Troy Bray

Soon after getting onto Powell City Council in early 2025, Troy Bray said he felt a weight of responsibility.

“It hit me, like, I'm responsible for my neighbors, for my friends. I have a responsibility to these people,” Bray said. “It's a serious responsibility, and I see other people on council and other politicians, other people in elected office, they don’t seem to behave like they feel that responsibility, that weight, and I kind of dream of having a country that government is responsible, and and that’s why I do what I do.”

He now wants to bring that same attitude to the Park County Treasurer’s Office.

Bray said he recently helped ferret out corruption in the Philippines and wants to use those skills for Park County. 

Bray said in that foreign case, he discovered a love of going through financial documents and another way to use his aptitude in math. 

“I’m a blue collar guy. I don’t mind sweating. I work out in the sun all day,” he said. “I never thought that I'd enjoy that kind of stuff, and I did. I really actually enjoyed it.”

Bray was born and raised in and around Casper and said he’s been political for awhile, but hadn’t engaged nearly as much before 2008.

“I always thought I was the only person in the world who thought like me, and then the Tea Party showed me, ‘hey, there's a lot of people who think like me,’” he said.

Bray had found his small government movement and stuck with it. In the years since, he’s not been afraid to speak his mind, even though it’s led to sharp criticism at times. He drew a rebuke from the city council in May after he wrote in a Facebook comment that, “The only way Wyoming is going to have freedom is to start hanging bad judges.”

Bray’s grandparents lived in Powell and he had fond memories of the area from his childhood. When he had the opportunity to take a job in Powell eight years ago, he took it. 

“I realized, you know, this is home,” Bray said. “This is where I belong.”

He now works at a bentonite plant in Lovell but still lives in Powell and continues to serve on the city council. He is also active in the Park County Republican Party and has both the party’s endorsement and that of the conservative Park County Patriots.

If elected to the treasurer's office, Bray said he would do everything he could to increase transparency — including wiping out any fees possible regarding public records requests as a way to make it easy for anyone to look at the books.

Bray faces the current first deputy in the treasurer’s office, Anne Lawler of Powell, in the upcoming Republican primary election. Bray said he’s running to dispel the notion that an elected officials’ chosen successor ought to be assumed the next to hold the office. 

He said it’s the same reason he opposed current assessor Terry Call being one of the Park County GOP’s nominees to replace outgoing Assessor Pat Meyer last year. Meyer had told the commissioners and the party that Call — then Meyer’s first deputy — was his pick to take over.

“I like Terry [Call] now that I’ve met him … and I have apologized to him because he really is doing a good job,” Bray said. “But Pat Meyer is not somebody whose recommendation I’m going to take and his coming into the Republican [Party] saying, ‘This is my guy, and you’re going to take him, and just it’s a done deal, you don’t have any say,’ that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and for good reasons.

“And then the way [Treasurer] Barb Poley is treating them all, like, ‘This is who I chose. I’ve trained her. She's going to do exactly what I want, just accept it,’ yeah, that's not America,” he said.

The primary election is Aug. 18.