A. J. Massey on his plans as the new Madison County Mayor

JACKSON, TENN (WNBJ)-

School Board Members, County Commissioners, the County Trustee, Constable and the new Mayor took the oath of office today at Englewood Baptist Church.

“I look forward to getting behind the desk and actually getting everything rolling and getting my hands around what the job actually means day to day," said New Madison County Mayor A. J. Massey.

Massey is spending his first days in office meeting with his new co-workers, "A lot of the first probably 30 days is going to be just get my feet underneath me, meet with department heads, meet them with departments and employees individually," he said.

After that it’s right to work, "Then we going to start looking at the way we can kind of upgrade the county as far as just modernize the county, understanding how we operate out of the courthouse and the way we can do that maybe more efficiently, the way that we work with the city, make sure that that relationship is intact. And then we're gonna look at once again how, what budgetary, what the budget looks like over the next few years," said Massey.

He is ready to work as a team, "If we ask everybody on that stage why they ran for office or what they want to do, we may have different views on what we want to do. The reality is that each person up there is to represent the entire county. Now we may have districts or a smaller area that we represent, but really we want to identify what is our one thing we are going to do," Massey said.

And the new sheriff is no exception, “Sheriff Weiser's a good friend. …we're gonna overcommunicate so that if we come to a budgetary impasse like this, this happened in the past. We know about it ahead of time. and we can hash it out behind closed doors and hopefully get what we both need," added Massey.

Mayor Massey says he wants his term to be defined by one word "service,”

"I want people to look at my term in office as someone who has served, who was available, who was open, who listened to the county residents and actually put the action behind, behind those conversations and was there to serve, listened and effectively managed all those relationships," Massey said.

Massey says he wants to be known as a servant of the county and its residents.