Mayor Candidate: Jernberg Wants to ‘Beef Up’ Police Department

ST. CLOUD -- Four men have thrown their hat into the ring and want to be the next mayor of St. Cloud.

One of the candidates is political newcomer Chuck Jernberg. He says he's never run for office before but decided to run for the city's top job a few months ago because he doesn't feel the elected officials are listening to the residents. And, he says he feels he can make more of a change being mayor instead of running for one of the three open city council seats.

Jernberg says his first priority is crime and beefing up the city's police department for instances like the recent protests.

I thought that there should have been a bigger police presence and show that this is our town.  People don't come in from outside of our city and just walk all over us.

He says he wants to add more police officers and have them out in the public more.

I think we need to show a bigger presence here in St. Cloud and get out and have the officers go and talk more to people that really need to understand that the police are here to help, they are here to keep laws, but they just want to help people.

Jernberg says he feels right now there are different laws for different people and we need to not have laws for one set of people and laws for the other set of people, we need laws for everybody.

Jernberg says in order to add more police officers he'd have to cut the city budget elsewhere like in the administration which he says he feels is overpaid.

Jernberg also says projects like the convention center expansion was a waste of money.

Jernberg is a sixth-generation St. Cloud native and worked at St. Cloud Hospital for 33 years as a security officer and worked in environmental services. He retired in 2017.

He was also a member of the Marine Corps Reserves, and he went to Military Police school in Ft. McClellan in Alabama.

Each day this week we'll be hearing for a different candidate running for St. Cloud Mayor. Absentee voting for the August 11th primary is open now, the top two candidates in the primary will move on to the general election in November.