The death of longtime Liberty County Tax Commissioner Virgil Jones, just days before the general primary ballot was finalized, left a vacancy with no incumbent. Two candidates, former Liberty County Chief Financial Officer Kim McGlothlin, and longtime Tag Office employee James “Jamie” Sharp, are both running in the Democratic primary. With no Republican challenger, whichever candidate gets at least 50 percent plus one vote in the primary will win the race.
A check of state ethics filings shows that both McGlothlin and Sharp filed affidavits of exemption, meaning neither expects to spend or receive more than $2,500 for their campaign. Sharp also filed a candidate campaign committee form, listing “Vicky Nelson” as his campaign committee. Nelson is Hinesville’s District 3 councilwoman.
Kim McGlothlin
McGlothlin holds a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Florida and has served as an adjunct professor of accounting for Central Texas College, which offers classes at Fort Stewart, since 2012, according to her LinkedIn page. Her county personnel file also shows more than two dozen training certificates in Governmental Accounting Standards Board procedures, Introductory Governmental Accounting, legal training for supervisors, 12 hours of Georgia Government Finance Officers Association training, supervising a drug-free workplace, the FEMA National Incident Management System’s Intermediate Incident and Advanced Command Systems, financial considerations for disaster recovery, Web EOC, active shooter training, leadership management personnel training, COVID-19 budgetary strategies, and CARES Act funding.
McGlothlin has said in public forums that a big part of the tax commissioner’s role is to educate the public. The tax commissioner does not set property taxes, for example — that is the job of the Board of Commissioners.
Two different offices with similar-sounding names deal with separate parts of managing whatever taxes the commission votes to pass.
One is the tax assessor, whose staff does the highly technical work of figuring out the value of your property only for the purposes of taxation, which may be more or less than whatever the real estate market value is at a given moment.
The other is the tax commissioner — the position for which McGlothlin and Sharp are running — whose job it is to send out and collect the tax bill on behalf of the county, as well as to make sure those books are balanced.
McGlothlin’s county experience
A review of McGlothlin’s personnel file, which The Current obtained through a Georgia Open Records Act request, shows that she was hired as county finance director in April 2002 at $42,515.20 per year. She earned merit raises in 2002, 2004 (retroactive), 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2021, and 2022, along with adjustments based on outside salary studies and cost of living adjustments. In 2019, she was named chief financial officer. On Oct. 17, 2022, a “re-evaluation of existing job” bumped her salary from $109,324.80 to $130,000 per year. At the end of 2022, McGlothlin retired.
McGlothlin’s performance reviews were strong, even glowing throughout her career. Her ratings either exceeded requirements or were “exceptional,” particularly in terms of “quantity of work” and going “beyond the normal scope of work in helping achieve the mission of the organization.” This was in the context of major challenges McGlothlin had listed over the years, like meeting grant requirements for federal ARPA funds, COVID staffing shortages, the county taking over EMS operations from the hospital heavier workloads due to hurricanes and budget cuts, the loss of two longtime employees who retired in 2018, and working with the Solid Waste Department and Tax Commissioner Brown to streamline solid waste account collections.
“The first few years that we were doing it, we weren’t doing it as an assessment in putting it on the actual tax bill,” McGlothlin told The Current. “It was almost like it was separate. I mean, we were having to work those collections separately, and it wasn’t working. So that’s why, when they finally just put it on the tax bill and just called it an assessment, it’s just run smoothly ever since.”
Asked how she might approach running the assessor’s office, McGlothlin said she would first go in and see how everyone works together. She doesn’t think she would keep real property, personal property, and tag and title as separate entities, and that “there should be some cross-training so that everybody understands the overall mission.” She added that, when she ran the Finance Department, she encouraged employees to cross-train in accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll, so that people could cover for each other if someone was out or needed some help. Cross-training, she said, also allowed her to promote and give raises to those employees.
McGlothlin says she also might open the office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to give taxpayers a little more time to get there before work. She says she can do this at no cost by staggering employee shifts.
“There’s some things like that I think I would tweak, but until I actually get in the office and work side by side with folks, and watch how they interact with each other, watch how they interact with customers, I’m really not gonna know,” she said. “I don’t foresee any major changes, you know, until I truly understand everybody’s skill set and where the strengths and the weaknesses are.”
Early in her career, McGlothlin, a single mother, took an extended leave to care for her own mother. Among 20 county employees donating leave hours to her was her current opponent, Sharp.
James ‘Jamie’ Sharp
Sharp, who worked for the county Tag Office for two decades, says he wants to “make a change in the community” and that it’s time for “new blood” in local government. A web flyer posted on his campaign page states that he has 19 years of office experience and “hours of state-certified training in property and motor vehicle tax.”
The Current asked Sharp for more specific information about those statements and the training he said that he had completed, his past work experience and education, and his thoughts about Jones as a mentor, but he did not provide that information. The Current also asked whether he wanted to address any issues in his personnel file. Sharp did not respond to those requests, other than to say he preferred to speak in person; when offered such a meeting, he did not respond.
Sharp’s county experience
Sharp was hired as a tag clerk in May 2004 at a modest $20,654.40 per year. His application shows he graduated in 2001 from Liberty County High School, where he was Defensive Player of the Year in 2000-2001, noted that he had taken basic computing and typing courses there, and that he had been “continually employed since graduating” as a sales associate at Pro Feet. Sharp also has served as assistant football coach for Liberty County High School and head coach of First Presbyterian Christian Academy. He also has played semi-professional football for the Hinesville Hurricanes and does stand-up comedy.
At the tag office, Sharp steadily worked his way up through the ranks and was promoted to senior tag clerk in October 2011. Sharp received merit increases in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2021, 2022, 2023, and February 18 of this year, as well as cost of living adjustments and pay study increases that also affected other county employees. When he resigned in February, Sharp was making $45,676.80 per year.
Sharp won rave reviews for polite and helpful service, and his supervisors repeatedly noted his good attitude, sense of humor, and ability to handle grumpy customers, while pointing out Sharp’s problems with organization. Some were relatively minor, such as keeping his work area tidy, punching in a couple of minutes late, or using his cellphone while on duty at the tag office window. Others were more serious, involving repeated instances where Sharp allegedly allowed important paperwork to pile up or finished the day with cash drawer shortages that he would later repay.
In 2010 and 2012, he was reprimanded for allowing crucial vehicle title paperwork to pile up. In 2014, Sharp was reprimanded and suspended for six months from his senior clerk position for allegedly failing to maintain “a $100.00 cash drawer and [lead] by example.” The letter, signed by Jones and Sharp’s supervisor, Rochelle Martin, called his work “unprofessional,” adding, “The lien holders on these registered vehicles have the expectation and right to receive their titles back in a timely fashion. Your performance has reflected poorly on your position and this office.”
And in 2017, Sharp wrote Martin an apology for having given himself a military exception on his personal vehicle: “Rather than getting someone else in trouble I figured I would take any problems that came from making that mistake. So the only way to override it was for me to get a new policy on my own. I have since done that and everything should reflect that.”
Sharp also wrote about several run-ins he had had with coworkers, all of whom were women. In one instance, Sharp wrote that a coworker he confronted outside of work refused to talk with him about her allegedly complaining to their boss about his attitude towards the other clerks. Another time, he described a meeting with four women, including supervisors Martin and Erin Houston, about him allegedly having told a coworker “get the hell on” after she sent a customer to his window as she was headed to lunch. Sharp accused the coworker of lying and “trying to manipulate and control what was going on in the vault” and that he was not at the Tag Office to “make friends.”
Time and again, Jones, the late tax commissioner, signed those reprimands, as did Sharp’s supervisor, Erin Houston, warning Sharp he could be fired. Time and again, for years, Sharp promised to do better. But Sharp remained on staff.
Five days after his last raise, in a Feb. 23 letter to the “Tax Commissioner,” Sharp resigned three days before Jones died, giving less than two weeks’ notice. His Georgia Department of Labor separation notice listed “voluntary resignation” as the reason for leaving.
Sharp, who has praised Jones in public forums, said at the April NAACP candidate forum in Flemington that he felt called to run for commissioner, and pointed to Jones as an example of integrity. At the May Riceboro forum, Sharp told the crowd, “One thing Mr. Jones made sure is, there was transparency and you knew what was going on.”
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