Sheriff, prosecutor on Shoshone ballot

Shoshone County residents have a choice between insiders and outsiders when it comes to voting for sheriff and prosecuting attorney in the Tuesday primary, candidates in the contested races say.

Sheriff Chuck Reynalds is seeking a second term and said his performance during the past four years is worth continued support. Bob Nelson, his challenger in the Democratic primary, said it’s time for a fresh effort to fight a methamphetamine scourge in the county.

Incumbent Prosecutor Val Siegel, running as an independent, automatically advances to the November general election. But Kellogg attorney Michael Peacock, running against Jay Q. Sturgell in the Democratic primary, said he has learned much about the short-handed office since offering to help out there since the first of the year.

Sturgell, the county public defender, said he is the only candidate outside the prosecutor’s office and should be elected by voters interested in change.

The 64-year-old Reynalds moved to the Silver Valley after retiring from the U.S. Navy 36 years ago. His retirement has included stints as a fraud investigator for the Idaho Department of Labor, covering 10 northern counties, and a couple of years with the Sheriff’s Department before running for office in 2000.

Drug use, drug trafficking and a tough economy are all issues facing law enforcement in Shoshone County, Reynalds said. He said he kept his campaign promise of four years ago to hire a full-time drug officer to augment the 16 field deputies.

“We have had 28 felony drug arrests since Christmas season, and more are pending,” he said. “The trafficking is still here, but I believe we’ve done a great job shutting down the (meth) labs.”

Reynalds said he also took advantage of federal grants to finance two school-resource officers. He said he was pleased that voters in the Kellogg School District overwhelmingly passed a supplemental levy that took over the funding for one of those school-based officers.

He also cited a Citizens on Patrol program as another grass-roots way to attack crime in the county. Two out-of-service — but still marked — patrol cruisers are dedicated to the citizens patrol, which cruises in four-hour shifts looking for minor crime and suspicious activity, Reynalds said.

The sheriff’s labor program has been “immensely successful in this area,” he said, performing chores for municipalities and such tasks as raking yards and splitting wood for elderly residents.

A recent effort to create a multi-agency drug task force involving neighboring counties in Idaho and Montana, the Coeur d’Alene Tribal police and state police was turned down for a lack of funding, he said. The agency managing the grant requests in Boise had $500,000 for all of Idaho, Reynalds said, which was also the projected budget for the task force.

“We are going to try again,” he said.

Nelson, a Silver Valley native and former Bunker Hill worker, found a new career in law enforcement the same way a lot of folks in the valley found new careers.

“I worked for Bunker for 15 years, and when they shut down in ‘82,” he was in a long line of people looking for work, 55-year-old Nelson said. He was a reserve officer for the Pinehurst police department for a year and a sheriff’s deputy for 10 years.

This is his first run for office, and “it’s been an experience,” Nelson said.

Nelson is now a security guard for Dave Smith Motors in Kellogg and said people have encouraged him to run for sheriff. His top priority would be to create a county drug task force to take on methamphetamine manufacture and sales in the county, he said.

Sturgell, the public defender, was recently elected to a three-year term on the Idaho State Bar Association’s board of commissioners. He previously worked as a deputy prosecutor in the county, and he is now city attorney for Pinehurst, Smelterville and Mullan. He’s also a deputy state attorney general working on child support cases in the five northern counties.

“From working both sides, I think I have a different vision of how the job can be done,” Sturgell said.

Plea bargains, he said, are critical to running a short-staffed and short-budgeted office.

“I understand plea bargain are dirty words to a lot of people, but they are ones we need to use often or justice will crash,” Sturgell said. “There are two kinds of people we run across: career criminals, where plea bargains are not very effective in rehabilitating them; and people who, for whatever reason, made a mistake.”

In the latter category are often people who could benefit from a plea deal that allows for rehabilitation or service more than prison time, Sturgell said.

Peacock, 55, a Kellogg native, has been an attorney in Kellogg since graduating from University of Idaho law school in 1978. After the prosecutor’s office lost a chief deputy, Peacock said he offered to help out. The experience, he said, revealed some problems he feels he can address.

In Shoshone County, the prosecutor is also the county’s legal adviser. Peacock said he thinks he would bring a better balance to handling civil and administrative matters as well as prosecuting criminal cases. In the criminal arena, he said, the prosecutor’s office needs to better communicate with county law enforcement on a variety of topics – on whether there are holes in cases to possible plea bargains or other outcomes.

“People who are career criminals or violent or involved in the manufacture of drugs will be made unwelcome,” Peacock said. But plea agreements would be appropriate for people “who have a brush with the law and who are not criminals.”

He said he backs the effort to create a drug court in the county and would like to see a similar program aimed at people arrested for domestic violence. “Putting them in jail for two days doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. You’ve got to send them to somebody who can show them there’s another way to deal with problems than by hitting somebody,” Peacock said.