Grant challenges Doyle over jail management

Chris Grant believes he can man­age the Clark County Detention Center bet­ter than the jail­er who’s been run­ning it for almost 10 years, and wants a chance to prove it.

Grant, 69, has been a police offi­cer, a radio ad sales­man, and a busi­ness­man, and has nev­er worked in cor­rec­tions. But he has been lis­ten­ing to coun­ty offi­cials talk about the jail and its finances, and he’s con­vinced there’s a need for new leadership.

“The jail has to be run like a busi­ness, because that’s what it is,” he said. “If you don’t run it like a busi­ness, this is what you get; you get bud­get over­runs and low accountability.”

The Republican can­di­date said that if he’s elect­ed, he’s going to be a nui­sance to the coun­ty judge-exec­u­tive and mag­is­trates because he’s going to share reports with them frequently.

Grant is try­ing to unseat one of the last Democrats in coun­ty gov­ern­ment in Clark County, Frank Doyle, who has held the office since January 2015.

Doyle insists he does run the jail like a busi­ness and has gen­er­at­ed mil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue by incar­cer­at­ing inmates from oth­er coun­ties as well as fed­er­al, state, and local pris­on­ers, and he has kept costs low and saved the coun­ty mon­ey by using inmate labor.

But Doyle has come under crit­i­cism from mag­is­trates for ask­ing for mon­ey from the Clark County Fiscal Court to pay the jail’s expens­es. Grant said he first learned about those dif­fer­ences when he relo­cat­ed to Winchester with his job in 2023.

“I got to be friends with three of the mag­is­trates, and I kept hear­ing them com­plain about the drain on the county’s mon­ey from the deten­tion cen­ter,” he said. “So I got to study­ing it.”

He said he watched Fiscal Court meet­ings online, going back three or four years, and lis­tened to dis­cus­sions about the jail.

“The more I looked at it, the more I was puz­zled as to why that place had turned into a mon­ey pit,” he said.

When Tim Janes, the party’s coun­ty chair­man, called to ask if he would run for mag­is­trate, Grant turned him down, but he asked if the Republicans had any­one run­ning for jailer.

“I’ve been look­ing at this, and with my law enforce­ment expe­ri­ence and my busi­ness expe­ri­ence, I can do that job and I can do it bet­ter than the incum­bent,” he said.

Janes, he said, was elat­ed because no one had want­ed to run against Doyle.

Grant grew up in East Tennessee, but his roots are in Eastern Kentucky, where his grand­fa­ther once ran coal on the L&N trains. He was born in Middlesboro, and moved to Jefferson City, 64 miles away, with his moth­er and her new hus­band after Chris’s father died when he was less than a year old.

When Chris was 14, his mom was shot to death in her husband’s office. His step­fa­ther was nev­er con­vict­ed. Afterwards, his grand­par­ents took him in and adopt­ed him.

“Until they passed away, I had a nor­mal fam­i­ly life,” he said.

Grant went to high school in Knoxville, and as soon as he grad­u­at­ed, he went into the police acad­e­my, where he was the youngest recruit. In those days, he said, cadets weren’t paid, so he got a part-time job as a night shift man­ag­er at a Nautilus gym. There he met and fell in love with a girl from Middle Tennessee and got a job as a patrol offi­cer with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office near Nashville.

“I got to do every­thing I want­ed to do as a police offi­cer,” he said.

He was on the SWAT team and the hon­or guard and worked as a detec­tive for a cou­ple of years. He was also a cap­tain in the Civil Air Patrol.

Then his father-in-law con­vinced him to come into the fam­i­ly busi­ness, which was a Weight Watchers franchise.

“Essentially, my wife was my boss. So that last­ed about three and a half years, and then we got divorced,” he said.

Grant then went to work for the cam­paign of the Republican can­di­date for Tennessee’s 6^th U.S. House District, Steve Gill, who lost by 900 votes.

“I’ve been in pol­i­tics all my life,” Grant said.

After los­ing anoth­er attempt, Gill went to work for an inde­pen­dent radio sta­tion, WLAC, as a morn­ing talk show host and helped Grant get a job sell­ing ads. The sta­tion was bought by Clear Channel, which became iHeart. He worked for the com­pa­ny for about 20 years before mov­ing to Cumulus, where he worked sev­er­al more years until he got his cur­rent job with RMS Communications.

He worked in Texas until that com­pa­ny had an open­ing in Kentucky.

“I did my research, and I picked Winchester,” he said.

He’s glad he did. He likes his new home­town, where he lives with his son Isaac, 27.

“Eastern Kentucky is near and dear to my heart, and it was the far­thest east I could go in Kentucky with­out get­ting in trou­ble with my boss,” he said.

His com­pa­ny con­tracts to pro­vide the equip­ment, soft­ware, and pro­gram­ming for the Department of Motor Vehicles’ region­al offices around the state. He said he’ll give up that job, how­ev­er, if he is elect­ed jailer.

Grant said that as jail­er, he would be effi­cient and open.

“I want to set . . . a real­is­tic bud­get, and I want it to be trans­par­ent,” he said. “I want peo­ple to know how much mon­ey we’re spend­ing and what we’re spend­ing it on.” He said he under­stands there are unex­pect­ed expens­es, like the air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem that recent­ly had to be replaced. But he said it had been mal­func­tion­ing for a while, and coun­ty offi­cials didn’t know it.

“Nobody in the jail is allowed to tell any­body what is going on in the out­side world,” he commented.

If elect­ed, Grant said, he would like to estab­lish a cit­i­zens review board to hear about and con­sid­er prob­lems in the jail. He also wants coun­ty offi­cials to tour the jail and see for them­selves how it operates.

He said he would use Property Valuation Administrator Jada Brady’s oper­a­tion in the PVA Office as a “tem­plate” for dig­i­tal mod­ern­iza­tion and transparency.

“I don’t think there’s any­thing that’s been done there to make it bet­ter,” he said of the jail. “It’s sta­tus quo, and it has been for the past 12 years.”

“You can’t find any paper­work” regard­ing the jail’s finances, he men­tioned. “There’s noth­ing. I’ve looked. And I’m going to start fil­ing FOIA requests if I don’t get some answers,” he said, ref­er­enc­ing open records laws.

One thing he would like to see, he said, is a cost com­par­i­son for state, fed­er­al, and coun­ty inmates.

“Is it a wash? Do we go in the hole on it? Nobody knows because they won’t tell you any­thing,” he said.

He said he would “do every­thing on a bid process” when it comes to pur­chas­ing items and ser­vices for the jail because “com­pe­ti­tion low­ers prices.”

Grant said he has been talk­ing with past and present jail employ­ees to get their thoughts on how the jail could oper­ate better.

“There’s a lot of tal­ent there, but it doesn’t seem like the cream is ris­ing to the top,” he said.

The can­di­date admits he has nev­er seen the inside of the Clark County jail, but he has been inside others.

He said he thinks one of the biggest chal­lenges is the mul­ti-sto­ry jail build­ing itself, which was erect­ed in 1990. He said it’s prob­a­bly too small for the county’s needs today, and he’s been told “there’s always some­thing bro­ken” there.

“When I take office, I’m going to do what’s best for Clark County, not what’s best for a select few,” he said.

Grant vowed that if he is elect­ed, he would lim­it him­self to two terms and retire.

“If I can’t get it done in eight years, I don’t need to be doing it,” he said.