This commentary was written by Bob Stannard of Manchester, an author, musician and former state legislator and lobbyist.
“Same as it ever was,
Same as it ever was.”
— The Talking Heads
The primary elections are over and the candidates have been chosen for the general elections. In the case of the Bennington County Sheriff’s race, nothing has changed. Well, we can’t say “nothing.” The winner of that race was Officer James Gulley. He beat out Beau Alexander and Joel Howard. The ink was barely dry when Alexander declared that he would be running in the general election as an Independent. Former Democrat Joel Howard has proclaimed that he, too, will run but now as a Republican. He said people asked him to run.
In my experience in politics, you can always find someone who will ask you to run. Your friends asking you to keep running is not a good excuse to do so. The primary criteria for running should be are you being true to yourself or are you running for political expediency? Howard appears to have chosen the latter.
Before I’m attacked for changing parties, I will state that I did change parties 34 years ago. However, I always received the nomination of both parties in the primaries. It’s not clear why Howard is now running as a Republican other than the fact that the Republican Party did not field a candidate for this lower-level race. Changing over works for his new political party, but not for the voters.
Upon losing to Gulley, Howard stated, “Unfortunately, I was tied to the reasons they wanted change.” Those “reasons” for the voters wanting a change were because for over two years the Bennington County Sheriff has been M.I.A. Something happened a couple of years ago that caused our current sheriff, Chad Schmidt, to sell off his real estate holdings in Bennington, pack up and move to Tennessee. There is great speculation as to just what that event was from everything to an FBI bust to other more sordid reasons, but to date no good reason has ever been forthcoming.
Schmidt is still the sheriff and still collecting his rather hefty paycheck. Doing some quick math, while mostly absent from his job he’s been paid in excess of $200,000; maybe a lot more. In Schmidt’s absence, Howard has been left in charge. Regarding Schmidt’s absence, Howard had this to say: “None of us would lie for him,” Howard said of the sheriff’s deputies. “When he’s here, he’s here. When he’s not, he’s not, and we don’t control that. There’s nothing that says he has to be at the office all the time to run the department. When he’s out of town, we’re still in contact with him.”
Seriously? So in other words you can run for sheriff, get elected, move to another state, collect your paycheck, maybe even get another job in your new state and just call in once in a while and that’s OK? Before the primary election, I had a conversation with Howard about his boss’s absence. He told me that Schmidt was in the office about three weeks per month and then gone for a week. When asked when the last time Schmidt had been in the office he said, “He’s here today.” I called Schmidt’s number and went straight to voicemail. I left a message for him to call me as I would be writing another column on this subject. He never called.
I’ve learned that Schmidt has not been in the office for any significant time for the past two years. That tracks with what others have said. From VTDigger: “Schmidt’s last public appearance to be photographed by local media took place in February 2019, when he was sworn in for his third elected term as sheriff.” And “Some town officials complained they hadn’t been able to arrange meetings with him to discuss their security contracts with the sheriff’s department. His agency’s key partners said they hadn’t seen him in person since the spring of 2020.”
Why would Howard say that Schmidt has been coming into the office when no one in Bennington has seen him for two years? Schmidt was seen the week after Labor Day reportedly sporting an FBI hat. Was that a spoof or for real? Who knows? Actually, maybe someone knows and that would be Joel Howard. Howard is not the only person who knows whether or not Schmidt has been doing his job for the past two years. All of the deputies who work there know. The staff knows. Why is no one talking about any of this? Are they being told not to speak out?
No one seems to know, but the voters, correctly, have a sense that something is wrong. They wanted a change in August and voted for someone not affiliated with Chad Schmidt. It will be up to the voters in November to make the changes necessary to clean up this mess of the missing sheriff.
