Cache Valley Extermination owner Bryce Wood is Running for City Council

Cache Valley Extermination owner Bryce Wood is running for this year's City Council. Bryce Wood was born in California where he lived up until the age of nine when his parents purchased a cattle ranch in Thatcher, Idaho were he learned the life of moving pipes, fixing fences, pushing cattle and “all that fun stuff” as Bryce puts it. 

Bryce Wood Family, 2021

Just before Bryce turned 14, his family moved to Wellsville, Utah where he grew up his teenage and young adult life, attending school at Mountain Crest High, and serving as a Missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan. After his return home, Bryce got into music, organizing the Wood Live Music group that performed at the last Black & White Days festival. At the age of 29, Bryce married Natalie Olsen and together they have 3 young children.

Soon after their marriage, the Wood family moved to Franklin, Idaho where Bryce served as a member of the City Council for about 5 years. He had to cut his time in office short when the family moved to Richmond in 2017. In 2019, Bryce bought Cache Valley Extermination from Cal Swenson and has been very successful with it, including his commercials on the local radio about how “these bugs need to die, and they need to die now!”

We were able to meet with Bryce Wood about his decision to run for City Council, and asked him some questions about what he has to offer to the City of Richmond. The following will be in a Question & Answer segment, quoted directly from our interview with Bryce on the morning of June 8, 2023.

Q: In the process of running for Richmond City Council, was part of that you already had in the Franklin City Council?

A: Yeah. Well, that was a really good experience. I didn't have a burning passion to run for Richmond City Council. I got a pretty good belly full in Franklin. But, I know that they were having a difficult time finding candidates. And so I spoke with a few members of the Mayor, the City Council, city employees, they kind of said, "Hey, you know, you really ought to look at trying to get into it." And so I tried to set an example for the kids saying, "Hey, if you're gonna belly ache about the world around you, you gotta be willing to actually step up and do something about it." So I figure, “Okay. Well I do have a bit of a background and experience and I've learned enough.” 

It's okay to change your mind. It's not okay to change your principles. You can kind of work with everybody and be flexible and understanding while still operating with your set of core values. And my kids are getting to an age where they can understand a lot of the things that are going on around them. So it's a pretty good opportunity for them to learn a little bit about being civic minded and everything. And it's a good chance to do it. And I like Richmond. It's been an awesome town. We love living here, so it's a good opportunity to get to know more people.

Q: What do you have to offer to Richmond if you get elected into the City Council?

A: I'm really good at cutting through the B.S. I can tell you right now, I'm probably the least educated person that would be in that room. But I've been through Hard Knocks University, graduated with honors. 

I look at things from a standpoint of principle driven, and I shoot for being fair and equitable. I know sometimes in the town we have this pro-growth or anti-growth mindset or we tend to have this tribalism happen like this political climate across the spectrum right now. And instead of saying, "Okay, what team am I on?" We're all kind of fighting for the same thing. We're all trying to make our community a better place, and we're trying to make sure that everybody has what they need to be able to be successful, happy, and safe. And so as those types of issues come up, that's sort of the lens that I look through in making decisions like one, what's, what's legal? You know, like how do we interpret this request in regard to the ordinance, right? So some stuff we have a lot of flexibility on to do whatever we want, and some stuff that the rules are pretty clear, and so we're gonna act according to those rules. Or we say “We don't like these rules, so we're gonna go through a process to change the rules.” So, and that's where the council is great because it's a legislative body, right? We can go through and change the rules if we decide that's necessary. I try to triage the way we look at issues from what the rules say first, and then we go into what's fair and equitable. 

I had an example up in Franklin. Building permits were an issue. Franklin had really expensive building permits. We had a city employee who would assess that permit, and every time a builder would complain about it. "Oh, sorry, it's what the permit is." Well, that was the case until that employee wanted to do an addition on their house. Then they came into the city council meeting wanting to lower the permit fee for their build. I agree that the permit fees were too high, but it wasn't really fair to lower that fee when everybody else paid their permits. So the solution that we reached was, "Well, yeah, we agree that it's high, but we also know there's too many active permits right now where they just barely paid this same fee. So why don't we let the permits catch up, and then we can lower the fee. And if you wanna reapply at that time, when the fee's lowered, cool. But right now we gotta keep that playing field level." And so I really do try to find what's fair without sort of favoring one group or another. But we want to make sure that everybody's taken care of equally. 

Q: Do you think that you can accommodate both the tasks of the farmers including the city individuals?

A: Yeah. We do live in sort of an agricultural community and that's part of what makes Cache Valley so charming and so many people want to live here. And again, I'm a transplant. So I just moved to Richmond and I have this awesome backyard behind our house where, If somebody decided to build a house, man, that'd be a bummer for me. It would ruin my view, but there's nothing I can do about it cause I don't own that land. It would be a real bummer, and unless they did something that directly impacted my environmental quality of living and my health, I can't really dictate what somebody else does with their land. But I do know that we have things in place with planning and zoning and community plans and there's several tools at our disposal to be able to sort of plan how growth happens. We can't stop it. If we stop growth, then all of a sudden we have problems with being able to maintain infrastructure and be able to have a tax base that we need and everything else.

So we, we don't want to say we hate growth because that's shooting ourselves in the foot as a community, but if we can control it and if we can be strategic about it and say, "Okay, well in our zoning we're finding places for our higher density housing. We're finding places to do different things, so that maybe we mitigate some of the consequences to the agricultural people and so that we don't hurt the farmers and everything else. But again, we also realize that we're all families. We're all people who need a place to live, and we all need to be able to have our basic needs taken care of. So it's not really fair to deny that to somebody else."

Q: What specifically are you hoping to accomplish while you’re in the City Council for the next four years?

A: I don't have a specific agenda. I came into this with sort of saying, "Okay, I'm willing to fill a hole that you have, and I'm willing to do it to the very best of my ability." I haven't been stewing for the course of a term with some chip on my shoulder ready to come in and fix something. The outgoing council members have done an awesome job. There's not really anything that I'm seeing that I'm going, "Oh man, I need to go and crusade for something." My goal is really to be a voice of reason and stability.

Sometimes it's easy to say, "Oh, this would be a great thing that we needed to run with." And sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's important for us to stop and say, "Hey, you know what? Let's look at how these choices impact people. Let's look at how this program might be awesome for this demographic, but maybe it might be a burden for another." And so I kind of want to come into it from the standpoint of, “I want to flesh these ideas out and I want to talk about 'em, and I want to make sure that we're doing what's right for everybody. And kind of make sure that we're representing the needs of the city and not really crusading on any kind of personal tasks or personal goals. Kinda keep what's best for the community as a whole in mind.

Q: Do you think that in between Cache Valley Extermination and Wood Live Music and your painting hobbies—including your family—that you have enough time to work with the City Council?

A: Oh yeah. Everybody's busy. The secret to life is how you manage your time, right? It's all about being able to put that time in a box, and when you have it, you maximize every square inch of it, and then you move it onto your next task and your next task. With Cache Valley Extermination, I've grown the business by a full third in three years, and so we've had some awesome things, and the summertime is nuts. I might work some 14 hour days and it gets really crazy, but in the wintertime it slows way down. That's when I'm able to really overcome my music. All of a sudden, I have time to dedicate to that, and I can be recording and I can do all these wonderful art things. Summertime, I don't really get to do my chart.I find a box and I put it in a different place. 

With the family, same thing. We maximize our time. We don't plan big vacations throughout the year because it's impossible. Things pop up when you have a business. But when we're cruising along, when we go, "Oh, this weekend we don't have anything. Let's live to the fullest." Then that's when we go, we'll have these epic adventures and different things. Same thing with the city council. You have your meetings, you have other things that you have to go through and run down. There's a fair amount of homework that happens behind the scenes. A lot of that can be done after hours. A lot of it has to happen during the day. 

The nice thing about my job is I'm in a truck and I'm mobile. I'm not behind a desk. I've got a phone. There's a lot of things that I can accomplish by multitasking, even while I'm out and about. So, I actually have a—for as much as I have to accomplish—I have a shockingly flexible situation.

Q: Is there anything else that you want the people of Richmond to know about you?

A: I'm excited to serve the community. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. I'm hoping for suggestions from people. If there's something that somebody feels very strongly about, then I'd love to know about it so that we can look at that and address it. 

The other thing is, I hope people get encouraged to want to show up to meetings and like to offer an opinion. One of the things that happened, like when I was in Franklin, it would seem people would rally over little things that might seem shiny or interesting at the time. And people would gossip and buzz about it and there would be all this fervor. But then the stuff that's really important, like developing water, making sure that our toilets flush. They wouldn't show up! Those are the things that really impact this long term, those little infrastructure things. The boring stuff is what really has the greatest impact on our quality of life as citizens. As people get more educated about those things and understand how those things impact our life, I think we start to get rid of some of the other contention type things. You know, the little shiny pet causes that we all like to sort of trivialize over when we realize that we're really just trying to make our town better and we're trying to make sure everybody's toilet flushes, everybody has water, everybody's safe, they can go down the road without crashing into a pothole. 

If we can focus on the things that make the town work and run and comfortable for everybody, then that's where we kind of create that sense of unity and make our city shine.