Lyle Rice has thought about being a county commissioner for years, but it wasn’t until the new millennium that he decided to try to achieve his goal.

"I thought about it even when I was farming," he said. "I feel the more I get involved in things, the more I get out of them."

Rice, a building contractor in Cortez, is challenging incumbent Commissioner Kelly Wilson in District 3 for the Democratic nomination in the Aug. 8 primary. The winner will face unaffiliated Darrell Veach in the general election.

A founder and director of the MontDolores Homebuilders Association and a member of the Cortez Masonic Lodge, Rice has considerable experience in organizations, although he has never held public office.

Among his focuses if elected, he said, would be law enforcement, education, transportation, and landowner rights

His main concern about the county’s law enforcement, Rice said, is salaries.

"My big thing there is that the officers, as well as the county’s health-care providers, are paid what they would be in like areas," he said. "If they’re making X number of dollars here and twice that elsewhere, we have to strive to get those levels that high so we can retain the quality we can."

Salaries for sheriff’s deputies have been a problem in recent years, as some officers leave the department for higher-paying jobs with the city of Cortez or elsewhere.

Rice said he would like to try a creative approach to finding more money for the sheriff’s department — using state lottery funds, which now go exclusively to recreation because of an amendment to the Colorado constitution, as a revenue source.

"It would take a lot of work," he said, "but the lottery is a big deal. Why couldn’t a percentage of that money be earmarked for education, freeing up some of our county money that could hopefully go into law enforcement and other areas?"

Although schools are not actually funded out of the county’s budget, Rice said, "It seems like there should be a way somehow that those funds could be allocated to assist in that way."

In the area of education, Rice has called for "higher standards." Mainly, he said, he would like to see teacher tenure abolished.

He knows the county commissioners have no jurisdiction over the schools, Rice said.

"About all I could do there is voice my opinion with the school board and work with them and at the state levels" to end tenure.

He would also like to see local teachers’ salaries raised, he said.

Another project he’d like to work on is getting bus service to Cortez from Durango or Farmington.

"We could start digging into it and see what it would take," he said.

Rice said he supports landowner rights and believes the current commissioners did not spend enough time researching the issue of what to do with the area that recently became Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said it had to be designated either a national conservation area or a monument, the commissioners should have "fought it a lot."

"There are groups that will help in funding to fight situations like this and I don’t think that was ever checked into," he said.

Rice believes the county’s zoning system, LIZ, is working fairly well, but would like to see the Uniform Building Code become mandatory throughout the county.

This year, the MontDolores Homebuilders Association was behind a proposed city ordinance that would have limited the number of structural repairs a property owner could do himself to one every three years, and would have allowed just one non-structural change a year for owners.

The measure was abandoned after numerous citizens protested.

Rice said the association’s original proposal was just for the licensing of commercial contractors and did not include the restrictions on repairs. City officials changed it, he said.

"I did support it originally, but it was changed so much from what we had presented that at the time it came out I didn’t support it," he said.

"I don’t think anyone in the Homebuilders was for that."

Rice added that one other change he would like to see as county commissioner is to eliminate the primary system in Montezuma County and let all candidates run on the general ballot in November, no matter what their party.

He said he knows that might be a difficult change to bring about, but "when somebody tells me I can’t do something, I sort of get my back up and want to do it."