Former Sgt. Michael Stalter Announces Run for County Sheriff

By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
OTSEGO COUNTY

A recently retired 25-year veteran of the Otsego County Sheriff’s Office is challenging his old boss. Republican Michael J. Stalter, a first-time candidate, announced this week he is running for Otsego County sheriff.

In an interview with AllOtsego, Stalter said he is running to cut costs and change certain office policies, including what he sees as “fluffing” of incident numbers. He also told AllOtsego he wants to see fewer inmates at the county jail boarded out to other jails and less overtime assignments for corrections officers. He later said he would rescind the office’s recently-signed 287(g) Warrant Service Officer Agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I have spent almost half my life now as a police officer and just serving people,” Stalter said, adding it was his “dream” to become a sheriff’s deputy.

Stalter said he loved working in the county he grew up in. He also previously served in the Cooperstown and Fort Plain police departments, and as a corrections officer. Stalter said his only job before law enforcement was in his father’s Middlefield-based construction business.

The current Otsego County sheriff is fellow Republican Richard J. Devlin Jr., who was first elected in 2006. He confirmed to AllOtsego he plans to run for re-election for another four-year term.

“I decided to retire because I just didn’t want to be part of it,” Stalter said of his June 2025 retirement. “The environment in the office had become negative.”

He claimed he was not alone among colleagues in that feeling.

“I truly felt that the person that I went to work for was a different person now, and that his priorities were not aligned with mine,” Stalter said.

Stalter said there “wasn’t much common sense when it came to some of the spending.” He said the county’s practice of significant overtime work for corrections officers and boarding-out inmates, in other words sending them to other nearby jails at cost to the county, was an unnecessary expenditure of a “tremendous amount of money.”

“I understand that the [jail] building itself, it’s not a new building. But then again, the building wasn’t built in the 60s,” Stalter said.

The Otsego County Jail was built in 1991, and is the last in the state built with “linear design,” an old prison style with hallways with cells on either side. Sheriff Devlin has been advocating for a new jail for years.

“If engineers want to come in and build a better, more modern facility using more modern techniques of housing inmates, of taking care of the jail population, I’m all about that,” Stalter said. “But why do we have to throw money away in the interim?”

Stalter also said significant overtime work for corrections officers harmed both them and the inmates. “Why are corrections officers being forced to work 16-hour shifts, go home for eight hours, and then work another 16-hour shift?” he asked.

Stalter was also bothered by recent changes to incident reporting requirements for deputies, calling it “numbers driven” and “fluffing.”

“Something as simple as I get out of the car and I remove a tree branch from the road, that’s an incident report,” Stalter said. “I drive [by] a business which is closed and look at the doors to make sure that the doors or windows aren’t broken. That’s a report.”

“I will be running to continue serving the people of Otsego County,” Devlin replied to AllOtsego’s inquiries. “The time for politics will come, but in the meantime I won’t lend credibility to a disgruntled former employee. My focus remains on doing the job and keeping Otsego County one of the safest in the state.”

In October, the Sheriff’s Office signed a 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Devlin previously said ICE would train five jail supervisors to execute immigration administrative warrants on individuals in the country illegally who are in sheriff’s office custody.

After researching the issue, Stalter told AllOtsego he would rescind the agreement if elected.

“I have an issue with federal direction,” Stalter said. “Our deputies should be focused on crimes occurring in this county and time and resources should not be spent training them to do someone else’s job.”

“My goal is to bring common sense policies and an open door policy which allows people to come in and speak directly to the sheriff,” Stalter said of his campaign.