There are five very qualified candidates running for San Juan County Sheriff.

We’ve given it a great deal of consideration, and we support Rob Nou.

Nou has experience and ideas. He also brings fresh leadership, unencumbered by the kind of baggage that one invariably acquires from being with an organization for a long time.

Nou — who joined the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department as a deputy after four years as police chief in Burns, Ore. — has 29 years of law enforcement experience, much of that as an administrative sergeant with the Yamhill County, Ore., Sheriff’s Department. He’s managed or supervised drug-abuse awareness programs, a multi-agency traffic accident investigation team, traffic safety enforcement grant projects, and a city police department.

In Oregon, Nou lobbied for state funding for Healthy Start and Early Head Start programs, saying tough law enforcement is essential “but we’ll win a victory over crime only when our commitment to putting dangerous criminals in jail is matched by our commitment to investing in our children.”

As police chief, Nou and four full-time officers provided law enforcement in the county seat of the largest county in area in Oregon. His 911 center served the entire county.

“We are one of two municipal police departments in an area of 10,000 square miles. If someone (outside the city limits) needed help, we’d go out,” Burns Assistant Police Chief Brice Mundlin said.

Nou’s annual budget: $388,000.

Former Burns mayor Laura Van Cleave said of Nou’s management style, “We’re a frontier community, miles and miles and miles from anyplace — 130 miles from Bandon, 130 miles from anything of any size, so we’re very self-contained. We’re the biggest county geographically in Oregon and the eighth biggest in the U.S. Some people count their people per square miles, we count square miles per people. Rob just fit in, perfect as far as I’m concerned.”

She said of Nou, “If you’re looking for a good sheriff, he would be perfect. I’d vote for him in a minute.”

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. He 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 is right for the job. We encourage islanders to vote for him in the Aug. 17 primary.