Finfrock vs Graham

THROUGH NOV. 4

ELECTION DAY

NOV. 8

Two Republican candidates, Joe Finfrock and Win Graham, face off in the Nov. 8 race for the Young County judge seat held since 2011 by the retiring Judge John Bullock. Pastor Finfrock is the longtime pastor at the Oak Street Baptist Church in Graham. Mr. Graham is an accountant and runs his family’s gas and oil business.

Mr. Graham ran unopposed in the primary election and faced no general election rival until Pastor Finfrock entered the race in March as a write-in candidate.

The Enterprise asked each candidate questions about the role of county judge. We present an edited version of their answers below. The full interviews are available YouTube at Town Talk with Gina Keating.

Q: What do you consider the county’s top priorities in the coming four years?

Pastor Finfrock: My priority would be to let the employees of Young County know that they are valuable … that they are appreciated. I found … if you value people, if you express that, and if you help them, then all the boats in the harbor rise and people do better just naturally. I also want to train leaders … of all the things I’ve done for 26 years, I think this might be one of the best. The three keys to any organization are leadership, leadership, leadership, whether it’s a church or a county or a business or a family.

The values that we have are slipping away from us. We seem to be in this moral freefall. It affects everybody, even the good people of Youg County … the families are disintegrating. It’s affecting all of us at a certain level, and so I really want to address that. The last thing is the cost of living. It’s killing people. My dad was a farmer scratching out a living in the Oklahoma panhandle, so I think I can appreciate this single mother who’s stressed out because she can’t pay her bills or the man who brings home the same paycheck but he’s not covering the needs or expenses.

Mr. Graham: One of the things I see as a crisis that we have here in Young County is housing. First-time home buyers and renters are often finding that housing is unavailable and we’ve got businesses, especially here in Olney [that] can’t find workers because those workers have no place to live. We’re having to bus workers in from Wichita Falls every single day, and that creates a lot of leakage in our county. We have salaries that are being earned here, that are being spent somewhere else. We have people that are paying property taxes in other locations that should be here, and we have employers that aren’t able to make as much product as they should because they can’t get the labor for us.

People are feeling like their property taxes are getting out of control. A lot of that is … handled at the state level but one thing we can do here is find more corporate taxpayers.

I think there are opportunities to tighten the budget. I’d like to go through that line by line and understand every dollar that we’re spending and try to find opportunities where we can spend less of our taxpayers’ money.

I’d like to work with the volunteer fire departments. I think they’re severely underfunded. Wildfires … were out of control this year and those guys were, were overworked and underappreciated.