A Conversation With … Jennifer McClure

You signed on April 6 as Greene County’s public information officer. What are your main duties?
When the commission conceived of putting someone back in this position – they had someone a few years ago who built a strong foundation with the public – they felt it was an opportunity to re-engineer that job, not just PIO, but more strategic communications. Really, to add the component of public engagement. There is a quote that says, “It’s easy to rule, but hard to govern.” That is the issue of public engagement; you have to have that dialogue, that two-way input. If you aren’t listening, you’re not governing.

Greene County has 288,000 residents. With an increased focus on public engagement, how will you engage them?
Social media is only part of it. That’s one of our strategic goals, to increase that type of communication. There are some steps to public engagement. I think one of those is engaging your employees, for them to understand the organization and be able to communicate to the community around them. One of the amazing things here is the Great Game of Business/Great Game of Government. Since I have been here – and been a beneficiary, especially of the dashboard information, the fiscal information that is available – it is such a wonderful tool to be able to engage people. They want to know where their money goes.

What is your role in an election year?
We are really trying to ramp up our communications prior to elections. I’m working on that with County Clerk Shane Schoeller. It does take a lot of nuts and bolts information to be prepared to go to the polls. We have new polling places this time. Absentee voting is something a lot of people don’t know about. There are a number of stipulations and there is a learning curve. The more we can educate people about that election process before going to the polls, the more they will have a successful voting experience.

The county was without a PIO for four years. Why get one now?
I think in part it was budget constraints, but I think it was also a bit of a test in terms of seeing what the need was. I think anytime you’re in the public sector, you have to justify something. They, over some years, realized there were some gaps in terms of people’s understanding. They did need a more focused and rigorous effort to disseminate information to people and that is a fundamental part.

The county has a 2016 general revenue budget of $42.2 million, a $4.4 million increase over 2015. With funding on the rise, what’s the biggest issue facing the county?
One of the biggest challenges is really financial sustainability going forward. The great thing for Greene County, over the last couple years, they were able to do so much in the way of streamlining, cutting and fiscal literacy. They had the citizen financial advisory task force come in and take a look at this issue of what are the greatest threats to our sustainability. The determination was made there is an enormous scope of what constitutes public safety and the criminal justice system.

Speaking of the criminal justice system, I thought you would say the ongoing jail situation is the county’s largest problem.
There is growing demand, to the point where almost half of our general revenue budget goes toward that. Part of the reason the jail is an issue is because most inmates in the jail are not serving a sentence. Those people are in the jail as part of the criminal justice process, so if we don’t have enough pieces and parts in the rest of that process – and there are issues flowing people through the different parts of the court system – that obviously keeps people in the jail. It is a systemic problem.