As sheriff, Hove strives to do more with less

• Nancy Hove

Nancy Hove

Talk about it

Although the department’s budget is a top concern for Pierce County Sheriff Nancy Hove, talking about it raises another concern for her.

“Where we’re going as a community as a whole” is a leading issue identified by the candidate for reelection as sheriff in the Tuesday, Nov. 2, general election.

Priorities in the community and government continue to be addressed, Hove said, yet there’s a prevailing expectation more must be done with less.

“Sometimes it shows,” she said, understanding an overburdening of taxpayers needs to be avoided while a demand for services is increasing.

The budget is definitely the “greatest hurdle” for the sheriff’s office in the future, she said, mindful a larger department is inevitable. The crime rate keeps going up and there are additional disasters to handle, such as this summer’s floods. Even the motorcycle flood runs and other events, despite being “nice to see” because they bring in tourism, cause the department to get busier.

Especially when economic times are tough, this poses a dilemma, the candidate said.

“Sooner or later, we’re going to need more people,” she said, describing dealing with the resulting overtime and other expenses as “one of my biggest challenges.”

Today’s economic situation has also impacted a solution to the antiquated county jail, Hove said. She acknowledged the cost to build a new jail “isn’t cheap…and it’s something nobody wants to pay for,” sympathetic with a reluctance to “pay for people who do wrong things.”

Nonetheless, quite a few prisoners are being housed outside of Pierce County—so many that the county is paying for Dunn and Pepin county jails, she said. So there’s the expense of one-half million dollars a year on housing prisoners elsewhere.

She said she’s worked with Judge Joe Boles in an attempt to get programs to “relieve some of this pain” and with her own programs “to see if I can make it better.”

Over $2 million in grants have been written during her tenure to help the taxpayers, taking “a load off of their pocketbooks” and still running the department as efficiently as possible, she said of accomplishments. She believes it’s a good department, though it doesn’t always have an ideal number of officers.

“Hopefully, as time goes on, we can build on that,” she said.

The dispatcher/ jailers presently on staff enjoy doing both roles, Hove feels, so for them to have to make a choice between the two due to a split will be tough. But someday the division in their jobs will happen; all of these personnel are simply too busy, as the workload has gotten to be “too much,” considering the number of people now in jail.

She’s aware the state jail inspector favors such a split, she said, for the safety of the employees and the people in jail. Yet, she’s convinced it won’t occur until there’s a new building. There’s no short-term solution, with money being a factor in this regard, too.

The candidate asserted morale in the department has been “pretty good” and, to keep it up, she said a lot is about showing positive reinforcement, besides being fair and honest with the employees. To increase the value of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, she’d like to see more time spent in the middle and high schools, though realizes the hours of any one officer are limited. Beyond a presence in the kindergarten through fifth grades, the former DARE officer indicated specialized training in areas such as computerized bullying is already going on in the higher grades, as is DARE mentoring. The latter not only helps the younger students to learn, but provides them with role models in the older mentors.

Hove, who hobby farms with her husband, Jason, in Plum City, said she loves what she does. She enjoys the challenges of dealing with others who’ve done either the right thing or wrong thing, and is rewarded when she can be any help at all. She appreciates the people here and labeled the community as “awesome.”

For more information about Hove’s candidacy, click on this link:nancyhoveforsheriff.com

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Background

Name: Nancy Hove

Age: 44

Address: Hager City

Occupation: Currently Pierce County sheriff

Clubs, organizations, civic involvement: DARE. Badger Sheriffs

Family: Husband Jason, parents Judy and the late Jim Ortwerth

Education: 1984 Ellsworth High School graduate, Hibbing (Minn.) Technical and Community College, Associate degree in law enforcement, many other accredited courses throughout 20 years in law enforcement

Tags: pierce county elections, elections