VIENNA — Belle Police Department Sgt. Mark Morgan, 46, outlined some of his vision for the Maries County Sheriff’s as he campaigns for the Republican nomination for sheriff in the Aug. 5 primary.

Morgan said one of his policy goals is separating the jail and dispatch centers, which both occupy the courthouse basement and share staff.

“We have gotten away with that for far too long,” he said. “We’ve asked too much for our staff down there. If you look at all of our surrounding counties, if you look at their dispatch centers, if you look at how their jails are run, nobody does that anymore. And to have one person down there, and a lot of the times during the day they have two, but to have one person down there at any given time being responsible for supervising all the inmates -- that means the male inmates on the bottom floor and the female inmates on the top floor -- plus dealing with answering phone calls, administration calls, 911 calls, dispatching fire, EMS, police deputies. And of course, while all that’s going on, all this stuff is supposed to be notated in a computer. It’s really too much for one person.”

Morgan’s plan would not require the dispatch center to move far away. It would not even leave the courthouse basement.

“The majority of our communication system is rooted in the (sheriff’s office) conference room,” he said. “I would like to kind of separate the whole dispatch center, move it back there, even put a wall up back there in the conference room and dedicate that to our communication center. Then the front office up there would be our jail. All our cameras and stuff are already routed in that area. All they would do up there is supervise and take care of inmates. And that would be their sole focus.”

Morgan said he believes separating the jail supervision from the duties of dispatchers would help minimize the county and sheriff office’s liability.

“They have so many things they have to do,” Morgan said about jail employees. “They’re responsible for those people back there seven days a week, 24 hours a day. If there’s a medical emergency, they need to be on top of that. If they’re administering prescription drugs or any medicine, all that stuff needs to be documented. And all that stuff is nonstop.”

One challenge the next sheriff may need to face is overseeing upgrades to the county jail. Morgan said his short-term plan for improvements to the jail would be to have focused jail staff. He also said the sheriff’s office needs to look at capping the number of detainees housed in the jail at any given time because it has had overcrowding issues in the past.

“We’re just going to have to bite the bullet, and we’re going to have to budget a certain amount of money to use to send them to other jails that do have room,” he said. “There’s an added expense to that, but I think when you’re talking about safety and minimizing liability, which is really what our primary roles as administrators are, I think we don’t have a choice.”

Morgan acknowledged that the physical problems with the jail have been ongoing for some time.

“We’ve been putting Band-Aids on it for years,” he said. “There’s just only so much you can do with it. The structure is out of date. I think long-term, a regional jail between Gasconade and Osage and Maries County would be the most likely avenue to upgrade because they all have the same problem. Gasconade County, they don’t have a jail. Osage County, I read an article in the paper a few months back that their commissioners were having issues with the standards of the jail. That leads me to believe that they have similar issues up there, so I think the biggest solution would be a regional jail somewhere over in the middle where all of our counties connect.”

The sheriffs and commissioners of the three counties met as recently as March 2023 to discuss the possibility of a regional jail though questions such as cost and location kept talks from progressing past the initial meeting. Morgan doubted that Maries County could fund a jail on its own.

“(Jails) are so expensive, and it’s such a burden to the taxpayer,” he said. “But that would definitely be a long-term plan and something you’d have to get all three counties on board with.”

Another priority Morgan discussed was improving the relationships between local law enforcement agencies.

“We need to get our law enforcement in the county all working together on the same page,” he said. “I keep preaching ‘One team, one fight,’ and that’s really the kind of mindset we have to have going forward with the Vienna Police Department and the Belle Police Department and the sheriff’s office. We all need to be one team instead of having all these problems between each other.”

Morgan said his strategy for improving those relationships as sheriff would be to work closely with the Vienna police chief and the Belle marshal.

“I already know the Belle marshal really well,” he said. “I know the chief here in Vienna really well.”

While working with other agency leaders, Morgan said he plans to further strengthen their bonds with consolidated training.

“That’s one of the biggest ways to build a team, or to build that camaraderie, is working together,” he said. “Training together. If we do a range, let’s all do a range, and not just I’m dictating we’re doing a range (or) we’re doing this training. No, I want to reach out to the marshal. I want to reach out to the chief. And I want to be like ‘Hey, what kind of training do you guys think we need to work on this year?’”

Morgan repeated his mantra for bringing unity to local law enforcement.

“Once again, we all train together,” he said. “We all work together. We all fight together. It brings us all together. It turns us into one team instead of this whole individual mindset that we have going on.”

Morgan said his biggest concern with the sheriff’s office is the budget.

“I think we’ve wasted a lot of money in this past year,” he said. “I think we need to tighten up our budget a little bit. I know that they budgeted $80,000 for improvements to that property over there (at Highway 28 and Route Z). It’s just a staggering amount of money. When I think about $80,000 being budgeted, we’re talking a couple of extra deputies there. I’m not understanding.”

Morgan said that during his campaign, one of the most frequent concerns he has heard from the public is that they want to see sheriff’s deputies patrolling their parts of the county more often.

“A lot of the residents on the west side of the county feel like they’ve been neglected by the sheriff’s office,” he said. “One of the biggest challenges is we have a large county and sometimes we only have one deputy to cover it, so it’s hard for that one deputy to be everywhere. My thought process is if we got this amount of money to spend $80,000 on improvements to a property for a gun range when we already have a gun range that we can use here in town, I just think that I would like to have more deputies if we have that much of an abundance of funds.”

Morgan said ideally the sheriff’s office would have enough staff to keep two deputies on duty overnight. He said doing that would keep one person from covering the whole county.

“I’m a big advocate of having a zone coverage kind of thing where you assign a deputy to, say, the west side of the county, like Highway 63 could kind of be the dividing line,” he said. “I think that will further the community policing mindset. I have found that working in the police departments in smaller towns that people want to know their law enforcement officers. They want to know their police officers. They want to know them by name, not just some random guy with a badge that just happens to be coming through their neighborhood. I think that’s one of the biggest areas that we need to improve on, and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of people I’ve spoken with in the county about that.”

Morgan said he planned to find and retain employees by demonstrating a strong leadership presence.

“Staff want a good leader,” he said. “They want to see the sheriff. They want to see that he isn’t just all talk and leads by example. If they’re doing a saturation, they want to see the sheriff out there on a DUI saturation. If they’re doing a jail sweep, the staff, they want to see the sheriff down there doing a jail sweep. They want to see the sheriff in the dispatch office. It’s not just a title alone. That’s how you really lead and motivate people and mentor people, and that really brings the staff together.”

Although elections sometimes cause turnover in government offices, Morgan said he did not expect a need to fill many positions if he took over as sheriff.

“I believe that they would have an open mind,” he said about the sheriff’s office staff. “Most of them know me.”

If positions did open up, Morgan said the office would work from within or rely on mutual aid from other agencies to help fill in the gap until the sheriff’s office could get fully staffed. He said building a good reputation in the community can help the office fill positions locally.

Morgan said his time as an 88M in the United States Army helped prepare him to handle a budget like he would as sheriff.

“I was responsible for a ton of high-value assets, ordinances, ammunition,” he said. “The money had already been spent, but as far as how it’s been divvied up these resources. In the military, you’re not necessarily thinking about dollars. You’re thinking about resources.”

Morgan also addressed concerns about the Maries County Sheriff’s Posse and its effect on the budget.

“I don’t really understand a rural sheriff’s office hosting two rodeos,” he said. “With the problems we have in our jail and the problems with not having enough deputies on the road, why would we be spending that kind of money to do rodeos?”

Morgan criticized the posse’s name.

“The name is a big problem,” he said. “I think it draws a negative connotation from a lot of people because a lot of people envision people carrying guns that are not sworn. That are not certified. That have not been through adequate training to be doing this. I don’t like people that are walking around wearing shirts that say ‘sheriff’ on them. If you go up to somebody that has a badge, or a shirt that says ‘sheriff,’ I want you to be speaking to a sworn peace officer, not someone that’s just volunteering.”

Morgan said the posse includes good people “who do not care about politics.” He said he could see the posse continuing if he becomes sheriff, but if it did, it would be under new branding that emphasized that they are volunteers.

“People that just want to go out and help out with, say, searching for a lost child or something along those lines, I’m all for that. But I’m highly opposed to this whole posse mindset and a lot of the negative stuff that comes along with that. I’m a big fan of volunteers (and) people wanting to give back. But if you look at that person, I want you to know that person is a volunteer. They’re here for search and rescue, or they’re here just to help out however we need them, and if you look at this person over here that’s wearing a badge or anything that says ‘sheriff’ on it, that they’re a sworn peace officer.”

Morgan said he was unsure if he would keep the posse’s divisional structure. When asked more specifically about the posse’s school division, he said he wants people going into schools to be sworn peace officers rather than volunteers. However, he would accept help from volunteers in teaching the Junior Deputy program in local schools, which the posse helped do earlier this year.

“Junior Deputy is an awesome program,” he said. “Anything that is going to get somebody in the schools interacting with the kids. Sometimes that’s those kids’ first interaction with law enforcement.”

Morgan said one of the changes people can expect if he becomes sheriff is availability.

“You’re going to be able to find your sheriff,” he said. “If you go down to the sheriff’s office between Monday or Friday, especially during normal business hours, and you want to speak to the sheriff, unless I’m out sick or unless I’m on vacation or something, you’re going to be able to talk to your sheriff.”

Morgan shared another personal motto: “Lead from the front.”

“Your staff wants to see you,” he said. “The staff wants to see you leading. They want your presence to be there. It’s really a morale killer for a guy to be elected and be in charge and be responsible for all this but hardly ever see him.”

Next week’s edition will include more of Morgan’s interview featuring topics such as drug policing, choosing a chief deputy and how Morgan demonstrates the honesty, integrity and accountability described in his campaign materials.