Nine things.
All of them checkable.

Open the books on the jail

Publish a plain monthly jail report: population, average daily population, medical spend, overtime, and transport cost. Right now nobody can tell you what the jail actually costs. That is the honest gap, and closing it costs nothing but discipline. A Sheriff who cannot tell you what his own jail's medical exposure is cannot manage it.

Finish the capital list that is already on the record

In April 2026 the Sheriff's department report to the Law Enforcement Committee listed security camera issues, the transport van and vehicles, the Humvee, and the jail and Sheriff's Office floors. Every one of those is a liability item as much as a maintenance item. Cameras in a jail are evidence. A failed camera during a use-of-force or an in-custody medical event is the difference between a defensible county and a settlement. Failing floors in a correctional facility are a jail-standards exposure. Transport vans are how inmates get to court and to medical, and transport failures drive overtime and missed court dates. I will finish that list, with a written condition-and-priority document so the board is choosing from facts instead of from whoever asks loudest.

Target the one trend that is actually rising

Theft from motor vehicles went 39, 46, 41, 84, 160 across 2021 to 2025, roughly four times the 2023 level, and the shape of that trend is genuine. This is a rural-county, unlocked-vehicle, night-time property crime problem, and it is the crime your neighbors actually experience. The response is directed patrol on the hours and townships where it is happening, plus a straightforward public push on locked vehicles and firearms removed from cars. Measurable, cheap, and it does not require a single new position.

Fix the county's reporting picture

Some municipal agencies in this county have stopped reporting to the state's crime reporting system entirely, and at least one reported a single offense for an entire year. That means the county's crime picture has holes in it. You cannot deploy against data you do not have, and you cannot win competitive grants without it. The county's largest law enforcement agency should be the one convening the municipal chiefs to close those gaps.

Bring in outside money instead of asking for more county money

The Sheriff's Office and the jail already run about 38.48% of county expenditures, and recent county revenue growth leans on sources that will not repeat. The alternative to raising the Sheriff's share is bringing in money that is not the county's. This is not a theory for me: I have already built the federal grant capability: a UEI, an active SAM registration, and GATA registration. That machinery exists and it comes with me.

I have also done it once already, at my own expense. I built the county's emergency management system at mcema.us and its internal Resilience portal, and donated both to Marion County outright. Between them they carry the Emergency Operations Plan, hazard mitigation planning, grant assistance, and the county's public information and reporting system. The county pays nothing for any of it. That is the standard I intend to hold the Sheriff's Office to: find the capability, bring it in, and do not hand the taxpayer the bill for it twice.

Answer the phone, and work the crash

Response time in the outer townships is the complaint I hear most, and it is a fair one. Village boards and residents tell me two things over and over. First, it takes too long for a deputy to arrive. Second, people sit on the side of a road after an accident for hours waiting on a State Trooper while a deputy drives by. That ends. If a deputy is on scene, the deputy works the crash. I am not going to promise more deputies I cannot fund. I am going to publish response times by township, be measured on them, and then make the case for changing coverage with real numbers.

There is a third thing I hear, and it does the most damage. People tell me they called about something real and were told it is a civil issue. Sometimes that answer is correct, and saying so honestly is part of the job. But it has become a way to end a phone call rather than a conclusion somebody actually reached. A person hears it, hangs up, and never finds out whether anyone looked. That is how a department loses a county's trust, one call at a time.

My standard is simple. If a matter is civil, the caller gets told why, what would change that answer, and who can actually help. The call still gets documented, so a resident can ask six months later what happened and get an answer, and a supervisor can see how often that phrase is used and by whom. The same goes for calls nobody disputes are criminal. I hear about burglaries where hours went by, and thefts where the caller never heard another word. A burglary victim standing in a house somebody else has been through is not a low priority call. Where the delay is real staffing math, I will show the numbers instead of making excuses at the counter. Where it is triage habit or a report that went nowhere, it is fixable now, without a dollar of new county money.

What I commit to: every criminal complaint gets a report number and a named deputy responsible for it. Victims get a call back with the status, good news or not, because hearing "we have nothing" from a person beats silence. A supervisor reviews a case before it closes as inactive, and the reason gets written down. Response times get published by township. I am not going to pretend this makes everyone happy. Some nights there are three calls and one deputy, and I will not insult anybody by promising otherwise. But there is a lot of room between what people are getting now and what taxpayers are entitled to expect, and most of what closes that gap is professional standards and follow-through, not budget.

Remove every county-owned Flock camera

As Sheriff, I will call for the removal of every Flock license plate camera owned by Marion County, timed to the contract terms so the county pays no additional fees to get out. A network that photographs every passing car, stores where residents drive, and shares it through a vendor's system is not something this county should be paying to own. The people of Marion County have made clear they are strongly against this tool. That money goes back to the county's priorities.

The cameras do not come back on my say-so. Once this office has 100% compliance on its jail audits, strong written policies, and grants awarded and performing, I will ask to put the question on the ballot so Marion County voters decide. If they approve, cameras go only on the main roads into the county, to catch outside criminals coming here to harm our residents. Marion County's data stays with Marion County unless a probable cause request form is provided. Every flagged inquiry is reviewed by supervisors, administrators, and civilian oversight through the Chair of the County Board's Law Enforcement Committee. Each quarter the public gets searches run, stops that resulted, and crimes charged.

Until those cameras come down, and for any plate search this office runs through another agency's system, the rules are in writing and enforced. Every search tied to a case number and a stated criminal purpose, entered before the search runs and not written in afterward. Audit logging on by default, reviewed monthly by a supervisor who did not run the searches, because self-auditing is not auditing. A plain quarterly summary published: how many searches, how many were flagged, and what happened to the ones that were. Repeat lookups on the same plate with no case attached get looked at every time, because that is what personal misuse actually looks like in the logs. A defined retention limit that the system enforces on its own rather than one that depends on good intentions.

And the people checking the system cannot all work for the Sheriff. Civilian oversight goes through the County Board's Law Enforcement Committee: the monthly audit findings and the quarterly summary get reported to that committee in open session, where residents can hear them. The committee gets the underlying audit records for any flagged search when it asks, with uninvolved drivers' information redacted. Every confirmed misuse finding is reported to the committee, not handled quietly inside the department. The people who pay for this system deserve their own elected representatives looking at how it is used.

On sharing, until the cameras are removed, I will review the current contracts myself and set the network so this county's data goes to Marion County agency account holders. Not out-of-state agencies, and no federal fishing trips through a vendor default nobody here ever voted on. Where an outside agency has a legitimate case need, it comes with the written declaration state law already requires and it gets logged like everything else. And the consequence gets stated out loud before anyone needs it: running this system on somebody for personal reasons is a firing offense and, where it fits, a criminal referral. Deputies deserve to know the rule, and residents deserve to know it is enforced.

Recruit veterans and their families to Marion County

Vacancies are what overtime actually is. Every unfilled deputy and corrections officer slot gets paid for anyway, at time and a half, out of the same county budget. The fastest lawful way to close those slots is to recruit where qualified, vetted, drug-tested, background-checked people separate from the service every single month. Military police, corrections specialists, and combat arms NCOs already do a version of both of these jobs.

I will work the Department of War transition programs at Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine installations, the SkillBridge and transition-assistance pipeline, and the Coast Guard's own transition program, which runs under Homeland Security rather than the War Department and gets skipped by recruiters for exactly that reason. Same packet, same offer, and put Marion County in front of service members while they are still on active duty. Our packet goes with them: open Sheriff's Office and county positions, patrol and jail, Illinois veterans benefits they have earned, and a straight answer on what it takes to get hired here. A soldier six months from ETS should be able to know Marion County wants him before he has to guess where to go next.

The state already gave us the tool, and almost nobody is using it. Public Act 103-623 created 55 ILCS 5/3-6008.5, effective January 1, 2025. A veteran under 38 U.S.C. 101(2), discharged honorably or generally under honorable conditions, may request an examination before the next scheduled test date, and once they pass, the statute says they shall be immediately placed on the eligibility list. That part is mandatory. The same act reached every county hiring structure at once: the Sheriff's own deputies under 3-6008.5, the county police and corrections tracks under 3-7008, and merit commission certification under 3-8010. Marion County does not need a commission's permission to use it. The Sheriff can implement it by written office policy.

Here is the honest part. The General Assembly pulled the teeth before passage. The introduced bill required the veteran be examined within two weeks. The version that became law says only that they may be examined "as soon as possible." There is no enforceable deadline left, which is exactly why it has to be a published standard instead of a hope. What I will put in writing, with no appropriation and no new authority:

• A published veteran examination request form, available online and at the office, for deputy and corrections openings alike.
• A stated time-to-test standard the office is measured on, the two weeks the legislature abandoned, adopted voluntarily as policy.
• The six-month window defined in plain words: within six months of separation. The statute's wording is ambiguous, and an applicant should never lose a fast track to a drafting error.
• A stated military preference point value. County law preserves preference but sets no number, unlike the municipal statutes. If it is not written down it does not exist.
• Immediate eligibility list placement on passing, as the statute requires, and a published count of how many veterans requested, tested, and were hired.

One calendar note, so nobody is surprised: Public Act 104-578 rewrites 3-7008 effective January 1, 2027. Corrections officers and non-police deputies drop to age 18, police officers stay at 21, or 20 with two years of law enforcement studies, and corrections probation goes to at least fifteen months, and no appointee carries a firearm or exercises arrest powers until 21. Our hiring policy will be written to that calendar, not the old one.

And recruiting a veteran is recruiting a family. The people I am going after are not just filling a shift. They are deciding where to start the rest of their life after service. When a separating sergeant picks Marion County, we get a spouse who works here, kids in Centralia, Salem, Odin, and Kinmundy schools, a household buying groceries and a home and paying into the tax base that funds every one of these departments. Our population has been going the wrong direction for a long time, and a shrinking county is a budget problem before it is anything else. Most rural counties compete for the same shrinking pool of applicants. Almost nobody goes to the installations and makes the case for the whole life, not just the job. We will.

And the workforce that comes with them is already trained on somebody else's budget. Discipline, clearances, medical and logistics and communications experience, people who have operated under pressure and been held accountable for it. That is a caliber of applicant this office cannot afford to grow from scratch and does not have to.

This is not charity for veterans. It is the cheapest staffing fix on the table, and it gets people who have already been vetted into their next uniform while the sense of purpose is still intact, which is the window that matters most.

Fix the jail

The state inspects our jail every year. In five straight inspections, 2021 through 2025, it failed the rule that officers personally check on every person in custody at least every 30 minutes. It has improved, from 56% on time to 94%, but it has never passed. In four of those five inspections, the jail could not produce a current commissary audit. A jail our size would expect fewer than one death in four years. Marion County has had at least three since 2022.

Here is what I will do as Sheriff:

• Treat the 30-minute check as non-negotiable, with supervisors reviewing the logs every shift.
• Post every state inspection report where you can read it, the week it arrives.
• Get the commissary audit done on time, every year.
• Work with nonprofits to set up a crisis response and narcotics peer-support team that makes contact inside the jail.

That last one matters to me. We should not wait until drug court, or any court date, to reach someone. The time to make contact is when a person is at their lowest, and the right person to make it is someone who can relate, someone who may be able to lend a hand up in the time of need and help our brothers and sisters back to their feet. Sometimes it will work. Sometimes it will not. But we will try, because these deaths cannot continue.

Read the full plan to pass the state inspection, step by step.

Source: Illinois Department of Corrections annual jail inspection reports, Marion County, 2021 through 2025 (2025 report, 2024 report).