It was announced that Mark Kerenyi, Judge of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas, will retire effective at the end of this month. Judge Kerenyi has spent 32 years working for the citizens of Washington County and the United States. Nine of those years on the bench as the Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Judge Kerenyi says one of his proudest moments on the bench is the creation of the COMPASS Drug Court program.

"That was a team effort from a whole lot of different agencies, including probation, Orienta House, a bunch of other treatment providers, the prosecutor's office, the public defender's office, and the sheriff's office. We kind of got together and decided that we are not gonna be able to incarcerate ourselves out of the drug problem, that we're gonna have to help people out and get them into treatment, that way we can hopefully turn them into law-abiding citizens."

Prior to his time as a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, he served as a Juvenile Court Magistrate, an assistant prosecuting attorney, and spent 4.5 years in the United States Marine Corps. Kerenyi says hes looking forward to retirement.

I've got a motorcycle, and my dream is to ride that motorcycle. You know, I've got all these trips planned. I did what they call backcountry discovery routes. There's a company that places all these like GPX tracks that you can follow, and they got them by all different states I wanna follow those. I also wanna do what they call the Trans American Trail. They pretty much did like an off-road trail growing across the United States. I want to go up to Alaska, and I'm thinking, I wanna go around the world."

Pursuant to Ohio law, the Governor of Ohio will appoint a successor to serve as Judge of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas until the next general election in November of this year. At that time, voters will elect a judge to serve the remainder of the unexpired term.