BY LISA STAYTON
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN
INEZ — It is a Tuesday night in mid-September. Martin County Utility Board’s outgoing chairman, Jimmy Don Kerr, is delivering a farewell speech in the same room where he spent years navigating the complexities of the public water and sewer systems. It is a job he was initially reluctant to take.
“I was at ‘The Nutcracker’ with my daughters,” he recalls. “John Horn [former utility board member] smiled at me and said, ‘I need you to do something you don’t want to do.’”
For Kerr that moment—watching his daughters prepare for a holiday ballet—became the prelude to a seven-year commitment, one that evolved into a saga of public service and personal sacrifice.
“Hell no,” was Kerr’s initial response when asked to join the board. “There ain’t no way I will ever do that,” he said with conviction.
But as often happens with reluctant civic servants, he did.
“We were putting up a Christmas tree later, and my daughters were sitting there,” Kerr recalls. “They were quite a bit younger than they are now. I don’t know why it came onto my heart the way it did, but I just didn’t want these two girls to look at me down the road and say, ‘Dad, you could have helped. Why didn’t you help?’”
Soon enough the waters—both figurative and literal—rose to meet him.
With his unfiltered style and wry humor, Kerr recounts the conversation with a mix of amusement and exasperation. Horn had promised it would take just six months. That six months ballooned into seven years as Kerr found himself caught in the challenges of a water district on the brink of collapse.
Just two weeks into his tenure the entire water system shut down. Facebook exploded with complaints. Despite advice to keep things quiet, Kerr made a bold decision: they would go public with everything, “just lay bare what the Martin County Water District was and the issues we were having.”
When Kerr first joined the board, the district was plagued by bad water quality, overwhelming debt and financial woes, and a system that was crumbling. The infrastructure was more a patchwork of band-aids than a functioning system, or as Kerr put it, “held together with paperclips, a rubber band and some duct tape.”
Kerr describes his chairmanship as having distinct seasons, each shaped by a revolving cast of water district managers, board members and bureaucrats. He is quick to name those he admired. There is Greg Scott, whom Kerr describes as a kind of MacGyver of utilities. Then there is Craig Miller, the “loud and brash” manager whom Kerr credits with teaching him how to lead, whether he wanted to or not.
“It was the blind leading the blind when we started,” Kerr admits of the water board.
The water district, he says, has transformed into something unrecognizable from those early years.
“We’re about to round the corner in a big way once the [raw water intake] project and the plant project are finished. We just got funding for new meters, and it’s going to change the game. It’ll lower our water loss even more,” Kerr predicts.
“This is a really exciting time to be on this board. The one thing is, I won’t be sitting where you guys are to see it come to fruition.”
Kerr’s speech, peppered with shout-outs, resembles a reunion special for a reality TV show about rural governance. He gives credit where it is due—sometimes begrudgingly—thanking critics and proponents alike.
“One of the biggest things I learned is that you need to listen to people with different points of view,” he says.
Perhaps Kerr’s greatest strength is his ability to navigate the fine line between defiance and humility. His journey from reluctant participant to the face of Martin County’s water board is, at its core, a story of grit, necessity and ultimately service. This was never about ego for Kerr, though he does not shy away from acknowledging the emotional toll it took on him and his family. His voice cracks only once when he reflects on how hard it was for his children to hear their dad criticized.
“I almost quit multiple times,” he confesses.
As Kerr steps down, he leaves behind a system that he believes is finally on its way. The incoming board members—like Timothy Thoma, an engineer experienced in designing water and sewer systems, and Vernon Robinson, a seasoned businessman—will lead in a more stable chapter of the district’s history.
“My season is over,” Kerr says, with a mix of relief and satisfaction. “But I feel like we made a difference.”
Whether he has succeeded in his mission will be up to the next generation to decide. But for now, he walks away knowing he did not leave the water district the way he found it.