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McKenzie Robinson | SBJ

2021 Men of the Year: Bob Dixon

Greene County Commission

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When it comes to saving money, Bob Dixon is a pro. Since becoming Greene County’s presiding commissioner in 2019, Dixon and his team have saved the county millions of dollars.

In his role, Dixon is responsible for overseeing the activities of departments within the county government, and his office enacts policies, resolutions and ordinances for more than 280,000 residents.

The office of county commissioner also adopts the annual budget, which is where Dixon’s private-sector background in finance shines. One of Dixon’s proudest accomplishments is saving the county more than $95 million by relocating the Greene County Sheriff’s Office operations and moving the county jail, creating a unified campus. Dixon says the redesigned jail will generate savings over the next 20 years due to reduced staffing costs.

“These savings are due to indirect supervision and having more area to spread out the cell pods horizontally as opposed to vertically, reducing needless duplications without adversely effecting safety,” he says.

Under Dixon’s tenure, the county commissioner’s office also refinanced and paid off several loans and bonds, totaling over $1.6 million in savings for the county. Dixon says the office additionally saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in building costs by relocating the Family Justice Center to the former Tefft Middle School building, which Springfield Public Schools sold to the county for $1.

Dixon says his long-term vision for Greene County is “to set the county on an even more solid foundation for the next generation.”

He hopes to achieve that longevity by stabilizing the county’s cash flow over the next 20 years with strategic long-term planning.

Dixon’s life of public service began in 2002, when he was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He served four terms as a representative until 2011, when he became a state senator.

As a senator, Dixon served as chair of the Judiciary Committee, the first person who wasn’t an attorney in the post since the 1830s. In this role, Dixon oversaw the reorganization of Missouri’s criminal code for the first time in 35 years. 

He has spent his life advocating for Missourians and recently took his advocacy to the National Associations of Counties. He was appointed to the Broadband Task Force, whose mission is to connect all counties to high-speed internet as “one of the primary equity issues of our time.”

As part of his work on the task force, Dixon held roundtable discussions with stakeholders in other Missouri counties to gather data for the national report.

“This gave Missouri a seat at the table,” he says.

From that work, Dixon was then appointed to the board for the Missouri Association of Counties.

When he’s not serving the county, Dixon remains active through volunteer work and board involvement for such organizations as the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, the Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau, Ozarks Transportation Organization, Ozark Headwaters Recycling and Materials Management District, and the Missouri Job Center.

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