The San Juan Islands are fortunate to have two very qualified candidates for sheriff. Each is a good, solid, experienced officers.

Deputy Rob Nou is 51 with 29 years of law enforcement experience. Lead Detective Brent Johnson is 55 with 35 years of experience. Both have undergraduate degrees in law enforcement-related fields. Both have been administrative sergeants who led special assignments and details.

But Nou has more advanced education and relevant management experience — as an FBI National Academy graduate, as a de-facto police chief in two communities that contracted for sheriff’s services, as a municipal chief of police, and as director of a 911 center serving one of the largest counties geographically in the U.S.

Nou would bring fresh leadership and a fresh perspective to a job that has been held by the same occupant for 24 years. As a recent island resident, he doesn’t come with the baggage of someone who has been in the Sheriff’s Office for years.

We urge islanders to vote for him on Nov. 2.

As sheriff, Nou wants to build camaraderie, cohesion and teamwork in the department. He has solid ideas for training and building deputies’ familiarity with all of the islands.

One idea we like: a five-year strategic plan that sets out the improvements the department expects to make and the goals it intends to achieve. Such a plan, Nou said, would be developed in consultation with input from the public and would be a yardstick by which to measure the department’s performance. Nou will bring an administrator’s know-how — and, as he puts it, a “fresh set of eyes” — to the job and the challenges the new sheriff will face.

Nou has been a resident of the county for two years. But in that relatively short time, he has served as a volunteer firefighter and EMT, and as a member of the Lopez Island Prevention Coalition helped win a $125,000 a year for five years for the coalition’s drug prevention programs. A Lopez Island resident, Nou said he will move to San Juan Island if elected.

In his career, he’s managed or supervised drug-abuse awareness programs, a multi-agency traffic accident investigation team, and traffic safety enforcement grant projects. He’s lobbied for state funding for Healthy Start and Early Head Start programs. In an earlier interview, Burns, Ore., Assistant Police Chief Brice Mundlin said of Nou, “He was very thorough … He strived for everyone to do better, and you came away realizing it was worth doing.”

Nou is right for the job.