Cache County clerk and auditor Jess Bradfield talks with KVNU For the People host Jason Williams on 12-16-2022
LOGAN — Last week was a big week in news about Cache County, included in that was the report that current county clerk and auditor Jess Bradfield had decided to resign his post.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Friday, Bradfield talked about his decision to go from part-time to giving a 90-day notice of leaving the position.
“90 -day resignation notice is not common, but I felt like it was needed to make the transition from my office. My office staff had been the ones who had said ‘please stay, everything’s working’. We’d been doing it for a couple of weeks at that point, the part-time, and the office staff said ‘ please don’t go, this is perfectly legal, it’s perfectly acceptable’”, he explained.
90 days will give the Cache G.O.P. time to organize a special election to fill the position. Bradfield feels that during his short tenure he has helped improved the office, including getting things up-to-date as far as online options.
“Some of the tax administration, just because of the demographic that we serve, we serve indigent and those types of things, they don’t always have computers, so it’s difficult to make some of those online, and it defeats the whole purpose. But everything else, marriage, business, GRAMA, open records requests, audits, everything else is online, elections. You can do anything you want, and we’ll help you get there.”
He is grateful for his staff and the thing he is most proud of is their ability to provide, over the last eight months, a building entirely dedicated to elections and running and hosting ballot processing. Bradfield said it’s one of the best in the state.
With three new council members coming on board in January with three leaving, he was asked what his response would be if they really wanted him to stay in office.
“If the council came to me and said ‘Jess we appreciate you, we want to retain you’, I think that’s kind of a way different situation than what had happened and how it all played out. Public service is in my blood.”
But, he said he’s not going to push for that and right now he’s very content and for the next 90 days he plans to work closely with the council and also make sure his staff is happy and that things are going well.