County officers sworn in
County Judge Win Graham presided over the swearing-in on Jan. 2 at the County Courthouse in Graham of Young County officeholders who won re-election in November. Precinct 1 Incumbent County Commissioner Stacy Creswell took his oath of office from Judge Graham and Precinct 4 Commissioner Jimmy Wiley watched from the audience.
The Enterprise asked Judge Graham and the two incumbent commissioners to reflect on their priorities for 2025.
Enterprise: What is your focus going into the new year? You have a legislative session going on – so any thoughts about what you want to work on with state lawmakers?
Judge Graham: We have mental health issues that we’d like to address and try to make some progress on that. In the last three weeks, I’ve been working with a family with someone with mental health problems, trying to find a solution and everything we’re trying isn’t working because we have such limited tools in our toolbox.
We’ve got all kinds of issues with our juvenile court that I wish they’d give us some help with - on how to detain juveniles. They’ve given us the ability to try to make the parents accountable by having them have to pay us for the ankle monitors and things like that.
It’s not a lot of money, but it makes them accountable in the process. It’d be nice if they gave that back.
We’ve got a historic black cemetery that we’re working on. It’s going to be a priority this year. Those are the big ones but I’m sure there are other things too. I’m looking forward to just starting year three. I’m still trying to figure out everything that I’m supposed to be doing and how to do it It’s still a learning process. It has flown past.
Mr. Creswell: [My priority is] getting our projects restarted and finished so we can start looking at the future because we have got lots of things that need to be done … that we didn’t get done and finished up like we should have.
The Safe Place [child custody] exchange that the jail needs to be finished over at Olney. We’ve done one over here [in Graham]. We need to finish that one over there. There’s finishing our [courthouse] annex… that way we can start with a clean note.
Mr. Wiley: We’ve got this mental health [program in the County Jail] that’s in the works right now. Hopefully, it will be successful not only as the groundwork [for a larger program] but for people that need the help. It’s sad that in this day and age we have more mental health needs than we’ve ever had.
We need help [from the state] with the volunteer fire departments. I know there’s legislation out there right now that’s going to help these volunteer fire departments. The people out there that used to give don’t give much anymore but they expect [the services]. The other problem we have right now is, we don’t have the volunteers we used to have. You probably have an average of four to five people that actually go on an accident or on a fire that are volunteers. We used to have 25 or 30 people. It’s not just the people, it’s also that you need help with, [we need help] maintaining the vehicles and buying the equipment and stuff like that.