One of the five Dallas County elected offices up for grabs in the November general election is the county attorney’s, and two candidates — one Democrat and one Republican — met Wednesday’s 5 p.m. deadline for filing nomination papers for spots on the ballots in the June primary election. No Libertarian candidate sought nomination.
Five-term incumbent Dallas County Attorney Wayne Reisetter, a Democrat from Adel, is running unopposed in the primary but will face a Republican challenger in the fall in the person of Assistant Dallas County Attorney Charles Sinnard.
Reisetter has a background in law enforcement, having served in the Urbandale Police Department prior to graduating from Drake University Law School. He was first hired as an assistant county attorney by former Dallas County Attorney David J. Welu and also worked under former Dallas County Attorney William R. Byers before Reisetter was elected in 1998.
“We’ve seen a lot of change in Dallas County,” Reisetter said, reflecting on his two decades in office. “Obviously, the growth in the county has caused the office to change, not only to grow in size but also to change in complexity as the kinds of issues that we face both in the criminal courts and outside the criminal courts, in advising public officials and in helping the county figure out how to move forward through a wide variety of issues.”
Reisetter said his office has gradually acquired more advisory functions, particularly in his role as legal counsel for the Dallas County Board of Supervisors. He said his job “has changed quite a bit from primarily being another prosecutor who has responsibility for the other staff to being involved in all kinds of other matters outside of the prosecution of crimes. So it’s a wealth of experience that I’ve developed over time and a wealth of education as I’ve undertaken to learn more formally about the wide variety of issues the county faces and how the county attorney can help the county through those issues.”
Reisetter predicts his office will continue to face new challenges peculiar to a fast-growing county as well as innovations in the methods of prosecuting crime.
“Looking forward,” he said, “we expect to continue both with the growth and with the change in complexity of legal matters. It’s an ever-changing world, it seems, even with what we might call common criminal matters or routine or regular criminal matters. There’s always new ways of looking at things and new challenges to how we approach the prosecution of crime and look to keep our community safe and secure and a place to build.”
A growing county means a growing caseloads for the county attorney’s office, but Reisetter said his office is “adequately staffed at this time. We continue to have a good dialogue with the county board of supervisors and continue to look at other resources where we can find staffing.”
Predicting his office’s staffing needs 12 to 18 months in advance calls for a kind of prophetic touch.
“If I think I’m going to need to add a prosecutor or some other specialized assistant for a legal matter a year and a half from now,” he said, “I have had to have already looked into that crystal ball and divined how we’re going to grow and how those needs can be met in the meantime.”
The county attorney’s office is mainly conditioned by limits to the county budget, but the Iowa Legislature’s cuts to the budget of the state judiciary also has indirect effects on work in the Reisetter’s office.
“While the state budget directly affects things like courts and the provision of judges and court staff,” he said, “that will impact us in some manner if they continue to be challenged in that area. Right now, the Dallas County courts are a judge short and, as I understand it, they won’t fill that position. So that has some impact on how full our courts are and how we can get cases into court.”
Reisetter said the legislature’s movement this year toward eliminating backfill funding to counties, originally intended to compensate them for the 2013 cuts to commercial and industrial property taxes, could also affect his office’s budget, but the county’s rapidly growing tax base might soften that blow.
Seeking the Republican nomination to run against Reisetter in the fall is Charles Sinnard of Urbandale. An Iowa native, Sinnard graduated from the Montezuma Community High School, took a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and earned his J.D. from Drake University Law School.
Sinnard has served since 2000 as an Assistant Dallas County Attorney in Reisetter’s office. He is the only candidate seeking his party’s nomination in June. After contemplating standing for the county attorney office for some time, he said the time now is right.
“I’d always thought about someday running for county attorney,” Sinnard said. “My son graduated from high school last year, and my wife and I are empty-nesters now. I had some people recently asking me about and just decided that this is the right time, and so I’ve thrown my hat into the ring.”
There are seven assistant county attorneys in the office plus the county attorney himself, Sinnard said, and more than half the county’s prosecutors have been with the office nearly 20 years. As the fastest growing county in the state, Dallas County has a caseload that is steadily increasing, and an experienced and well trained staff is crucial to managing the volume of work, he said.
“We certainly have a significant volume of cases,” Sinnard said. “I think one of the benefits of having a seasoned staff, an experienced staff of attorneys and support people, is that we’ve been able to manage that pretty well, and I think we can continue to manage that. So my focus is on keeping those experienced and seasoned employees with the Dallas County Attorney office.”
Sinnard does not stint in praising his fellow county attorneys, including Reisetter, First Assistant Dallas County Attorney Jeannine R. Gilmore and his fellow assistant attorneys.
“Wayne and I have worked together for virtually my entire career,” he said. “He’s been a good boss. We share a lot of the same philosophies. I guess my approach to this has been that change is going to come to the Dallas County Attorney office. He won’t always be county attorney. I felt the time was right for me, so it’s a matter of, I think, continuing to manage the exponential growth that we’ve seen here in Dallas County. We continue to be one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, the fastest growing in Iowa. That growth presents a lot of challenges as far as additional caseloads for law enforcement and my office. Technological innovation is also going forward. We’ve managed so far, but there’s still transitions to be made there with the electronic filing system through the courts and just the use of technology in courtrooms as far as my job is concerned. So having a vision going forward of where we’re going and managing that type of growth and new technologies is certainly going to be a focus for me.”
While the eight-person legal team is managing the workload at present, the growth of the county’s population is bound to press more and more on their resources.
“It’s always a constant battle,” he said, “especially with the growth that we have here, to keep pace with it. It could become an issue at any time certainly.”
The deadline for filing was Wednesday at 5 p.m. at the Dallas County Auditor’s office. Nominees for the Republican and Democratic primary elections needed at least 100 signatures to qualify for a spot on the Dallas County ballot. Libertarian candidates needed 35 signatures.
