A Legacy of Completing the Story

Sherri Turner's decades-long career at the Valley County Sheriff's Office is coming to a close this November after Turner announced her retirement earlier in the year. When she leaves her job as the VCSO administrative assistant this month she will have worked a total of 37 years for the county and served a total of seven different sheriffs-starting with Dan Taylor and ending with current Sheriff Tom Boyer.

Turner had never intended to end up in Valley County. She was originally from Omaha, moved to upstate New York, went to high school in Denver and college at Arizona State where she studied archeology and anthropology. She had intitially applied for a job in Denver after school but was tipped off by her parents that the Northern Border Pipeline would be seeking archeologists to survey, catalogue and excavate the route in 1980.

Turner applied to both jobs and received both offers, but took the one in Valley County stating, "I took this one because I thought it would last two weeks longer, and that was 40 years ago."

She stayed for two summers surveying and excavating teepee rings where they found centuries-old remnants of the Native American inhabitants of the land. Turner said the crews even excavated pottery, carbon dated ash from fires and even unearthed an interned body from one site although Turner was not present for that discovery.

After her second year in the area, she left for grad school, but not before falling in love. Turner returned to Glasgow quickly to be with her late husband, Walt Turner. Turner said she took a job working for a local attorney and the couple purchased a trailer park that they would later convert into the Shady Rest RV Park.

Turner said it was an "accident" that the couple transitioned the park to a campground. Lots had been vacant on an off for years, and the city was anticipating an influx of visitors for the 1987 Montana Centennial celebration. So, they were approached about parking RVs on empy lots and they went ahead with the plan. Following the celebration, they just continued to convert each vacated lot to a campsite and the Shady Rest was born.

Asked if it was lucrative, she responded smiling, "we both still had full-time jobs."

It was also 1987 when she started with the Sheriff's Office after they received a grant to set up a drug task force.

Turner became the secretary for the Big Muddy Drug Task Force where she kept the statistics and case files for the grant that kept the force going. She did that until 1993 when the grant began to dry up and the then Sheriff's Office secretary, Mickie Hines, was preparing to retire. Turner began to fill in around the county and she officially took over the job when the task force grant ended under then-sheriff Dick Britzman who also renamed the position to administrative assistant.

Over the years the position has changed dramatically. Turner said her biggest accomplishment has been computerizing all of the county's records. When she began, the system was entirely manual and not a single office had a computer. She actually acquired the first computer in the entire courthouse through the drug task force grant and learned the complex coding language needed to not only track but also input the crime records and statistics digitallly to be sent to the state.

Since the 1980s she has worked through upgrades that span the entire evolution of computer systems. Over that time Turner pushed to advance the county's digital capabilities and she led efforts to acquire software to assist deputies, dispatch, the administrative assistant and the sheriff track and manage data, case files and records in the most efficient way possible.

The most recent effort was 911 coordinator Renee Clampitt's push to acquire the law enforcement information management database and software dubbed Zeurcher in 2016. Turner initially opposed the idea joking with Clampitt at the time that they could change it whenever she retired. She was happy with the status quo by that time.

After a demonstration to the department however, she said they looked at each other and emphatically said, "we want it." The software has since greatly improved the office's capabilities to track and manage records and ensure total accuracy across all of the cases' participants-from dispatch and the officers to Turner and the sheriff.

Among her other successes, Turner helped found the Montana Law Enforcement Information Record Association (MTLEIRA) in 2009, established to help the various law enforcement record keepers around the state better manage information and fill gaps for new employees and changing systems.

"We got together and asked, 'how do we get a peer group together to train others,'" said Turner, and to answer questions like who to call in certain cases. The group's primary purpose was to maintain continuity of information while offering support to the various representatives across the state.

A love of maintaining the whole record was the theme for Turner's endeavors over the years. A friendship with Doris Franzen led to her involvement in the historical society's book Footprints in the Valley, and from there the Friends of the Pioneer Museum was established. Turner is still a member of the group having served as the secretary/treasurer since its inception in 1991.

It was that love of making sure the record was complete, clear, accurate and well maintained that kept Turner at work for over 30 years. From anthropology and archeology to the law enforcement records and the museum curation, Turner's dedicated her life to ensuring the most complete and accurate record possible in Valley County. A feat she is quite proud and leaving was no easy decision.

"I really wanted to make sure that the information is put in correctly," explained Turner on why she stayed on at VCSO. "So that if I have to go back next year or five years from now the information is there and it's complete, because when I started, you'd go back, and you couldn't find anything. So, kind of like you, I want a complete story. I want the conclusion of the call."

In honor of her 32 years of service to the sheriff's office, Turner was awarded the Montana Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association Distinguished Career Award. According to the award's presenter the honor is rarely bestowed on non-law enforcement personnel.

A release put out by the association announcing the awards said, "Sherri not only kept all of the gears spinning at the local level in Valley County but was always willing to assist on a statewide level as well. According to many of the Sheriffs who Sherri worked for, the title administrative assistant does not do justice to all of the duties and projects that Sherri took on and often ended up spearheading from behind the scenes. She is a strategic thinker and fiscally conscientious on behalf of the citizens of Valley County. Throughout her career, Sherri performed her duties with integrity, diligence and transparency."