District 2 commissioner faces challenge at the ballot box

Tim McGrady and John Russell will face off next month in the election for Greene County’s District 2 commissioner, which represents the eastern side of the county and assumes office for a four-year term.

All other Greene County races are uncontested in the general election, including the District 1 commissioner, Rusty MacLachlan. The others are sheriff, Jim Arnott (who defeated challenger Ben McMains in the August primary election); assessor, Brent Johnson; treasurer, Justin Hill; and public administrator, Sherri Martin – all incumbents poised to continue in their present roles.

For the contested commission seat, incumbent Russell, a Republican, was appointed to his position by Gov. Mike Parson in 2019 to fulfill a vacancy left by the election of Missouri Sen. Lincoln Hough and was reelected the following year. Russell is the founder of Pillar Insurance LLC and has been involved with a family manufacturing business, L&W Industries LLC. He served as the deputy chief of staff for former Gov. Matt Blunt, according to his candidacy website.

Challenger McGrady, a Democrat, has held various professional roles, from working as a Realtor to serving at CoxHealth and as a corporate leader for O’Reilly Auto Parts, according to his candidacy website. He is a former U.S. Army sergeant.

The candidates were asked the same set of questions in separate interviews captured by members of the Informed Voter Coalition, a group of nonpartisan organizations with a goal to boost voter engagement. Springfield Business Journal joined the 14-member coalition in 2023.

In this excerpt, candidate responses are compiled side-by-side for ease of comparison. The full interview is available at SBJ.net/election2024.

Do you think Greene County should take a more proactive approach dealing with vacant commercial and residential properties that are years in disrepair? If your answer is yes, what do you think the county should do? And if it’s no, please explain why you feel that way.

Russell: The commission works very closely with the Resource Management Department of Greene County, which is a commission department, and we have a compliance division of that department, and it’s something that we have invested dollars in, both in terms of budgeting as well as an additional full-time employee added to that department this year to work through some of those cases. Sometimes it is related to some vacant houses that are maybe in disrepair or maybe just not taking care of the yard or the trash in the yard, but we have made investments over the past two years to try to continue to tackle some of those problems. At any given day, there can be around 400-500 open cases in Greene County of compliance issues, so we’re working to try to take care of those in a timely manner.

McGrady: Yes, any kind of vacant, blighted – any type of properties like that, be it commercial or residential – needs to be taken care of. I mean, they’re not going to get better, of course – the worst thing you can do with any vehicle or home or building is to let it set. And so if that happens, it’s going to get worse. It’s never going to get better –  never, ever. The county, of course, in dealing with any kind of properties like that, of course, they’ve got to be fair, open, listen to what the county wants because, you know, the commissioners there were elected by the residents of the county, and we need to listen to what they want. We need to listen to them on a very regular basis and know how they want to deal with things like that. If you have people that are not taking care of properties, not taking it seriously – and I think any time that something is vacant or ran down, they’re not taking it seriously; that’s plain for everybody to see – and so when that happens, it’s time for the county, city or anybody to step in and make changes for that, and you probably need a new owner, and/or the county could lend a hand, you know, depending on the property that you’re talking about and make sure that it’s good for the new owners and/or the county. Yes, it’s absolutely a big deal, and we can’t let things go on like that because it’s never going to get any more positive and it’s got to be addressed. We’ve had some owners in the past that have had quite a few properties in the Springfield and Greene County area, and they let them go way too long, and sometimes people even have to deal with that that are tenants there, and that’s a very bad deal. People should not have to deal with that.

Can you give examples of how the counties and municipalities could cooperate to solve problems, and how can cooperation between these entities be improved?

Russell: Collaboration is one of the things that we hear about most in our community. I think we do very well as a community, but of course there’s always room for improvement. Some of the ways that we have collaborated, and I will continue to collaborate, with colleagues in different municipalities and with Springfield – and one thing to remember, there’s many other municipalities here in Greene County – but we have regular meetings with most of these either mayors or sometimes the councils. We have a standing monthly meeting with the city of Springfield’s management team just to collaborate on what might be going on here that we might need to know about and then vice versa. We have regular phone calls with each of these mayors and municipalities and try to have meetings out in the community just to hear what’s going on in each of these, because Greene County takes in all roughly 300,000 citizens, so we really need to hear what’s going on in each and every segment of the county.

McGrady: Great question. And of course, as I mentioned before, you know, the county’s budget for this year is a little over $248 million. That’s a huge amount of money. The county, the city, the state and even the federal government have got to work together. We need to make sure that we’re maximizing and minimizing all the time. I mean from my corporate life at O’Reilly’s, I learned that to the nth degree. You want to maximize everything that you’re getting out of every dollar. And you’ve got to minimize cost, to minimize taxes, any way you can. It’s got to all be done, you know, correctly, but we’ve got cooperation – again, there’s communication; you’ve got to make sure that that is happening on an ongoing basis – and if you’re talking with people – and I’m a relationship builder. You’ve got to demand things of vendors and people like that because you’re spending the taxpayers’ dollars, and you got to make sure you’re getting everything you can for every one of those dollars. And at the same time, you got to build great relationships with those people so that they want to work with you. But I think via the state and the city and even the feds, I would always be looking for ways that I could spend their money before I’d spend our money, you know? I mean, it’s all got to be legal and up front, of course, but if we can spend other people’s money to help get things done in the county in a better way, we’ve got to make that happen any way that we possibly can.