurred by the town for town owned assets.

The causes and effects of municipally owned corporations are posited to be different from those of state-owned enterprises. Corporatization may be more utilized locally rather than nationally allowing more hybrid or flexible forms of public service delivery such as public-private partnerships and inter-municipal cooperation. It also allows charging user fees. As most know, our golf course has raised fees for golfing and camping. To date, there have been three rate increases.

Effects can be different because of lower regulator expertise, lower contracting capacity for municipalities, and the higher presence of scale economies. Current research shows that municipally owned corporations are frequently more efficient than the bureaucracy but have higher failure rates because of their legal and managerial autonomy.

An additional problem is the fact that municipally owned corporations often have more than one municipal owner, and conflict between municipal owners can lead to reduced output for the municipally owned corporation due to various negative spillovers.

A key purpose of corporealization is externalization. Such externalization gives the service delivery organization legal and managerial autonomy from politicians, which could potentially increase efficiency because it safeguards the firm from political exploitation. However, it can also fail to bring efficiency (or cause inefficiency) because this autonomy also reduces the government’s ability to monitor its management.

Whether corporatization is beneficial may depend on the nature of the service that is corporatized, where autonomy may be less beneficial for more politicized and complex services. At the local level there may also be higher transaction costs, because contracting capacity may be lower.

The municipal pool is typically contracted out to a third party for operations, while the town absorbs the costs of maintenance and capital repair. The golf course is solely owned and operated by the Town of Guernsey, fronting all costs. The tyranny and double-faced talking to the public is evidence that the administration has always conducted business in this way and not allowed enterprise to assume the respective role within the purview of the town.

The Town requests bids for the pool, as part of its operational budget. The town awards the “bid” and pays the third party to operate the pool while allowing all concession sales to go to the third party. One hundred percent of the cost of the pool is absorbed by the town and its taxpayers.

The golf course is no better, except that the user fees are returned to the town to offset cost. It had been proposed and an initial implementation, to expand the camping facilities into Old Timer’s.

As the town continues to thwart and undermine projects to help offset cost, the public service of the pool and the golf course will continue to drain precious resources and money from taxpayers’ pockets. It is of note, that any change of the operation of the above mentioned, must be gained by administration approval or denial. The oversight of the administration borders on Constitutional legality.

The underlying issue is that of alleviating fiscal stress. Municipal corporations tend to be established by local government experiencing some degree of fiscal stress. Corporatization is a way to allow local government to “hide their liabilities by allocating them partly to their companies, or corporealized their utilities (…) to raise new sources of income from their companies”.

The members of the community need to be aware of and demand the fiscal transparency of the Town and its administration. Consolidation of power, blatant ignorance and violation of Guernsey Town Policy is not an excuse to continue down this road of financial irresponsibility.

Citizens need to wake up to the corruptive and corrosive influence of people who only wish to put a feather in their cap and to say they are for the people, only to peddle petty influence of a local government for personal benefit or the benefit of their friends.

When much is given, much is demanded. So too, may we have the strength and courage to stand up against the Chief of the Double-Tongues.