See Part 1 of this report, “Key retirements come as county administration changes,” at this link.
BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
Sherry Jones, who wore multiple hats in her nearly 31 years in county government, had been talking about retiring for more than four years, and this year, she made it happen.
“I started out working for Woody (Gardner) and Carroll Redford Jr. in their law office right out of high school, and then Judge Gardner went to work in another law firm, and I went to work for him in that law firm,” Jones said. “And then an opening came up here, and I asked Judge Gardner if I could come up here, and that’s when it began.”
Technically, “up here” was “over there” in the Barren County Courthouse.
Fiscal Court Clerk Sherry Jones listens to someone speak at the October meeting of the Barren County Fiscal Court. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
She started that role Feb. 5, 1992. Gardner, a Democrat, was in the last year of his three terms as judge-executive, all of which he’d won unopposed, she said.
Next up was David Dickerson, a Republican who served a five-year term, created due to changes in statewide law to better align election years, she said. He was defeated in his bid for re-election by Democrat Freddie Travis, who also only served one term, which was back to a four-year time frame then.
Republican Davie Greer took over the position she held for 12 years then, and Micheal Hale has served eight years.
Through those years, Jones has worked with eight fiscal courts.
“I worked for different parties,” said Jones, a Democrat, “and my party’s never changed.”
When she first started with county government, she was Gardner’s administrative assistant, but she also had the duties of finance officer and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance officer.
“I laughed one time [as] I asked him if I was going to be dog warden, but he didn’t give me that,” she said, chuckling.
According to state law, the county clerk always has the option of having the duties of fiscal court clerk, and then-County Clerk Wilmer Hodges chose to designate his daughter, Pam Hodges Browning, who was a deputy county clerk, as the fiscal court clerk.
If the county clerk chooses to not have that additional role, then the fiscal court has the authority to appoint someone to be that and/or a court reporter, and early in Dickerson’s term as judge-executive, in 1994, Wilmer Hodges notified him his office no longer wished to serve in the fiscal court clerk role.
Jones, then, became the fiscal court clerk.
“The statutes require that you have a finance officer that backs up the treasurer for a set of books,” she said. “We check each other. She’s the primary/chief financial. I’m basically the backup. I do accounts payable, but we all have our hands in it.”
Barren County Treasurer Jenny Hoffman and Fiscal Court Clerk Sherry Jones share a light moment before the December 2022 Barren County Fiscal Court meeting, their last together before Jones’ retirement. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
Those bills the county pays are referred to as “claims” when the fiscal court is voting on them during their meetings.
“The experience itself has been rewarding. There’s things about local government that people like, people don’t like. That includes the employees that work right here, but it’s rewarding to see the progress that comes about. One of the dissatisfactions of local government is the fact that it moves slow – they move slow – and that’s irritating to a lot of people, not just people who work here but the general public in itself, but the experience and the rewards of being educated and working with people in the community and trying to help them has been rewarding in itself.”
Discussions about the current Barren County Government Center started under the Dickerson administration, but by the time it was finished and they moved across the street from the Barren County Courthouse, which had housed a variety of other state and county offices in addition to the court system, Travis was judge-executive, she said.
Several county employees’ desks were arranged around one large open room in the courthouse.
“It was smaller than we are now; it was close-knit,” Jones said. “The ladies over there were just hysterical. You know, Judge Gardner went away for a few, and everybody was always like, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something to aggravate him.’”
One example was that they made up a tale that they had left him out of the process and were going to sell the courthouse while he was gone, she said.
“The fellowship that you had there was really – it was good; it was special,” Jones said.
The judge-executives
Glasgow News 1 asked which judge-executive had the best sense of humor.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Freddie Travis could be a little dry …, his sense of humor, but he had a really good sense of humor. Judge Dickerson loved to sing, and he was a very good singer. He’d sing in the office and get us going on the singing.
Dickerson said of Jones: “She was quite adept at her job. She kept, as I insisted, absolutely accurate minutes of the minutes of fiscal court. People that care to go back to look at the work that we did can see with absolute accuracy the decisions that were made. There’s no ambiguity to it. If you look at the minutes before Sherry started doing them, you’ll see a big difference …. She was extremely accurate, and that’s what I thought the people deserved, and I think that’s what she thought the people deserved at that point in time. Ambiguity and lack of transparency in court proceedings is – that’s two ingredients to a recipe for disaster, and we didn’t have any issues with ours.”
Although the meetings are recorded now, Jones also still often uses the shorthand she learned more than three decades ago, a skill that Dickerson said had definitely helped along the way.
“She was so accurate with her shorthand, and she was such a fast typist and was so good with word processing, had a good vocabulary. Nothing ever passed by her understanding when we were in fiscal court meetings. She just did excellent work. … I don’t think I ever found a mistake in what she printed. If you want to go back and look at the fiscal court order books for that period of time, I think you’d be very pleased in the way they were done,” Dickerson said. “She was quite impressive during the time that we worked together.”
Regarding Greer, Jones said, “working with the first female [Barren County] judge-executive, that in itself was a monumental event. And Davie was a go-getter, and she was out there, and she was very active even prior to her job as county judge, in the community. … Davie always had the energy … to go out there and get it and work it and get it done.”
Greer said she considers Jones a very good friend.
“She is the sweetest thing that ever was,” Greer said. “I know she knows more about that office than a lot of people do — put together. I hate to see her retire but I understand. She’s been there a long time. … She was always nice to me and good to me and helped me out of things that I would have probably got in trouble with if she hadn’t have steered me the right direction. … That’s easily done, when you take a businessperson going into a government position, you’ve got a know a whole lot of things that you don’t know that you thought you did.”
Greer agreed that’s one of the biggest mistakes candidates make, is thinking they can run a government just like a business.
“It’s good to have that little business background,” she said, adding that there are some aspects that can be done in similar fashion, “but there are so many rules and regulations that go back for years and years and years, and you’ve got to follow them, but Sherry knew them. She was on top of things. She was very, very smart and very personable. She could meet the people and she, she’s going to be missed.”
Greer said Jones was “right with me when I was meeting with the people in this county when I was trying my best to get some land-use planning going on, and Sherry was always right there with me, telling me what I could do and what I couldn’t.”
Jones said Greer never met a stranger, to which Greer replied that sounded about right.
“They were always telling me that I tried to talk to too many people, but I did. I tried to talk everybody that called,” she said of Jones and Houchens, laughing heartily, “and they’d get after me some days, and I said, ‘Well, that’s what I thought I wanted to do when I took the office. I wanted to be sure that we kept the people involved. … All I know is that those two were a pleasure to work with, both of them.”
Jones doesn’t deny that Gardner is kind of her favorite.
“Judge Gardner and I had a special bond, because I started out working with him right out of high school,”
She was 17 in 1984.
“He was a patient teacher. I learned a lot under Judge Gardner. Now, the joke around here is that he’s my favorite, and somebody’s caught me saying that, but, hey, he was the first judge and he was one of my first employers, so he and Mr. Redford both are very special, because that’s where I started,” Jones said.
Gardner told GN1 that when Jones expressed interest in a county job, “of course I knew of her good work.”
He said she’s obviously continued to do a good job.
What stands out the most about her, he said, is “the combination of her personality, intelligence, her willingness to work and to an excellent job of what she does.”
“She came as a young single girl out of high school, and she got married while we were working together,” Gardner said. “She had her daughter, who’s now an engineer and working in Louisville.”
He said they share a lot of good memories of their families.
“I thank her for her friendship and her service to the people of Barren County,” he said. “You can be very proud of it.”
Barren County Magistrate Tim Coomer stands and salutes Fiscal Court Clerk Sherry Jones, behind chairs, as she makes what she called her “final walk” into a fiscal court meeting in December 2022 as Magistrates Mark Bowman and Kenneth Sartin chuckle. Jones’ retirement at the end of this year came after nearly 31 years’ employment with the county. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
Coming back around from the first one to the last one, Jones said, “And of course Judge Hale, he loves to play pranks. He’s come in — and that was the first thing that we learned about each other – that he liked to pull pranks on people. … And then we would pull pranks on him, too.”
Hale said he definitely was not the only prankster in the office.
“We aggravate each other,” he said.
He said he’ll miss the most just being around them every day and getting their advice in general – not only how to stay compliant and stay out of trouble.
He’s written down some of their words of wisdom to keep with him as they go their separate ways, he said.
“Sherry Jones has been a very important on this wheel with county government. When you think about what she’s done over the years and the different judge-executives that she’s worked for, you know, she’s not only a fiscal court clerk but she’s a lot like a county attorney as well, because she can remember KRS’s – statutes. … Not only just for me, she’s been a person that department heads and elected officials have looked to to keep our county compliant, and I greatly appreciate it.
He said he’s very thankful to have had Nancy Houchens, the deputy judge-executive, and Jones and, for the last few years, County Treasurer Jenny Hoffman now].
“I’ve had a good team around me,” Hale said. “I think what I’m really going to value, take away from this, is the friendship, because we’ll always have the friendship between us. We’ll have a bond between us because we’ve had a lot of conversations about what we need to do here, what we need to do there, but we’ve all moved forward together. Whatever we’ve decided, we’ve moved forward together.”
Three decades of perspective
Jones said she won’t miss “the politics of the job.”
“I understand it’s political. Once you get in, politics should be put aside. And sometimes when it gets close to the election years, re-election years, it tends to rear its ugly head, so that part of it I don’t like,” she said.
As with Houchens, what she’ll miss the most is the social network with the people there and with the general public.
“I enjoy helping people,” she said. “Even if it’s a simple answering the phone and giving them the correct phone number. I’ve said that many times, government’s hard to follow. … That’s what I’ll miss, helping the people.”
Where she’s seen the most progress is with the infrastructure itself. The county renovated the courthouse and then the jail building that had been along Ford Drive, and then constructed the county government building.
“Those processes that you go through are not easy. We’re currently working on the new judicial center project. I didn’t think I would be here to see that again. Also, reapportionment proceedings will start next year. Had it not been for COVID, I would have been involved in that again for the third time.”
During a reapportionment, the fiscal court appoints a commission to examine the most recent census data and then make recommendations to the fiscal court on how to divide the county as equally as possible with regard to voting precincts, magisterial districts, etc. In her time, she’s never seen it proposed to increase the number but it had been proposed to decrease, ultimately it stayed the same.
When given the opportunity to make remarks at the fiscal court’s last meeting of the year, she told the group that the mama in her wanted things to work the way they should.
“So I have babied everybody as far as, ‘Here’s what you need to do; here’s your reminder.’ So Mama’s going home,” Jones said.
To see Nancy Houchens’ and Sherry Jones’ remarks, as well as other fiscal court members’, at 2022’s final fiscal court meeting, check out this video of the meeting on YouTube. Houchens’ and Jones’ parts begin at approximately the 1:15:50 and 1:17:06 time marks, respectively.
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