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Community Profile: Sherriff Sheila Prue
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Community Profile
by Euan Bear
It was a close race, with the winner pulling out a victory by only 261 votes. “It was close on 3 a.m. when the final tally came in,” said the winning candidate in a phone interview a few days post-election. Sheila Prue will be sworn in as the first female sheriff of Windham County on February 1, 2003 – barring recount results that might erase the winning margin. She’ll have one gender peer in Vermont – Grand Isle County’s Connie Allen, who ran unopposed. The two women are the first female sheriffs in Vermont’s history. The fact that Prue is a lesbian never openly entered the campaign.
Prue beat Republican Henry Farnum, who had been appointed last February by Governor Howard Dean to fulfill the term of retiring Sheriff William Graham. As of press time, Farnum had requested the recount, saying he owed it to the voters. Farnum has also suggested that Prue is unqualified.
Prior to the general election contest, Prue earned the right to compete for the office when she beat two other men in the Democratic primary by large margins. On primary day, both of those men agreed not to run independent campaigns in the general election. Dennis Mathieu reneged on that promise and ran as an independent. Claude Weyant, the other primary candidate, decided to launch a write-in campaign less than a week before the election. Both trailed far behind in vote totals.
When I met Sheila Prue and Kris Gaudiniere, her partner of eight years, at the bakery they owned (then in the process of being sold) on the Friday before the election, Prue was upbeat and fairly confident, eager to explain some of the initiatives she hoped to lead the Sheriff’s department into. The door of the bakery displayed a big wanted poster: Wanted: Sheila for Sheriff.
Prue, a compactly built gray-haired 49-year-old, grew up in Bennington, Vermont, and joined the army after being turned down for jobs with the Bennington police force. She served seven years as a member of the Military Police, including a stint guarding Cubans released from Castro’s jails to take part in the Marièl boatlift.
When Prue left the army, she applied to the Brattleboro Police Department and was hired. After four years, she earned a promotion to sergeant, the rank she left 14 years later. After leaving the police force, she and her partner bought the Upper Crust Bakery, tucked away in the Harmony parking lot behind the buildings lining Brattleboro’s steep Main Street.
“Being away from law enforcement has really helped me get a different perspective on people,” Prue said in our interview. “Especially the kids, like the ones who hang out here or in the parking lot. It’s very different being able to get to know them out of uniform. They’re not as defensive, particularly the kids.”
She and Gaudiniere have three daughters between them, so of course they have a deep concern about the kids. The issue came up almost as soon as we sat down in the Mole’s Eye View, a bar and restaurant across the parking lot from the bakery.
“My top priority is children, their safety,” Prue began. “You probably know that I’ve pledged that any direct campaign contributions I receive are going to the Child Locator Program. I want our county to be the model program for the state.”
Kris Gaudiniere is equally invested in bringing the program to Windham County. “We get grant money to set it up and buy the bracelets,” she eagerly explained. “It means building cell towers to transmit the location of any child wearing a bracelet.”
Any parent who wishes would enroll their child in the program and equip the child with a locator bracelet with a personalized code. The bracelet would have a ‘panic button’ the child could push when he or she is in trouble, or that would automatically emit a signal when the bracelet was being tampered with. Or a parent might notify the sheriff’s department that a child is missing, and the sheriff’s computer program would display, on request, the location of the bracelet whose code is entered into the program. The object is to keep track of runaways and children who have been abducted, Prue explained.
I asked whether child abduction and runaways were a serious and frequent issue in Windham County. “Runaways are more of a problem than child abductions,” Prue acknowledged.
Another project Prue is proposing was characterized by her opposition as “an art project”: the Windham Walk. The goal is to involve the community in a county-wide project fostered by the Sheriff’s Department that would provide an artistic outlet for kids, connections between kids and seniors, an attraction for tourists and, eventually, jobs for the community. “It’s crime prevention and economic development – they go hand in hand,” explained Gaudiniere.
“Because it’s art-focused, it brings the community together and helps the economy of Windham County,” added Prue. Her vision is a county-wide walkway in every community, made of bricks or tiles donated and/or made by community members, wandering through historic sites and dotted with outdoor sculptures and other art projects along the way. “There would be graffiti walls for the kids,” said Prue. “There could be alcoves for sculptures and art installations, we could get kids in the neighborhood to work on and show their art instead of hanging out and getting into trouble,” added Gaudiniere.
“It would be a draw for tourists,” Prue pointed out. “It would transform the county into an outdoor art gallery. It’s crime prevention. It’s like holding hands with the community. Deputies would be involved and mingle with community members.”
“It would provide jobs for kids as tour guides,” Gaudiniere said.
“The kids who are hanging out on Elliot street, instead of the seniors being afraid of them, could work with the seniors at the senior housing or at the teen center,” Prue came back.
The project would be, in other words, a vehicle for the Sheriff’s Department to foster a positive environment in the county. Both women are enthusiastic about their vision.
Kris Gaudiniere, a teacher and artist, met Sheila Prue on the playground. That is, when both were there with their children. “The thing that impressed me is just how unflappable she is – she’s such a stable person. Nobody who knows Sheila doesn’t like her,” Gaudiniere said. “She’s very warm and genuine. No way is she a politician. She’s not slick, she’s got nothing up her sleeve, what you see is what you get. It’s been very hard for her campaigning.”
While Prue said clearly in several interviews that her being a lesbian wasn’t and wouldn’t be an issue in the election, she did allow this time that it might have been a factor in the decisions of her former primary opponents to run as an independent and as a write-in candidate. “Privately, I’ve heard that maybe they couldn’t stand the thought of losing to a woman, much less a lesbian,” she said.
Prue wouldn’t comment on Henry Farnum, the deputy hand-picked as successor to the retired sheriff. But she did mention a letter published in the Brattleboro Reformer the day before our interview. The letter was from Robyn Burke, whose partner Judith Hart Fournier had been murdered ten years ago by a former boyfriend. Burke reminded the community about the murder and wrote that Farnum had refused to enforce the restraining order the two women had obtained against Fournier’s ex-boyfriend, contributing to Fournier’s death. She questioned whether Farnum was the kind of sheriff residents wanted and urged readers to vote for Prue.
“Women’s issues,” Prue commented laconically, “are not a high priority at the Sheriff’s office. The Sheriff’s Department has been a haven for ‘good ol’ boys’ for years.”
Prue aims to change that. The department she’ll lead has 52 members including civilian support staff, and about 40 vehicles. Ten county towns have contracts with the Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement services, plus the Stratton Mountain resort. Her main task, she said, “will be building trust within the department and within the communities for the department.”
Trust might not come easily. Ten days before the election, several current and former members of the department made public their complaints about Henry Farnum’s leadership, charging Farnum with mismanagement and “creating a climate of fear and intimidation,” according to a report in the Reformer.
Prue has no illusions about achieving instant rapport. “I’m sure there will be a faction of people who are not going to be happy with the fact that I’ve beaten Henry. And they’ll do little things to try to undermine my leadership. My suspicion is that some [personnel] will want to leave. I plan to run the department differently. I want to establish an atmosphere that’s friendlier, not screaming and yelling at staff.”
Another goal for Prue is to have every officer trained in unarmed defense methods as well as raising the level of firearms training for officers to be the “best trained in the state.”
Prue’s officers will call her “Sheila,” she said, not “chief” or “sheriff.” She will carry a gun but will not wear a uniform most days in her new job. “Most sheriffs don’t wear uniforms,” she said, laughing when Kris chimed in with a wink, “But she does look good in a uniform.”
Not only that, Kris added, “When Sheila is elected, we’ll have a sheriff who can take up any budget shortages with bake sales.”
But Prue herself had the last word: “I want to be the sheriff, not the lesbian sheriff. Brattleboro and Windham County are the best for letting people be themselves. I’m not a label – I’m myself.”