BEATRICE, Neb. - Residents of Gage County are learning more about their candidates for sheriff.

In a room full of potential voters, candidates Tim Hanson and Spencer Behrends fielded questions from a moderator on issues facing the county and department. Candidate Mike Hager did not attend.

One issue discussed was that of school safety. Behrends, a current deputy and former member of both Dallas and Lincoln Police Departments, said one thing he is have deputies stop at other schools, when the School Resource Officer is occupied.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where we have a school resource deputy at each school,” Behrends said. “We need to encourage our other on duty deputies that if our School Resource Officer is in Adams, we’d encourage the ones that are working to go down to Southern and to (Diller) Odell.”

“We need to assist them [schools] in other areas,” Hanson said. “Things like truancy, misbehavior, problems at home that transfer to the school so we need to have close communication with them. That can be accomplished by having a deputy stop by, because they’re familiar with the face.”

Both candidates were supportive of body cam release footage, pending county attorney approval.

Behrends also emphasized department recruiting, but was intentional in how to do it.

“We need to get our pay higher, it would be nice if our benefits were slightly better,” Behrends said. “We’ve been lucky so far with people not leaving, recently, but I could see that happening for jobs in Lincoln or Omaha, even Lancaster County.”

On the topic of staffing, Hanson, a veteran of the department, said he would have more communication with county officials about department needs.

“I would want to educate the public and other elected officials on why we need additional deputies,” Hanson said. “We also have to educate the county board on why we need this many deputies. We need deputies for this, for that, for evidence collection, perimeter security and we can’t always be calling them in from off duty or night shift to do it.”

Behrends stressed he would be an in-the-field sheriff and would encourage his deputies to do the same.

“If I was elected sheriff, I would be the sheriff out there working, answering calls for service and I would expect everyone else at the office to be Abel to do that and help out,” Behrends said. “This would lessen the burden of overtime and reduce our overtime budget numbers… I think that’s important to your community to see your administration to be able to do that and go out there and work.”

Stories on both the mayor forum as well as a county board seat are still to come.

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