Sheriff Candidate Drops Out Bonner County Democrats Trying To Find A Replacement For Nichols, Who’S In Alaska

What once was a crowded field for sheriff in Bonner County has shrunk to one Republican and two independent candidates.

Democrat Lance Nichols has dropped out of the race.

Nichols, 39, called Bonner County Clerk Marie Scott last week from Alaska to tell her he no longer is pursuing the job.

Nichols won the Democratic primary with 339 votes - only 40 votes more than his party challenger, Maurice (J.R.) Banks.

Most of the votes in the primary went to the three Republican candidates. Phil Jarvis won with 73 percent, or 4,064 votes.

The Democratic Party’s county leadership is trying to find a replacement for Nichols, said party Chairman Gary Pietsch.

Banks was sent a letter asking whether he’d be willing to be the party candidate. Party officials could not find a telephone number for Banks, nor have they heard from him.

“We have an opportunity to fill the vacancy. We’re talking to some people,” Pietsch said. “If we can’t field a viable candidate, then we’ll decline.”

Pietsch is on a tight deadline. He is leaving Thursday on vacation, and Scott wants to know of any replacement candidate by Friday. She has to have ballots printed by mid-September for absentee voters.

In fact, it was Scott’s desire to have the ballots printed correctly that initiated Nichols’ departure.

Two years ago, Scott said, county commissioner candidate Craig Mooney dropped out at the last minute. The ballots already had been printed, and it cost $700 to blot out Mooney’s name on each ballot, Scott said.

So, this year, she called all candidates to confirm that they still were planning to run in the general election before she ordered the ballots to be printed.

“I was very much surprised to find Lance Nichols’ phone was disconnected,” Scott said. So she left messages on the answering machine of a friend of Nichols’, she said.

Nichols called her, and when she questioned him about his residency, “he said he was up there (in Alaska) to earn money for his campaign,” Scott said. When she asked how long he would be there, he said he wasn’t sure.

Scott said she pressed the issue of residency, and Nichols agreed to call her back. When he called last week, he said he was withdrawing from the race, then followed up with a letter, Scott said.

If Democrats find no one to fill the vacancy, the GOP’s Jarvis still will have two opponents. Running as independents are Donald Parkison, a small-business owner, and David Morgan, a retired Kitsap County, Wash., deputy.