WENATCHEE — The Chelan County Sheriff’s office is up for election in November.
Three-term incumbent Brian Burnett is challenged by Deputy Mike Morrison for the position. The two answered questions Monday in a public forum sponsored by The Wenatchee World at Pybus Public Market.
Burnett was elected in 2010 and Morrison is president of the Chelan County Deputy Sheriff Association. Both filed as Republicans.
Questions answered by the two candidates came from readers’ emails sent to The World and World journalists. The responses below include only two questions.
The candidates’ responses were edited for clarity and brevity.
Wenatchee World: What role should the sheriff play in the community and how far should his or her influence reach?
Mike Morrison: Pretty simple: protect and serve, enforce the laws, make the community safe, protect our citizens, protect the businesses that invested hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars here in our community to put up their buildings.
I mean, we’re seeing it over in King County, that a lot of those industries that are not getting the same level of service are pulling up stakes and going to other areas to run their businesses. We don’t want that to happen in Chelan County.
So the role should be to protect and serve citizens and the businesses that come here, and keep out of the politics and personal agendas. I mean, our job’s already complicated enough without trying to wade into those waters.
So get back to law enforcement. Get away from politics. Personal agendas don’t matter. Make sure the citizens are happy businesses are protected.
Brian Burnett: Well, we might as well get the elephant out of the room because obviously you’re saying that there’s personal agendas, and there’s politics involved. And I will tell you this, that it’s very important.
I want to go back, I’ll come back to that, it’s a big role. People look to the elected sheriff as the protection of the Constitution, number one. The Second Amendment is there to protect the First Amendment. It always has been, and it always will be. And there’s a lot of different opinions on that.
And so when I see an agenda coming back from politics — across the nation, and statewide — it’s time to get involved in politics to protect that. And we’re not talking about being dirty and nasty, we’re talking about being truthful and honest. But it’s talking about standing up and having a voice when it’s time to stand up and have a voice rather than cowering down and letting the minority speak for the majority.
That’s really what this is about, people. And people look to the elected sheriff as the top elected, top law enforcement official. And it’s important. I don’t tout that title because that’s not the title that I see myself as, but that’s the title that it is.
And what I mean by that is I surround myself with people that are like minded, but yet free thinkers, and they’re gonna be coming up with ideas, and we create a team that is going to serve the county the best we can. We’ve never gotten away from policing, we’ve never gotten away from enforcing the laws — we’ve always been doing that. And we’ve been actually putting people in leadership positions recently that are doing a much greater job in that effort.
And they’re working closely and collaboratively with people all over the region and the state. I’ve never been more proud of our command staff and our supervisors and our line staff than ever before. We have the best agency that I’ve ever seen. And it’s not that it was bad before. But we’ve really seen people step up to those positions. And they’re doing an amazing job.
So yeah, we’ll continue to enforce that. We’ve never got away from that. But the sheriff has to get out and has to communicate. And you have to go and communicate with your legislators. And your policy adviser, which is part of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs and the Washington Association of Sheriffs because I’m the current president, I’m the past president of WASPC. Wenatchee Police Chief Steve Crown is the current president of WASPC and there’s a lot involved there.
I didn’t get involved in that in the first four years because I was trying to figure out how to run the sheriff’s office. And as I brought in a command staff that could take over those operations and I trusted them, I got more involved because at some point in time, sheriffs and chiefs that are tenured have to step up, otherwise it doesn’t happen. And that’s the same reason that Chief Crown is in his position. He’s tenured, he’s been around, he’s got some great leadership experience. He’s got a good command staff that’s leading their agency and we’re working closely together. And it’s the same thing across the river with Sheriff Kevin Morris, he’s now the incoming president of WASPC next year, and it’s the people stepping up to take leadership roles.
It’s not doesn’t make it easier. It’s just the right thing to do. And we all know, the right thing to do isn’t always the easiest, it’s just the right thing to do.
They want to see us step up, be the leaders in the community and represent, hire and train to the best of our abilities. We’re going to continue to train because it’s excellence. Our training doesn’t want to be mediocre. We want to be excellent at it. And it’s like a professional athlete, OK So if a professional athlete from the Seahawks or the Mariners, if they’re training and going daily, they do that every day, but some of the things that we face, we don’t get to train for that every day. So we got to take it serious and we got to give our people the best training that we can and we will continue to take that status. I’m not gonna back down on the training.
WW: If elected, what areas will be your focus in the next four years?
Burnett: Well, obviously, we’re going to continue on that thing, as I want to continue to focus we’re going to build our staff back up where we want, we’re going to continue to put a little bit of pressure on, work with the commissioners. I don’t want to be the commissioners, I don’t want to tell them how to do their job. But the relationships that we’ve built with the commissioners, and the leaders here locally, as they know when my team brings them information, it’s accurate to the best of our ability, they trust the knowledge that’s coming forward and then we allow them to make the decision of what’s best for the county to balance that budget.We’re gonna focus on behavioral health, we’re going to focus on dangerous drugs and we’re going to figure out how to fight that — because we’re training and adjusting all the time. That’s a lot what PTI was about — our regional training — we came in, and we trained local agencies that didn’t have the ability to train themselves on the new laws.
And every time they pass a new law, it’s like taking a step back and everybody’s focusing on the command staff, and even for me, I’ve got to go back and look at my subject matter experts that are down the chain of command because they truly are the ones that I look to.
If I get a call from a policy advisor, or a legislator, and they asked me specific questions, I call my subject matter experts because they’re the ones. I don’t have all those answers, but I have the people that I trust to do that. So we’re going to continue to partner with Wenatchee PD, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, Washington State Patrol, we’re going to be the best leaders we can and you’re going to see us operate at a high function. And to do the best we can and you’re going to see the quality of life here is always going to be better as long as you have this type of team mentality here, not just the sheriff’s office, but all the local agencies working together.
Our quality of life, you go 100 miles in any other direction, and I guarantee you people don’t feel as safe as they do here in Chelan and Douglas County. So anyway, just looking forward to proceeding on the next four years.
Morrison: You have to focus back to law enforcement, make sure that we have adequate staffing on the road, I think at times we have three to four people working a shift. It’s not very adequate, especially with PTI. Talking about that we have to have contact, cover, de-escalation, off authority, it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re by yourself. So I mean, it’s usually stressed you need to have one person out there covering you the other one out there contacting. So getting our staffing levels back up.
I think the 46 different departures that we’ve had over the last eight years, just speak volumes about the level of turmoil. I would go even further because if that wasn’t recognized, I mean, we’ve had 13 different appointments at the administrative level, it has never been stable.
Editor’s note: In a follow-up question, Burnett said he’s hired 74 employees during his tenure and 56 have left for various reasons.
Morrison: Well, obviously, we’re going to continue on that thing, as I want to continue to focus we’re going to build our staff back up where we want, we’re going to continue to put a little bit of pressure on, work with the commissioners. I don’t want to be the commissioners, I don’t want to tell them how to do their job. But the relationships that we’ve built with the commissioners, and the leaders here locally, as they know when my team brings them information, it’s accurate to the best of our ability, they trust the knowledge that’s coming forward and then we allow them to make the decision of what’s best for the county to balance that budget.It’s always been up and down. We’ve got new chiefs coming, new chiefs going, new officers coming, new officers going, Well, why don’t we just get back to figuring out why are we having this kind of turnover? Why are we having these kind of issues? And once we stabilize there, we shouldn’t be able to get our focus back to patrolling and doing our primary function. We’re seeing agencies across the nation that are getting rid of their auxiliary programs in order to get the focus back to law enforcement, because the primary function is to be on the road, answer calls, address issues within the community and if we can stabilize that then let’s start expanding back out and see if we can actually fulfill our contracts with the marine patrol.
Any citizens in Chelan see our boat out in the water much this summer? I don’t think so. I’d also ask you to go out there and check how many tickets we wrote — not many. Forest service, we got a previous guy that was out there doing a fine job, we put another one in that has just as much talent and capability to do the job, but we’re pulling him in three to four different directions so he’s not able to go out there and fulfill the contract.
Same deal with our schools. I was a school resource officer, they were asking, Where are you guys at? We’re always covering for training. I agree: We have a great trained agency, but you’re not going to see them out on the road very often because we’re focusing on training.
I don’t think that’s going to help you as citizens very much. So when the calls are going pending, I’ve heard more complaints from citizens since I’ve been out here campaigning: “You guys won’t even respond to our house, you won’t return a phone call and you pretty much tell us there’s nothing you can do about it.” That is 100% unacceptable for an agency.
We handle like probably two to three calls a shift per deputy. We’re not exactly getting our butts handed to us out there. So a lot of time probably spent drinking coffee, instead of coming up with solutions on how can we actually explain why we are not going out there and responding to calls and returning phone calls and dealing with issues. We give excuses and we put our focus back onto our own image and how we look statewide. So I would get back to the basics: law enforcement..
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