Back in 2022, Susan Bayro became the first Osage woman ever elected to the Pawhuska City Council – and now she’s ratcheted up another first as the first Osage woman to be elected vice mayor by her fellow councilmembers.
She might be the first Osage vice mayor, period, but no one appears to have kept those kinds of records.
Bayro, who works for the Osage Nation as a strategic planning analyst, has made her place on the City Council by applying her day job to her elected: She has worked to develop better policies and procedures, developed job descriptions – previously lacking – for city manager and fire chief, and helped update the city’s comprehensive plan as well as its capital improvement plan, documents that are key to obtaining infrastructure and other grants.
“Those items were desperately needed to get funds,” Bayro said.
Bayro might well be described as the ranking wonk on the council for her attention to detail and love of planning. Before she was elected, she and the Nation worked with the city to install broadband downtown, helped the state Department of Environmental Quality to iron out glitches in the city’s wastewater and water operations by building templates and policies to avert the chaos that used to come with employees leaving, and worked in Indian Health Service to fix the city’s 2 million gallon water tank and the dam at Lake Pawhuska.
Bayro grew up in Pawhuska, the daughter of Jesse and Pam Abrams. She is married to Mike Bayro, a Pawhuska firefighter, with whom she has two children.
She has a master’s degree in International Business with a minor in marketing.
The mayor of Pawhuska, in whose absence Bayro will serve as mayor, is Mark Buchanan.