Sandra Schepp is looking to take her small-town political experience to all of Onondaga County.
“I mainly wanted to take the combination of the business experience over the years and in the political arena and take it to the clerk’s office,” she said.
Schepp, a Manlius town councilor, is the Republican candidate to become the Onondaga County Clerk. She faces Democrat Gary Morris, a real estate broker who teaches business classes at Onondaga Community College, in the Nov. 6 election. The county clerk oversees legal and public documents about business, property ownership and civil and criminal cases.
The clerk’s office was left vacant after the longest serving County Clerk in Onondaga history, Ann Ciarpelli, resigned in July, five months short of the end of her fourth four-year term. Ciarpelli, a Republican, had been the clerk since 1996.
In her bid for the office, Schepp brands herself as a businessperson who understands government. As manager of Juno’s Glass in Auburn, Schepp said, she handles the day-to-day operations and the financial responsibilities of running a small business. Handling finances from a business standpoint carries over to working in government, where conscientious spending is also a priority, Schepp said.
If she’s elected, she said, voters can be assured “the person coming into this office will do the best job not only with their tax dollars but the documents that’s entrusted to them.”
Before Juno’s, Schepp worked 12 years as part of the town of Manlius’s emergency medical service. In 1995, Schepp was named the Onondaga County EMS administrator of the year.
Schepp, 51, has three adult children and three grandchildren.
Her work as a medical administrator and dedication to serving the community are among her defining characteristics, said Tom Marnell, a fellow Manlius town councilor who’s worked with Schepp since 2003.
“She’s just a very giving person, he said. “She helped many people in distress.”
He has worked closely with Schepp recently to help consolidate the fire department budget into the town’s own budget in hopes of lessening taxpayers’ financial load, Marnell said. A study of the consolidation conducted earlier this year and is under review by an independent committee, said Marnell.
Marnell described Schepp as an “astute business woman.”
The business skills of the two candidates recently became the center of a controversy in the race, when The Post-Standard reported that Democratic candidate Morris had filed for personal bankruptcy five times since 1986. Morris acknowledged only one bankruptcy to the newspaper. In an interview with The Post-Standard, Vita DeMarchi, the chair of the county Democratic party at the time of Morris’ nomination, downplayed the bankruptcy as a concern and reaffirmed her support for Morris.
For her part, Schepp said Morris’ financial track record challenges his qualifications for Onondaga County Clerk. “Whoever takes over the office will be managing a $4 million budget, and that person needs to hold a lot of responsibility,” she told The Post-Standard.
If elected, Schepp said, she would like to branch the county clerk’s office out into the community, to update the technology in the county clerk’s office and improve communication between county and town clerks.
Schepp also proposes to renew a program to take the county clerk’s office to the villages for one day a month as a convenience to residents. A similar program was dropped by the county clerk a couple years ago, she said. Renewing the program, Schepp said, would mean residents would not have to travel to downtown Syracuse from a town or village.
“We would take the clerk’s office on the road and provide service in the towns,” she said.
Files and records dating back to the 1700s are under the county clerk’s watch. The next county clerk will also likely face a storage issue, she said.
In addition to winning the Republican nomination, Schepp is endorsed by the Onondaga Veterans’ Party. The Onondaga County Clerk also maintains veterans discharge records. Hearing veterans tell stories about combat and the “planes they flew, the ships they were on,” she said, is among her prized interactions whenever she attends events dedicated to veterans.
“My dad was a veteran, my brother’s a veteran,” Schepp said. “They’re terribly important to our community.”
(Debbie Truong is a junior majoring in newspaper and online journalism.)
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