Cerro Gordo sheriff candidates discuss employee recruitment, retention

MASON CITY — Two long-time north-central Iowa law enforcement officers are seeking to be Cerro Gordo County’s next Sheriff. Longtime Cerro Gordo County chief deputy Republican David Hepperly as well as former deputy Democrat Brian Koob will face each other in the November general election for the position.

During this week’s candidate forum presented by the League of Women Voters of North Iowa, Hepperly and Koob were asked about the ongoing problem that law enforcement is seeing nationwide of recruiting new employees and what to do to retain current members of the department.

Koob says Cerro Gordo County is losing out on potential good employees because of salaries of deputies in surrounding counties. “A lot of the surrounding counties around us pay significantly more. If I look at Hancock County, Winnebago County, Mitchell County, they make about $20,000-25,000 more just for a deputy per year than Cerro Gordo County does. We’ve go to start looking at that and what we’re doing and getting them to that section.”

Koob would also implement a better tiered structure of deputy salaries for the department.  “One of my plans would be to put the employees at a certain percentage of the sheriff, and to get those people to those percentages, I would keep my pay frozen until they got there, just to make sure they could get there, and then we could continue to move forward together. I think that way it would be equal. There’s been a gap and a spread between the pay, and I think the employees have spoken, from what I’ve been listening to, and that that gap has increased and that’s one of their concerns.”

Hepperly says the amount of pay deputies make is a concern.   “In our hiring process, we’ve been able to give the new deputy hires that they have experience, we’ve been able to start them at higher rates. That’s helped a little bit, but I do believe that we need to do a lot more than that. Many of the sheriff’s offices in the area have certain percentages that the deputies make as opposed to the sheriff, and then that requires other departments like ours that don’t need to look at ways that we can attract and retain our employees.”

Hepperly says Cerro Gordo County needs to stay competitive when trying to attract new employees for the Sheriff’s Office.   “I just believe that the biggest problem that we’re having right now is that there are just so many departments that are looking for good employees. We’re always looking for different employees in the divisions of the sheriff’s office, if we can do anything as far as making sure that we can pay better, than we can be more competitive with the other sheriff’s offices in the region.”

Current Sheriff Kevin Pals announced at the start of the year that he would not seek another term and that he would be retiring at the end of his current term on December 31st of this year