By MARK COWLING | Casa Grande Dispatch
APACHE JUNCTION — A retired Pennsylvania state police commissioner and former Apache Junction police chief is running in the Pinal County Supervisors’ District 5.
A Republican, Glenn Walp is challenging incumbent Supervisor Todd House in the Aug. 30 primary election for the board seat in the Apache Junction and Gold Canyon region of the county. Walp said he decided to make his first run for office after seeing some things in government that bothered him and thinking he can do better.
“I’m saying you need people in there who have the background, who have the education and the knowledge and know how to run a budget. … They failed. We’re in a calamity now,” Walp said.
“… I just feel the county is at a juncture that it needs someone that has the ability to take it to the future. I think there are things they’re doing wrong.” For example, ”They made a crucial error in the ICE contract” for holding federal inmates at the jail, Walp said.
After county officials learned through an audit that they were losing money on the deal, they asked to renegotiate their contract with the federal government. Federal officials asked them to wait because the federal budget was under sequestration at the time.
“(But) the supervisors said no. We’re going to play hardball. We’ll give you X-amount of days and if you don’t come back with a contract, the contract’s going to end. It was the proverbial cut off your nose to spite your face-type thing.”
When the sequester was over, ICE went elsewhere and is paying $102 per inmate per day, after paying the county $59. “And all ICE said was, ‘Stand by, we’ll negotiate with you,’” Walp said. “That $102 could’ve been ours.” He continued that the county needed that revenue stream, because it was using $9 million of it annually to pay off bonds on three buildings.
Walp said making equal cuts across the board is the simplest, and it would seem the fairest, way — “it’s the easy way and no one’s mad at us” — but it doesn’t serve the people.
Furthermore, “There is a war going on between the supervisors and the sheriff’s department, and the only winners are criminals. The losers are law-abiding citizens.
“There’s no problem having disagreement. And when you’re in charge of the money, you don’t give away the farm. You do what is correct. But you don’t get in a war with someone where it begins to affect the deputies, it affects the detention officers, it affects the civilian employees. Ultimately it affects the citizens.
“If I’m elected — I’ll make it very clear — I will end the war the day I’m elected. I’ve been in law enforcement all my life. I know what works and what doesn’t work. And I don’t get in these penny-ante wars. And it is a war. You read about it in the papers. It’s a constant thing. It has to end. It’s sophomoric, high school-ish. It’s gotta end, and I will end it,” Walp said.
