West Edge moves ahead

The Cheyenne City Council voted earlier this week to adopt a document known as the West Edge Visionary Blueprint as a guide to improving stormwater protections, adding public parks and green spaces, and encouraging private investment in the area.

The blueprint roughly defines the West Edge as the neighborhood north of 15th Street, south of 24th Street, west of O’Neil Avenue and east of Snyder Avenue.

Boyd Wiggam, an attorney with the Wyoming Liberty Group, has repeatedly expressed concerns that the creation of parks and other public spaces in the area could require the city to acquire privately owned property by force.

The Wyoming Liberty Group is a local nonprofit that focuses on constitutional issues and government accountability.

State statute provides cities with a variety of urban renewal authorities, which give governments the power to take over “slums and blighted areas,” of which certain unoccupied or abandoned buildings within the West Edge area would undoubtedly qualify.

But Wiggam said his concern is that “the definition of what constitutes blight is broad and very flexible and malleable. Local governments can virtually say blight is anything they want it to be.”