VIENNA — Buddy Thompson, 53, recently outlined some of the policy goals he hopes to achieve if Maries County voters choose him as the next sheriff in the Aug. 5 Republican primary.

Thompson’s first response when asked about his policy goals was one word.

“Transparency,” he said. “Not hiding stuff from people. If there’s a problem, if I screw up, I’ll tell you I screwed up.”

While discussing transparency, Thompson put an emphasis on the budget. He said his 15 years as a business owner at Bud’s Auto in Vienna have prepared him for handling the office’s budget, and he would run the office like he would his business.

“Don’t overspend,” he said. “Show that to the public out here that we stayed within the budget. We didn’t go out and buy a bunch of crazy stuff that we don’t need. There’s been a lot of bad spending going on.”

Thompson noted the Maries County Sheriff’s Posse as a section of the sheriff’s office that did not need any budget allocations. He said if he were elected sheriff, he would eliminate the posse.

“That is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” he said. “Those people are not law enforcement-trained at all. Once you give it that name, it’s an entity in the sheriff’s department. It becomes a liability issue, and we don’t need any more lawsuits.”

Although Thompson plans to end the posse, he would not want to completely discount volunteers working with the sheriff’s office. He discussed his willingness to listen to community members who offer assistance, for example, in the case of a person with dementia who might have wandered away from home.

“If a situation like that arises again, or something else arises, you say ‘Hey, can you help me find this person?’ or ‘Where do I go look for this guy?’ We’ll go look in this hollow down here, or go to this county road over here and look. They know that area like the back of their hands. They grew up there. You use those people to do stuff like that. There are no lawsuits with that.”

As for the Junior Deputy program, which returned to local schools earlier this year with help from the posse, Thompson said he would want deputies teaching the course.

“Why not have your own law enforcement in there because they’re actually qualified if something happens inside of the school while they’re there? Put your officers in there. Why wouldn’t I be in there doing that stuff myself? You would work with Belle PD instead of the county being in there. Work together.”

Thompson said an addition he would like to make to the sheriff’s office would be a secretary to help manage the financial side of the office. The office had one when he was there before.

“She made sure all the bills got paid,” he said. “She made sure the money was coming in and going out. She made sure all the stuff from the court systems got taken care of and she also dispatched. She made sure that the sheriff signed papers that needed to be signed. Basically, she kept him out of trouble. I would want to put someone in that position who had the financial background that could work in that kind of state.”

Over the last few years, the sheriff’s office has received grants for a variety of equipment or improvements. Thompson said he had written grants in the past to receive new vests, but if he became sheriff he would likely rely on someone else to write grants.

“I think my time would be better spent out in the community and making sure that everything is run properly,” he said.

Another goal Thompson shared for the budget would be to keep money spent by the sheriff’s office within the county. He also planned to review the office’s vehicle rotation to determine if it was the most financially responsible option going forward.

“If it’s already set up, and it works, and I can sit down and look at the numbers and say ‘Well, we are saving this much money,’ leave it in effect. I have no issue with that.”

One challenge the next sheriff may need to face is overseeing upgrades to the county jail. Thompson said he suspects the county will need to do something different someday.

“The county is not getting any less populated,” he said. “It gets expensive to house people in other facilities. I don’t know what the county can afford as far as that would go.”

Thompson noted that a bigger jail would mean a need for more staff. He questioned if the county tax base could handle that increase if it somehow found the funding for the jail. He said he had some ideas for where the sheriff’s office could go, including the former bank building located off Highway 63 when entering Vienna from the south.

“They already have the vault there for your evidence,” he said. “With a little bit of work, you could put some offices in there.”

Thompson discussed continuing the jail trusty program and allowing some detainees to volunteer for supervised work around the jail or the community.

“(The jail) is a dungeon,” he said. “They don’t get much daylight. People do stupid stuff, and they’re not bad people. They just messed up. Instead of them sitting in jail all day long, let them earn their keep a little bit.”

Another one of Thompson’s top priorities as sheriff would be to improve the strained relationships between some of the local law enforcement agencies, particularly the sheriff’s office and the Belle Police Department.

“Communication is a huge part of it,” he said. “You just have to sit down with all the heads of those departments and work it out to where it can be one working wheel, basically. Get with the marshal at Belle. Get with the aldermen and the mayor at Belle and let them know that I’m willing to work with them; not trying to control them. And do whatever it takes to make that happen. They’re all taxpayers, so at the end of the day, we have to make sure that the taxpayers in the county are protected no matter here, there, wherever it’s at. They’re all in Maries County.”

Thompson said he has known some of the elected officials for many years. Belle Mayor James “Pudd” Mitchell delivers tires to Thompson’s auto shop.

“He sees me on a weekly basis, and he knows that I work well with him,” Thompson said.

The transition between sheriff administrations will bring changes throughout the sheriff’s office no matter which candidate wins the election.

“There are going to have to be a lot of changes done inside there,” Thompson said about taking over the sheriff’s office. “If I became sheriff, the big changes (the public) would see… they would see me out on the street in Belle. They would see me on the street in Vienna. They would see me out on the roads. I’m going to be one of those types of sheriffs that if I’m driving down the road, and I see a farmer out in a field, I’m going to stop and talk to him because, in the long run, that’s going to help you tremendously down the road.”

Changes in the office would directly affect the people who work there. Thompson acknowledged that going through the changes could be an adjustment for longtime employees, but he planned to get a head start on establishing working relationships with sheriff’s office personnel.

“Some of them know me,” he said. “It’s just going to take time. If I win the election in August, I would hope between August and January to be able to meet with some of them one-on-one and let them know that I’m not out here to replace them. I want to get the problems fixed that are going on and all of us work together as one unit and trust each other to make everything right in the county.”

Thompson said he would begin working on those relationships the day after the election.

“If they want to sit down and have a dinner together, I’ll make them all dinner,” he said. “If you put everybody at a table, there’s no way that you can go back and say ‘Well, he said this and he said that.’ If everybody’s here and we’re all sitting down together, everybody knows what’s said.”

Thompson said he would be open to feedback from personnel who disagreed with some of the changes he would implement.

“The sheriff has the final say so,” he said. “I will look at their ideas and compare them to mine. If their ideas are legal, then okay. If they’re not legal and fair to the community, then I’m not okay with it. They’re going to have to either decide to do things the right way or not be there.”

A possible change in leadership could persuade employees to look for different job opportunities. Thompson said he planned to retain employees at the sheriff’s office by treating them fairly. He said working with the same employee at Bud’s Auto for the last 15 years has helped him develop skills he uses to work with employee needs.

“You have to earn their trust, first, and let them know that you’re there for them,” he said. “It’s the little things that go along that way.”

If the sheriff’s office saw several positions open after the election, Thompson said he would actively recruit to find the right people to serve as replacements.

“I would like to find people that want to live here and stay here,” he said. “If there are people here who have the willingness or the capability of wanting to go to the academy, that want to stay here, that’s what I would like to try to find. The more people we can get that want to stay here, instead of Maries County being a stepping stone for them to go somewhere else, the better off we are.”

Thompson said in the late 1990s when he was a full-time deputy at the sheriff’s office, the county only had four full-time deputies plus the sheriff. He said he was unsure of how many deputies would be the right number for the county without knowing the call logs, but he would like to get the county proper coverage while providing time off for the staff and staying within the payroll budget.

More of Thompson’s candidate interview will appear in next week’s edition featuring topics such as his plans for handling drug cases, choosing a chief deputy and why he changed party affiliation.