Woodard
Heath Woodard wants voters to know that if he’s elected sheriff of Cherokee County, he and his deputies will stand at the county line to defend the constitutional rights of local citizens if necessary.
“My campaign logo, ‘Guardian of Liberty,’ is not just words,” said Woodard, who is seeking the Republican nomination. “That is our job.”
While stopping state and federal government overreach is central to his campaign, Woodard doesn’t just bring that passion and principle to the sheriff’s office. He also has 14 years of experience, most of them fighting narcotics in the tri-state area.
“It’s been interesting,” Woodard said of being on the campaign trail. “What I’ve learned is each community across the county has its own specific concerns. In town, they’re more concerned about drug-related crime. Out west, they just want to see patrols.”
Woodard started at the Murphy Police Department in 2008 before moving to the Andrews Police Department for a raise. After the town hired an uncertified administrative chief, Woodard left in 2014 and went to the Graham County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked on narcotics cases.
His success in those cases led to Woodard being hired by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office to work narcotics, which led to him supervising the investigations division. During this time there, Woodard helped the office lead several large drug busts, with the Unicoi Pipeline being the biggest.
More than 9 pounds of methamphetamine was seized in that case, which involved local, state and federal agencies and resulted in significant prison terms. According to one judge, that was “enough meth to overdose the citizens of Clay County three times over,” Woodard said. “That was the most meth he had ever had seen come through a courtroom in the western district of North Carolina.”
The best way to combat illegal drugs is not the way task forces have operated in the past, he said. Instead of just seizing assets, Woodard’s focus is on targeting dealers, and in order to do so in these parts you need to be able to work closely with others.
“I have learned how to cooperate with other agencies and not make it a competition,” he said. “Nobody wants to tell what they know because then you might get that bust. But I don’t care who gets the credit; I just want to get the most drugs off the street.”
Woodard called drug use “a spiritual issue” that is not being addressed by law enforcement.
“We have to figure out root problem with addiction,” he said. “If we can start addressing that, we will make some headway.”
Woodard believes the biggest problem closer to home is the thefts that often occur as a result of drug abuse.
“Theft is actually more dangerous because people are coming onto your property and violating your sanctum,” he said. “We need to focus more on the people who are having their rights violated. We have failed our citizens by not doing that.”
Woodard is a proponent of moving officers into different positions from time to time in order to prevent burnout and give them a chance to become more well rounded. He said doing that keeps them from seeing the same kind of graphic images for too long, plus gives the sheriff a chance to see what they are particularly good at.
“Doing the same thing we’ve always done is simply not working,” he added.
One thing Woodard promised to do if elected is relocate the sheriff’s actual office to a space easily accessible within the building.
Since leaving Clay County, he is working with his father at Woodard Construction Co. Woodard and his wife, Becky, have been married for 21 years and live in Andrews with their three daughters. They consider MountainView Church in Murphy their “home.”