photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Democrat Dakota Loomis and Republican Mike Warner attend the district attorney candidate forum Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, at the Douglas County Fairgrounds.

The two men vying to lead the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office for the next four years agree on one thing: The current DA’s Office is in shambles and desperately needs to be fixed.

Neither Republican Mike Warner nor Democrat Dakota Loomis pulled any punches as they met as opponents for the first time Tuesday night in a forum at the Douglas County Fairgrounds sponsored by the Douglas County Rural Preservation Association. However, most of their punches seemed to be directed at the office of lame-duck DA Suzanne Valdez, whom Loomis defeated in a landslide in the Democratic primary in August.

Both men said they had no intention of running for DA, but felt called upon to do so to restore, as they variously described it, “professionalism,” “stability,” “respectability,” “effectiveness” and “experience” to the office.

Loomis introduced himself by saying that he had looked for someone to run, but seeing no one, decided to step into the breach himself.

“I grew up loving this community and wanted to make sure the district attorney’s office was put back in a place where there was professionalism, it was stable, and it could do its main job, which is to protect this community and hold folks accountable who’ve harmed others,” he said.

Warner opened his remarks by saying, “I think it’s widely recognized that the district attorney’s office is badly damaged,” and he largely blamed what he called Valdez’s lack of prosecutorial experience, saying her jump from academia to prosecution had served the community poorly.

“Like Mr. Loomis, I had no intention of running, but given the disaster that the current district attorney’s office is, I decided to run,” he told the crowd.

He said he was urged by law enforcement to do so, and Loomis said the same, both of them indicating that the relationship between the DA’s office and law enforcement was in bad shape, characterized mainly by increasingly poor communication.

Warner said Valdez’s lack of experience made it difficult for her to mentor others in the office in trying cases, negotiating pleas, communicating with victims and performing other vital functions.

“Turnover in that office is horrific,” he said — a theme that Loomis picked up when he described the office as having been “hollowed out” and as “pathological” the office’s seeming inability “to get along with anyone.”

Tuesday’s forum did not include moderator questions, but instead consisted of the DA candidates and County Commission candidates taking three minutes to introduce themselves and then fielding questions from an audience of dozens of people.

It was in answering the questions — about a spate of lost trials in the current office and what one questioner, to lots of head-nodding in the audience, called “crappy plea deals,” — that Loomis and Warner attempted to distinguish themselves from the other.

Warner noted that, yes, he’s a Republican — usually a hard sell in blue Douglas County, where the last Republican to hold the office was 20 years ago — but foremost “I am a prosecutor,” he said, noting his 30 years of prosecutorial experience at both the state and federal level.

“I am not political,” he said, declaring a distaste for the partisanship he had “a belly full of” in various prosecutors’ office where he had worked. “I’m not wedded to the Orange Guy,” he said, referring to Donald Trump. “I’m not into culture wars.”

“It’s all about experience,” said Warner, who promised to be a hands-on prosecutor and contrasted his own prosecutorial experience with Loomis’ relative lack.

Loomis acknowledged that while he has had prosecutorial experience — he worked at one point for the Shawnee County DA and is the Baldwin City prosecutor — he has never prosecuted a felony case, although he has had many years as defense counsel trying high-level felonies on the other side.

Loomis said he had the advantage over Warner in having worked for 10-plus years in Douglas County, where’s he familiar with the prosecutors, judges and jury pool. He described himself as “the only person here” who has that experience.

While Warner described the DA’s job as a performance-based position, Loomis cautioned that the administrative role of the DA would be particularly important and that he would be a good fit for that based on his connection to the community.

“You have to be there on the ground each and every day to see what has gone on in that office,” he said. “This is not a simple fix … Working in the Douglas County courthouse every day lets me see the damage that has been done. It’s not a one year, two year … we’re talking five, 10 years” to get the office built back up because of how long it takes to hire and train prosecutors and to repair relationships in the community.

Loomis said his long-term relationship with law enforcement partners and community agencies would serve him well in the long-term project of fixing the office, while Warner insisted that the DA must be able to always take the helm as the office’s chief prosecutor.

“You need a prosecutor to be a prosecutor,” he said.

A point of agreement between the two men was that whoever wins in November has a challenging road ahead, with Warner likening the winner to the “dog who catches the car.”

Warner and Loomis will face each other in at least two more forums between now and the general election on Nov. 5:

• A forum at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Lawrence Public Library hosted by the Douglas County Chapter of Women for Kansas.

• A forum at 3 p.m. Oct. 6 at the Lawrence Public Library hosted by the Lawrence branch of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County.

The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 15.