Sheriff Candidates Clash Over Office’s Future in Los Alamos County

The sharpest split in Los Alamos County’s sheriff race is not over personalities. It is over whether the office should keep existing at all.

At a League of Women Voters of Los Alamos forum April 30 at UNM-LA, Democratic candidates David Izraelvitz and Antonio Maggiore offered starkly different visions of what the sheriff should mean in a county that is unlike any other in New Mexico. Los Alamos County is the state’s only home-rule county and is also treated as a municipality, a structure that has long blurred the line between county and city government.

That unusual setup sits at the center of the debate. The county charter says the Police Department is charged with conserving the peace and enforcing the laws, while the sheriff may not duplicate duties assigned to police. State law still gives sheriffs duties such as serving and executing process and court orders, and New Mexico law keeps a full chapter on the office. In a county of 19,419 people, that leaves voters deciding whether the sheriff is a meaningful law-enforcement post or a largely symbolic one.

Izraelvitz argued the job has outlived its traditional purpose in Los Alamos. He said he wants to be sheriff in order to eliminate the sheriff position, and he said the county and municipality being the same entity means Los Alamos does not use the office the way other counties do. He pointed to the police department as the agency already doing the practical work most residents would associate with a sheriff, and he described the remaining role as mostly administrative. If elected, he said he would donate any salary to charity and prepare a transition plan that could lead to a voter decision in 2028 on whether to end the office altogether.

Maggiore took the opposite view, arguing that the sheriff remains important because residents still want an elected law-enforcement official who answers directly to the public. His case was less about reorganizing government than preserving a visible point of accountability in a county where the lines between institutions are already unusually tight.

The race also carries the weight of recent history. In 2016, the Los Alamos County Council voted 4-1 to transfer the bulk of the sheriff’s duties to the police department and considered abolishing the office as an elective post, but the office remained. The county’s current sheriff page lists Jason Wardlow Herrera as sheriff and says the office maintains the Sex Offender Registry through OffenderWatch. Herrera has more than 19 years of law-enforcement experience and retired from the Los Alamos Police Department in December 2021.

The June 2 primary will be the first in New Mexico to use a semi-open system, allowing unaffiliated and Decline to State voters to choose a major-party primary without changing registration. In Los Alamos, that makes the sheriff contest a referendum on whether the county should keep a historic office, reshape it, or begin phasing it out.