Ada County commissioners choose a new sheriff: Eagle Police Chief Matt Clifford
Two days after conducting official interviews, the Ada County Board of Commissioners on Friday appointed a new sheriff.
Matt Clifford, police chief for the city of Eagle and an Ada County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant, was chosen to replace Stephen Bartlett. It was a selection that garnered plenty of praise from officials and the community, even though it was not unanimous.
Clifford began working at the Sheriff’s Office in 2000 and served as a jail deputy, patrol officer, K9 officer, patrol sergeant and in court services before becoming chief in Eagle. Of the three candidates, he was the only one actively serving in law enforcement, although both of the other candidates previously worked for the county.
The commissioners were choosing a replacement from among Clifford, Doug Traubel and Mike Chilton. Commissioners Rod Beck and Kendra Kenyon voted in favor of appointing Clifford. Commissioner Ryan Davidson voted nay.
On May 31, Bartlett resigned abruptly, leaving the vacancy for the Ada County Republican Central Committee and Ada County Commission to fill. The GOP committee put forth Traubel, Chilton and Clifford as finalists, and the three went through public interviews with the commissioners on Wednesday.
Clifford will be sworn in on Tuesday, after the holiday weekend, before he begins work as the new county sheriff, Kenyon said.
“The past three, four weeks have probably been the most stressful of my career,” Clifford said after his appointment. “I feel really positive about the future, the agency, continuing to do great work that we’ve been doing for decades. … I’ve been with the agency for 21 years, I’ve had a lot of leadership roles within the agency. They know who I am and they know what I’m about, and the Sheriff’s Office functions very well.”
THE ADA COMMISSIONERS’ CHOICE
The Republican Central Committee gathered in a special meeting on June 17 to select three nominees for sheriff. Six candidates were nominated, and the panel conducted three successive rounds of voting, according to Michael Tomlin, a precinct committeeman for District 14. The most popular candidate was Traubel, followed by Chilton and then Clifford.
Clifford, however, had his candidacy favored by many present and past leaders in Ada County, including the mayors of Star, Kuna, Meridian, Eagle and Garden City, who endorsed him in a public letter sent to the commissioners in June.
At Friday’s meeting, Kenyon said that 99% of the Sheriff’s Office employees who weighed in on the choices supported Clifford, as did 59% of the public commenters.
“My duty is to listen and is to represent all of you,” Kenyon said. “If I went against the majority of what folks wanted out there, I better have a darn good reason to do that.”
She also said the other two candidates were “really strong in some of the areas we were looking for.”
Beck, the commission chair, also voted in favor of Clifford and said he wanted to select a “constitutional sheriff.” He said the most important issues for a constitutional sheriff are gun rights and the “possible intrusion of the federal government, and maybe even the state government” into county business.
“It was important to me that we have a candidate that would recognize and support the Constitution and would recognize and support our Second Amendment rights,” he said.
Beck said he asked Clifford what he would do if the rights of county residents were threatened during his interview on Wednesday, and he agreed with Clifford’s response. The Eagle police chief noted that he would “use everything in my powers and my ability to protect the rights” of residents.
CANDIDATES AND THE OFFICE
The right-wing constitutional sheriff’s movement claims that county sheriffs have the ultimate authority in their jurisdictions, even over state and federal agencies. Under the U.S. Constitution, though, federal authority often supersedes local and state law.
Traubel calls himself a “constitutional” sheriff. In his interview on Wednesday, Traubel said that if he saw police in Boise, which is part of Ada County, responding in a passive way to a particular protest, he would intervene.
“I’m going in,” he said.
Davidson, a far-right Republican elected to the commission last November, declined to comment to the Statesman on his preferred candidate. During an opening statement, he said that all three were “great candidates” but that he wanted an “outsider” to prevail and objected to how sheriffs had been selected in the past.
“I wanted not necessarily a coronation where, you know, the line of succession has already been lined up well beforehand,” he said. He added that he believed the previous sheriff, Bartlett, had been selected in this manner.
Bartlett was first appointed to the position in 2015 when Gary Raney retired. Bartlett then was overwhelmingly elected by voters in 2016 and 2020.
Clifford will face an election next year.
On Wednesday, the commissioners had tough questions for Traubel and Chilton, asking them whether their limited backgrounds in managing county budgets or leading a law enforcement agency were sufficient to prepare them for the job of sheriff.
Kenyon, especially, appeared alarmed by Traubel’s past writings, saying she was “offended” by his claims that single mothers are not an economically “viable unit” and that more than 50% of rape allegations are false, and by his comments that Jews were responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a well-known form of anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda.
On Friday, Davidson read praiseworthy comments from letters submitted to the commissioners on Traubel’s behalf, and he called Traubel and Chilton “absolutely exemplary” candidates.
He said that Traubel’s past writings had been examined in the press and the public, and that “it’s my worry that the author’s message is probably not being perceived by the public in the way that he would want it to be.”
“This is a Republican state, but we are, in my opinion, burdened with a far left-wing media in Ada County,” Davidson said. “One of my biggest concerns is that the issues with one of the candidate’s writing will be an endless source of fodder for editorial pages and news channels for months, years to come.”
The commissioners also expressed ongoing concern on Friday with the surprise retirement of Bartlett. Beck called the announcement on Memorial Day a “shock,” while Davidson said he wasn’t happy being “here in front of the public with questions still lingering as to what happened with the former sheriff.”
This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 3:45 PM.
