The platform
I am not going to promise you deputies I cannot fund or a crime wave I cannot prove. Every item below comes out of Marion County's own board records and the state's own crime reporting. You can look up all of it.
First, an honest word about numbers
County-wide reported offenses climbed sharply between 2021 and 2025. It would be easy to put that on a mailer. It would also be wrong.
Agencies in this county came onto the state's current reporting system at different times. Centralia PD reported zero offenses in 2021 and over thirteen hundred in 2025. That is not because Centralia became thirteen hundred times more dangerous, but because it started reporting. Any comparison against a 2021 or 2022 baseline is measuring paperwork, not offending.
So I am not going to run on it. What I will run on is the part that survives scrutiny: the Sheriff's Office workload has been essentially flat, one property-crime trend is genuinely rising, and the county cannot currently tell you what its jail costs.
A candidate who will shade a statistic to win an election will shade one to keep the job.
Cody RoseWhere I stand
Anyone can list values in an election year. These are the ones I can show you the receipts for, which is the only kind worth reading.
A Sheriff swears an oath to a Constitution, not to a mood and not to whoever is loudest this year. Your rights do not pause because enforcing them is inconvenient, and they do not bend because a department finds them awkward. I have carried that oath for twenty years in uniform and I do not intend to start reading it selectively now.
A rural county does not win by outspending anyone. It wins by bringing in outside money, putting it where it does the most good, and refusing to pay twice for the same thing. That means going after state and federal dollars the county is already eligible for, budgeting them against the needs residents actually raise, and getting our agencies working the same problem together: the Sheriff's Office, the municipal departments, the Highway Department, EMA, fire and EMS, and the state and federal partners who will send equipment, training and manpower if somebody asks. Shared equipment, shared training, honest mutual aid. The decisions stay local; the resources come from wherever I can find them.
Over twenty years in uniform, and I am still doing the job today. I know what a shift costs, what the equipment is really like, and what it means to be short-handed at two in the morning. I know what it is to miss your own children being born, and to miss years of their lives because you were somewhere else doing the job. I know the commitment this work takes and I know the weight of the badge. The working police officers of Illinois FOP Lodge 95 have endorsed this campaign. Deputies deserve a Sheriff who has done the work, not one who has read about it.
Government that cannot be audited cannot be trusted with money. I publish what I find, including the findings that do not help me. When residents believed something about their assessments that turned out to be lawful, I said so in public. When the answer is not known, I will refer it to an expert in that field who does not have a conflict in it. That is the standard I will run this office by: response times published by township, the jail's books open to the people paying for them, and a countywide community survey asking residents what they actually think of the quality of service they are getting.
License plate readers work. I have used this class of tool and I know what it does for a stolen vehicle, an Amber Alert, or a shooting suspect moving through a county at two in the morning. I also know how it gets abused, because the abuse is almost never a hacker. It is an account holder looking up an ex, a neighbor, or a co-worker, and it is a network quietly sharing this county's traffic with agencies that never answered to anybody here. A tool this powerful is kept honest by written policy and audit logs, not by trusting that everyone with a login is having a good day. Get the controls right and the tool survives the first scandal. Get them wrong and the county loses it entirely, right when a family needs it.
The commitments
Publish a plain monthly jail report: population, average daily population, medical spend, overtime, and transport cost. Right now nobody can tell you what the jail actually costs. That is the honest gap, and closing it costs nothing but discipline. It is also my answer to the July 2026 judicial line of $794,087.13, which is 75% of that month's total claims, with no narrative attached to it. I asked the board what comprises that number. The answer never came. A Sheriff who cannot tell you what his own jail's medical exposure is cannot manage it.
In April 2026 the Sheriff's department report to the Law Enforcement Committee listed security camera issues, the transport van and vehicles, the Humvee, and the jail and Sheriff's Office floors. Every one of those is a liability item as much as a maintenance item. Cameras in a jail are evidence. A failed camera during a use-of-force or an in-custody medical event is the difference between a defensible county and a settlement. Failing floors in a correctional facility are a jail-standards exposure. Transport vans are how inmates get to court and to medical, and transport failures drive overtime and missed court dates. I will finish that list, with a written condition-and-priority document so the board is choosing from facts instead of from whoever asks loudest.
Theft from motor vehicles went 39, 46, 41, 84, 160 across 2021 to 2025, roughly four times the 2023 level, and the shape of that trend is genuine. This is a rural-county, unlocked-vehicle, night-time property crime problem, and it is the crime your neighbors actually experience. The response is directed patrol on the hours and townships where it is happening, plus a straightforward public push on locked vehicles and firearms removed from cars. Measurable, cheap, and it does not require a single new position.
Some municipal agencies in this county have stopped reporting to the state's crime reporting system entirely, and at least one reported a single offense for an entire year. That means the county's crime picture has holes in it. You cannot deploy against data you do not have, and you cannot win competitive grants without it. The county's largest law enforcement agency should be the one convening the municipal chiefs to close those gaps.
The Sheriff's Office already runs about 21.72% of county expenditures, and recent county revenue growth leans on sources that will not repeat. The alternative to raising the Sheriff's share is bringing in money that is not the county's. This is not a theory for me: I have already built the federal grant capability: a UEI, an active SAM registration, and GATA registration. That machinery exists and it comes with me.
Response time in the outer townships is the actual complaint I hear, and it is a fair one. I will publish response times by township and be measured on them. I am not going to promise more deputies I cannot fund. I am going to tell you what the coverage really is, and then make the case for changing it with real numbers.
I will not add a single license plate camera. Before anyone argues about expansion, the system this county already has gets a written policy and controls that can catch a problem before it becomes one. Every search tied to a case number and a stated criminal purpose, entered before the search runs and not written in afterward. Audit logging on by default, reviewed monthly by a supervisor who did not run the searches, because self-auditing is not auditing. A plain quarterly summary published: how many searches, how many were flagged, and what happened to the ones that were. Repeat lookups on the same plate with no case attached get looked at every time, because that is what personal misuse actually looks like in the logs. A defined retention limit that the system enforces on its own rather than one that depends on good intentions.
On sharing, I will review the current contracts myself and set the network so this county's data goes to Marion County agency account holders. Not a statewide open door, not out-of-state agencies, and no federal fishing trips through a vendor default nobody here ever voted on. Where an outside agency has a legitimate case need, it comes with the written declaration state law already requires and it gets logged like everything else. And the consequence gets stated out loud before anyone needs it: running this system on somebody for personal reasons is a firing offense and, where it fits, a criminal referral. Deputies deserve to know the rule, and residents deserve to know it is enforced.
The figures behind the goals
Compare: State's Attorney 30.74%, Circuit Clerk 29.14%, Probation 20.55%.
A 2x swing between April and January 2026 with no standing explanation.
75% of roughly $1.06M in total claims that month.
41 in 2023 to 160 in 2025. The one trend not explained by reporting changes.
Sources: Marion County Revenue/Expense Department Totals (3/6/26); Law Enforcement Committee agendas (1/13/26, 4/14/26, 5/12/26); Board Review (7/28/26); Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting public portal, 2021 to 2025, ORI IL0610000.
Straight answers
No. The Sheriff's Office is already 21.72% of county expenditures. My first move is transparency on what the jail costs, then outside grant money. As for the Sheriff's own salary: under state law it is set at a statutory floor tied to the State's Attorney's salary, and the State furnishes two-thirds of it subject to appropriation. That figure is not something a Sheriff sets for himself.
Nothing I would run against. The current Sheriff put his own needs list in front of the board in April: cameras, floors, vans. I want to finish it, and add the reporting the office has never had.
One vote of many, and I have been asking. In July I asked what comprised a $794,000 judicial month. The answer never came. That is exactly why I want the seat that can produce the answer.
I am not going to promise bodies I cannot fund. I will tell you what the jail and patrol actually cost first, then make the case with real numbers.
A Conservative, by write-in. A write-in line is the way this office gets put back in front of the voters, so that is the way I am asking for it. Here is exactly how to do it →