Vince Shambaugh says that he wasn’t planning on running for Sheriff of Morgan County, but that every time he made the trip into Berkeley Springs, people would stop him and say — you need to run for Sheriff.
“I can’t come to town without every other person asking me to come back out and run,” Shambaugh told This Week in Morgan County with Russell Mokhiber.
Shambaugh was Morgan County Sheriff between 2008 and 2016.
Why do you think people are asking you to run again?
“I’m not going to bad mouth anybody,” Shambaugh said. “I’m not going to run anybody down.’
“On my record as Sheriff, there was a lot of good things we ended up doing. Indictments were off the charts, drug arrests were off the charts, we were bringing in piles of forfeiture money to better the community.”
“I want to run on what I was when I was Sheriff. I’ve been in a uniform serving this community, serving this nation since pre-puberty, since Cub Scouts. I’m a grassroots guy. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. I’m a blue collar working class guy like the majority of this community is.”
Sheriff Bohrer says he is running on his record of bringing down drug crime.
“We have reduced drug related crime in Morgan County,” Bohrer told This Week in Morgan County. “We have taken out some major drug dealers. Drug overdoses are on the downswing.”
A year ago we interviewed you and you said you were getting 10 to 12 overdose calls to your office a month.
How many calls a month are you getting now?
“Some months we haven’t even had any – they average maybe one a month,” Sheriff Bohrer said.
Sheriff Bohrer oversaw the move of the Sheriff’s office from downtown to behind the Food Lion and the conversion of the old Sheriff’s office to the new 911 communications center.
When Sheriff Bohrer won the election in 2016 for his first term, he ran on “professionalism, accountability and communication.”
“Our staff has attained all of the goals, but there is more work to be done,” Sheriff Bohrer said.
Sheriff Bohrer and Shambaugh will face off in the Republican primary May 12. Republicans and independents can vote in that primary. There is no Democratic Party candidate for Sheriff.