New WWPD Chief Reaches Out To City

Burdel Welsh, West Wendover’s new police chief is a soft spoken man from Kansas who stressed the importance of relations between his officers and the community.

In a two-hour-long wide ranging interview with the High Desert Advocate, Welch repeatedly stressed the importance of building and maintaining a good relationship between the police department and the community it serves.

Welsh explained the very nature of police work and its associated stress has an effect on anyone who wears the badge. Pent up anxiety and aggression can lead to a whole bevy of physical and psychological problems from over eating to overt aggressiveness toward the public.

According to Welsh there are various exercises both physical and mental that have been proven to reduce the toll the badge and the uniform take.

For his own part Welsh said he was considering visiting local churches and organizations to introduce himself to the community.

Unfortunately for the Lutheran Welsh there is no church of his denomination in town.

“We have been driving to Salt Lake for services,” he said. “Although I heard there is a Lutheran church in Elko. I am used to being a minority I went to a Catholic high school and was only one of three Lutherans there.”

Welsh, 56, was appointed by Mayor Emily Carter Tuesday and unanimously endorsed by the city council in May and took over the department earlier this month.

A 35 year veteran of law enforcement Welsh hails from Tonganoxie, Kansas a city of about 5,000 in Leavenworth county.  Welsh wrote that he spent most of his career with the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Department leaving in 2005 as Under Sheriff.

After 2005 he was served as Police chief of Lake Quivira, Kansas  and in 2009 was elected to the city council of Tonganoxie. In 2010 Welsh resign his council seat and left Kansas to become Deputy Chief of Police at the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site (RTS), formerly known as Kwajalein Missile Range on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“Sequestration caused a 30 percent cut in the force and my position was hit,” Welsh said. “It went from being a police department to base security.”

In 2012 Welsh returned to Tonganoxie to run for Leavenworth County Sheriff. He lost the race and when the West Wendover chief’s job opened up with the retirement of Ron Supp in November was one of 45 candidates who submitted an application.

In several areas Tonganoxie is quite similar to West Wendover. It population at 5,000 is about the same and the town also has one high school, one middle school and one elementary school. It like West Wendover is also the third largest community in Leavenworth County which is also dominated by a much larger city that is the county seat and shares the same name with the county as Elko does here.

With Leavenworth county bordering the Kansas/Missouri state line, Welsh certainly has experience in interstate relations that often bedevil law enforcement operations.

But while the two cities have much in common there are some important differences. Tonganoxie is by no means a tourist town. It was illegal to even buy a drink in Leavenworth county until the late 1980’s. And while Kansas does have a handful of legal casinos none are close to Tonganoxie.

Wendover on the other hand lives or dies by the entertainment industry. Boasting five major casino/resorts and a have a dozen of hotels on the Utah side the casino industry directly employs over 80 percent of the workforce including there of the five West Wendover City Councilmen and the mayor. While Tonganoxie population stays relatively stable year round, Wendover’s can swell up to four times or more its size during the weekends especially during the peak summer months.