Retired Navy officer Vetter runs for county judge

Eric Vetter has nev­er held elect­ed office, but he has run large organizations.

The retired Navy cap­tain and hos­pi­tal phar­ma­cist is one of four can­di­dates vying for the Republican nom­i­na­tion of Clark County judge-exec­u­tive, and he thinks his mil­i­tary lead­er­ship makes him a good fit for the office.

Vetter said in a recent inter­view that he has two impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tions. One is his back­ground. He has com­mand­ed hun­dreds of men and women. The oth­er is his abil­i­ty to relate to peo­ple, includ­ing influ­en­tial polit­i­cal lead­ers he has known for a long time.

“I think one of the strengths I would bring to the office is those rela­tion­ships that I’ve devel­oped over 20 years in GOP pol­i­tics,” he said.

Vetter said he has known U.S. Senate can­di­date Andy Barr since 2003, before Barr first ran for Congress. And he got his start in pol­i­tics cam­paign­ing door-to-door for Dr. Ralph Alvarado of Winchester, a for­mer Kentucky state sen­a­tor and Tennessee com­mis­sion­er of health who is now run­ning for Congress. He also has close ties to the oth­er lead­ing can­di­date for Congress in the Bluegrass, the Rev. Ryan Dotson, also of Winchester. And he has known both Republican can­di­dates for state rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Clark County, Daniel Konstantopoulos and Les Yates, as well as state Sen. Greg Elkins of Winchester, all of Winchester, for close to a decade.

Vetter was state chair­man of the Kentucky Young Republican Federation for two years and start­ed the local chap­ter here.

He describes him­self as a tra­di­tion­al Ronald Reagan Republican.

Also, being in senior-lev­el exec­u­tive lead­er­ship in the mil­i­tary has helped him learn how to work with peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds and expe­ri­ences, he said.

“Relationships, whether it’s spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships like I have, or just the way I work with peo­ple, I think that’s a strength,” he said.

Vetter, 57, grew up in a small town in Michigan and earned his bachelor’s degree from Ferris State University in Big Rapids in 1993 and his doc­tor­al degree in phar­ma­cy from the Kalamazoo Center for Medical Studies, asso­ci­at­ed with Michigan State University, in 2001. He joined the Navy Reserve right after his sopho­more year as a hos­pi­tal corps­man and made the mil­i­tary his career, being com­mis­sioned an ensign in 1993 and retir­ing as a cap­tain in 2022.

He and his wife, Sharon, who is from Lexington, met in the Navy when both were on active duty, and they decid­ed to move close to her parents.

“I’ve lived in Chicago, I’ve lived in San Diego, but I much pre­fer the pace of a small­er town,” he said, explain­ing why they chose Winchester, where they’ve lived for 25 years.

He’s a phar­ma­cist for Centerpoint Health, for­mer­ly Clark Regional Medical Center, and she’s retired as a den­tist from the Veterans Administration clin­ic. She also retired from the Navy as a cap­tain, in 2019.

They have three adult chil­dren, an old­er daugh­ter, Theresa, who works for Palmer Engineering; a son, Daniel, who recent­ly grad­u­at­ed from Eastern Kentucky University and is con­sid­er­ing fol­low­ing his par­ents into the mil­i­tary; and a younger daugh­ter, Katie, who just grad­u­at­ed from high school and is a stu­dent at Blue Grass Community and Technical College.

The ⁹⁄₁₁ ter­ror­ist attacks hap­pened a month after they arrived in Kentucky, and they want­ed to vol­un­teer, but the Navy at the time need­ed den­tists but not phar­ma­cists, and the Letters told the recruiter they were “kind of a pack­age deal.”

Later Vetter was direc­tor of admin­is­tra­tion in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for 20 detach­ments, or 900 per­son­nel, and when the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic occurred, he became act­ing exec­u­tive offi­cer, or sec­ond in command.

“There’s a lot of man­age­ment that goes into a com­mand that large,” he said.

Also dur­ing the pub­lic health cri­sis, when the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, which was head­ed for Guam, had 1,000 covid-pos­i­tive sailors on board, Vetter was part of a group called up from Camp Pendleton, California, to estab­lish the first expe­di­tionary med­ical facil­i­ty hos­pi­tal since the Vietnam War.

Vetter was direc­tor of clin­i­cal sup­port ser­vices, mean­ing he was over phar­ma­cy, lab, radi­ol­o­gy, behav­ioral health, and pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine — every­thing except nurs­ing and physi­cian services.

He believes that kind of expe­ri­ence is good train­ing for being a coun­ty gov­ern­ment  chief executive.

Asked why he wants to serve Clark County after decades of mil­i­tary and med­ical ser­vice, Vetter answered that “we’ve made this place our home, and I just think there’s so much poten­tial in this coun­ty,” in large part because of its location.

“I feel con­fi­dent in say­ing I’m the most pro-growth can­di­date,” he said, and he thinks the coun­ty needs “respon­si­ble growth,” adding that what he’d “real­ly like to see are some Keystone Industries” in Clark County.

“At the fore­front of my mind is what do we need to do to be ready so that we can take advan­tage of those oppor­tu­ni­ties when they strike,” he said.

He also believes that growth is the answer to the coun­ty government’s cur­rent finan­cial prob­lems. He would rather increase rev­enue by grow­ing the tax base than by rais­ing tax­es, and also prefers that to reduc­ing services.

Vetter, a for­mer mem­ber of the Clark County Board of Health, said he is “a quick learner.”

As for the issues fac­ing fire pro­tec­tion and emer­gency med­ical ser­vices, he said, “that’s going to be a challenge.”

“Nobody wants to cut those ser­vices,” he said.

Vetter thinks the state leg­is­la­ture needs to pay more for coun­ty jail services.

Asked what he would like to achieve as coun­ty judge, Vetter answered: “One of the things I would envi­sion if I come into office would be a change of tone. I think I’d like to bring a new tone, a new focus and a new ener­gy to the job of judge-executive.”

“I think I have a very good work­ing rela­tion­ship with a lot of our mag­is­trates we cur­rent­ly have. Obviously, the court’s going to change, but that’s all right. You can lever­age the expe­ri­ences that those mem­bers already have,” he said.

“I have real­ly enjoyed this com­mu­ni­ty, and I just think that now is a real­ly good time to step up and take the helm,” he concluded.