Tomorrow (Friday, Jan. 30) will mark the end of an era in Monroe County as longtime Monroe County Manager Jim Hedges officially retires after more than seven years of leading the county government.
County Manager Hedges’ tenure will perhaps be best remembered for the financial hurdles he inherited and conquered as well as his steady leadership through some unexpected tests, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the discovery of contaminated water in Juliette-area private wells.
Monroe County Commissioners hired Hedges as the county’s second-ever County Manager in October 2018. Hedges, a retired Amoco oil executive, had an extensive background both in the private sector and in politics. He had previously served two terms as the mayor of Ashburn before a three-year stint as city manager in the Southwest Georgia town of Pelham.
Monroe County District 2 Commissioner Eddie Rowland said that when Commissioners first hired Hedges, Monroe County had recently shifted to a County Manager form of government, and he wasn’t sure what an effective county manager even looked like. But Commissioner Rowland said Hedges himself knew what a quality county manager could do for a county like Monroe, and it took less than a day for Hedges to prove his worth.
Commissioner Rowland said in County Manager Hedges’ first day on the job, then-Monroe County Commission Chairman Greg Tapley was made aware of an incident involving a county employee. Chairman Tapley initially said he’d deal with it before County Manager Hedges quickly intervened.
Commissioner Rowland recalled, “Jim said, ‘Greg, let me handle that.’ And that’s how we came to know that Jim would take care of it. ‘It’s not your problem. It’s my problem. So go do things that are your problem.’ Jim had enough insight in the proper way to lead an organization. He had to kind of teach us (Commissioners) what we needed to do and just as importantly, what we didn’t need to do. We manage the county manager, and the county manager manages everyone else.”
When County Manager Hedges arrived in Monroe County in late 2018, it was shortly after a tumultuous period in the county’s history when the previous county manager had been demoted and previous finance director had been fired. Only a couple of months before County Manager Hedges started work, a new Monroe County Finance Director, Lorri Robinson-Byrd, was hired. The two of them immediately rolled up their sleeves and went to work fixing a government plagued by financial mismanagement. County Manager Hedges said Robinson-Byrd discovered millions of dollars in county banking accounts that had previously been unaccounted for because some major expeditures had been made from the county’s general fund instead of from the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) fund that was supposed to have been paying for the purchases.
County Manager Hedges recalled of that wild first year cleaning up the county’s financial accounts: “I got challenged by the newspaper and social media that all I do is spend money. But few people knew that the 2020 SPLOST, because of the way it had been handled in the past, it was written in the bond documents that Lorri and I had 36 months to spend 75 percent of the money.”
By the time the county’s financial woes were sorted out, another major event shook Monroe County and the entire world in early 2020. The unknown of the COVID-19 pandemic had a paralyzing effect on local government, as Commissioners swiftly moved to shut down non-essential operations. Despite the county operating with a socially-distanced skeleton crew, County Manager Hedges showed his leadership by continuing to commute daily from his Ashburn home to Forsyth during the pandemic.
“We basically shut down the whole county government, except me,” County Manager Hedges said. “I’ll never forget that meeting when Eddie (Rowland) had his list of what all was going to be closed. And at the end, he said, ‘Jim, you’re here every day.’”
While County Manager Hedges might have gotten a bit bored in his quiet office during the COVID-19 shutdown, he never minded the nearly two-hour daily drive before daybreak to work that many private sector retirees his age would never have even considered.
“When I interviewed for this job, I told them that I don’t have any hobbies,” County Manager Hedges said. “I don’t golf. I don’t fish. I don’t hunt. Work’s what I enjoy doing. . . As I go into retirement, the Commissioners say, ‘You’ll probably be working again within two months because that’s your hobby.’”
At about the same time in 2020 that the COVID-19 storm was raging, Monroe County Commissioners faced another unanticipated challenge. Juliette-area residents notified Commissioners that a highly toxic compound called hexavalent chromium had been found in a number of private wells on the east end of Monroe County. The residents urged Commissioners for help, and it was County Manager Hedges, with help from the county’s engineers, who came up with a plan. County Manager Hedges spent the next three years overseeing what was at the time the largest water project in the state of Georgia as Commissioners dedicated more than $20 million to run 75 miles of county water lines to the portion of the Juliette area impacted by the contaminated well water. Despite the scope of the project being much larger than most small counties like Monroe County face, the project was completed on time and on budget in 2023.
But perhaps the achievement that County Manager Hedges is most proud of is the significant rebuild of the county’s vehicle fleet and heavy equipment in its Public Works Department and its Public Safety departments over the past seven years.
“It was a disaster when I first got here,” County Manager Hedges said of the county’s aging capital infrastructure. “We had deputies driving vehicles with 350,000 miles on them that wouldn’t even make it from one side of the county to the other. Also, the overhaul of equipment for Monroe County Emergency Services. During my tenure, we bought 15 fire trucks, a ladder truck, heavy-duty rescue vehicles. I lost track of how many ambulances, but it’s a large number along with the command staff vehicles that they didn’t have. We also opened three new fire stations.”
Former Monroe County Commission Chairman Greg Tapley said County Manager Hedges’ financial smarts made it easier for Commissioners to make hard spending decisions.
“We (Commissioners) made some significant decisions like buying all brand-new fire trucks and things of that nature,” Tapley said. “Which were tough decisions to make but now have played out to be the right things to do. People have safe drinking water. People have fire trucks that will crank and run and get to where they’re going and pump water. And when you’ve got someone that understands finances and how to manage that properly, it can help you make your decisions on whether to move forward with those kinds of things.”
While issues like a pandemic, a multimillion-dollar water project, and failing infrastructure may have seemed like major problems for an inexperienced administrator, County Manager Hedges said he never considered them “challenges.”
“Nothing really jumps out as a huge challenge,” County Manager Hedges said. “I know Eddie (Rowland) in the last day or so told me, ‘Things come up. We handle them and then we move on to the next thing.’ It’s just rolling like that.”
County Manager Hedges said one of the biggest reasons why the Monroe County government keeps overcoming bumps in the road is the employees that work for it.
“I’ve been very, very lucky about the department heads that report directly to me. There are no weak links anywhere,” County Manager Hedges said. “My management style was I wanted to get their budgets approved and their manpower approved, and it was up to them to implement their budget and their hiring practices. I never got involved in the hiring or firing of anybody below department head level. It’s an outstanding team everywhere.”
Monroe County Community Development Manager Kelsey Fortner said she appreciated County Manager Hedges’ professional approach to managing employees, which was honed by years overseeing a large finance office and a massive budget of $3-5 million a day while working all over the globe for Amoco.
“Jim’s been real big on taking a 30,000-foot view, which I think has helped everything,” Fortner said. “His leadership has changed this county. He’s not a micromanager, and that is wonderful. He just expects you to be an adult in the professional workplace, and you just do your job.”
Nevertheless, County Manager Hedges’ hands-off approach to departmental decisions didn’t mean he was unapproachable to county staffers.
“I feel like he’s always got his door open if you ever have any questions,” Fortner said. “If you’re ever maybe second-guessing yourself or something like that, you just go in there and tell him what you’re thinking. And he holds nothing back. He’ll either tell you, ‘No, that’s not a good idea.’ Or, ‘Yeah, it is.’ His door always being open to whatever you want to talk to him about has always been one of his biggest attributes.”
While County Manager Hedges oversaw the county’s day-to-day operations, that left the five Commissioners with the job of overseeing him. Five Commissioners who have different personalities, different geographic areas to govern, and occasionally, competing interests. Monroe County District 1 Commissioner Lamarcus Davis said County Manager Hedges built personal relationships with all of his five “bosses,” which usually kept the Board united in the end.
“A lot of people who don’t know him don’t know that he has a great personality,” Commissioner Davis said of County Manager Hedges. “He’s a friend. Any one of us (Commissioners) can go in there at any time and talk to him. He has a relationship with each of us, different relationships, but he has a way to let us all know how to look at different things. If I have a different opinion on something, he will go to the next commissioner and help them understand why I have that opinion and vice versa. He’ll help me understand why they have that opinion, and that helps me out a lot. When you have somebody sitting in that county manager seat that can really sit down with the commissioners and talk to them and help them through things, and form relationships with them, that makes a big difference.”
Commissioner Rowland said it helped that County Manager Hedges usually came to Commissioners with solutions already in mind rather than just turning over problems to them.
“I think he does a good job of forming the best course of action for whatever we’ve got on our plate,” Commissioner Rowland said of County Manager Hedges. “He does it clearly. He doesn’t throw a problem out and there and say, ‘Okay, you five debate on how to solve it.’ He throws a problem out there and he says, ‘This seems to me to be the best solution. What do you guys think?’ Typically, what he thinks is the best one, but if it doesn’t work for us and we feel differently, he will sit back and say, ‘Okay, I’ve taken my shot at it. You guys debate the way you want to do it.’ That’s all you can ask. . . And he doesn’t hold grudges. Whatever happens, that’s it. That was the decision. Let’s move on to the next one.”
County Manager Hedges said he got along with all of the Commissioners and enjoyed each of their differing perspectives on the county. He said Commissioner Rowland was fun to work with because of the detail with which he approaches every issue, which sometimes included filling up all of the whiteboards in the office with mathematical data. He said Commissioner Davis and current Monroe County Commission Chairman Alan Gibbs were both eager to learn from Day 1. He said former Chairman Tapley still calls him daily at 6 a.m. for a regular morning chat even more than a year after leaving office. He said Chairman Tapley was the Commissioner that loved to debate issues the most. He said Monroe County District 3 Commissioner John Ambrose has been one of his biggest supporters throughout his tenure, urging the Board to include him in the county’s retirement benefit program while also making sure he had a safe, effective vehicle for his long drives to Ashburn.
Commissioner Davis said County Manager Hedges has been a mentor to him in the five years he’s been a commissioner.
“Jim has been very instrumental in my career as a commissioner,” Commissioner Davis said. “Any questions I have, even before I got elected I’d come up and have conversations with Jim. Jim had a lot of experience in government and politics, and he knows a lot of people throughout the state and nation. . . He’s put me in the room with a lot of people I would have never known. He’s given me a lot of advice. A lot of times I thought something was one way, and I’d go talk to Jim and see that there are different angles to it.”
Commissioner Rowland said he bonded with County Manager Hedges over shared tragedies that occurred in their lives during the past few years, including the 2020 passing of County Manager Hedges’ wife Joan after a lengthy battle with cancer.
“There would be a lot of time that county business would be on my heart, and I would be struggling with it,” Commissioner Rowland said. “He (County Manager Hedges) is an extremely good listener. He will sit there and listen and not say a word and take it all in. And then he will guide you through getting yourself out of it. And as far as personally, I was involved with him with the loss of my dad, the disappearance of my brother, the loss of his wife, the loss of his son, and we shared a lot of those experiences.”
While County Manager Hedges will officially hand over the county manager “crystal ball” to his successor Robinson-Byrd this weekend, county work will not cease. He said some major issues that will be pushed to the forefront in the coming months and years include: building a new Animal Services facility and a new fleet management facility, continuing negotiations with Google on a new data center off Rumble Road, renegotiating a long-term water contract with the Macon Water Authority, holding a countywide referendum concerning a potential penny Floating Local Option Sales Tax (FLOST), and negotiating an updated service delivery strategy with the cities of Forsyth and Culloden.
County Manager Hedges said of Robinson-Byrd: “I’ve made sure in her own mind that I believe and I fully support that she can do this job. . . She’s got to learn to juggle about six or seven balls at one time because there’s always that many issues going on within the county.”
More than anything, County Manager Hedges said he’ll miss the friendships he’s made in Monroe County. He said he frequently keeps in touch with co-workers from three decades ago and his Monroe County colleagues will be no different.
“I’m going to miss Monroe County,” County Manager Hedges said. “I plan on following them on social media. I will continue to e-mail and talk with those that are up here. I’ve made it known that they are willing to bounce something off of me, but I have no authority whatsoever after 5:00 tomorrow afternoon.”
