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Personality Profile
From refuse collector to superintendent: Jimmy Smith Jr. manages Thomasville, Ga., Solid Waste Department with passion By BETH ANNE BRINK-COX | The Municipal
Jimmy Smith Jr. makes you feel you’ve always known him, and all it takes is a few minutes of conversation. As the solid waste and landfill superintendent of Thomasville, Ga. — and having worked for the city since 1995 — what Jimmy doesn’t know about the business likely isn’t worth knowing. “I was a young country boy who started at the bottom — a refuse collector, working on the trucks, all that, for a couple of months. And how things have changed! Back then, the trucks didn’t have air brakes, but hydraulic. I went into it thinking I’d do this for a couple of months. Showed my supervisor! Through the years, I worked up from crew leader to team leader to foreman and, eventually, this position,” said Smith. Smith shared he didn’t really see the need for college and went right to work as soon as he’d graduated. But in 2016, while celebrating his niece’s birthday party, his mom answered the phone, dropped it and left the room. “Dad went to see what the problem was and came back and told us: Mom had cancer. So I was thinking, what can I do for her? What would be something that would really make her feel good in spite of all this? And it was pretty simple. She’d always wanted us to go on to school, and so I did. Back to school for my mom. That was some form of relief I could give her. I graduated with an Academy Profession degree in business management. I enjoyed it! I earned a Student of the Year, Advocate of the Year and went to talk at other schools. It wasn’t the same as being a valedictorian, but it was pretty good. I mostly went for mom. I vowed to finish after she passed, because she would want that. So I got a degree in environmental management. I met Governor Kemp in Atlanta, as one of 36 THE MUNICIPAL | AUGUST 2022
the G.O.A.L. (Georgia Occupational Award of Leadership) students. Seems like I just kept moving and climbing.” Smith is amazed at how much has changed during the years of his employment with the city. “A lot has changed — the workforce in general, when you came in, you came in to work. Technology advancements, print and file lasers, analog — you can put the truck in drive just by pushing a button now. Emails, acronyms — I didn’t know what they were at first — getting used to text speak, I learned. Older generation here, and those are different communications. And the way we dress. Used to be shirts and ties, now it’s casual pants and tennis shoes, and oh, I guess that’s how it is now! It seems to be harder for some of the younger workers to put in the work at the bottom; they want to start right out at supervisor level. But you got to put in the groundwork first, learn your way up to that. And when I started, it was something like paid $4 an hour, something like that, and now you offer $20, and they say that’s it?” Smith is a family man. “Four beautiful daughters and my wife! I ask the guys at work, any of you know the way to win an argument ‘cause I haven’t learned it yet? Two of our girls are in college, and the twins are in seventh grade.” And family needs have reconfigured his life, as well. “My wife has an illness — scleroderma — and now I am privileged to be her caretaker. Things you might take for granted, like taking the top off the orange juice, she can’t do any more. So we stay humble and prayed up. I want to show my girls that there
Solid Waste and Landfill Superintendent Jimmy Smith Jr. are people who will love you for you, no matter what. But I still have a lot of responsibilities over two departments. A lot of people look up to me, and I want to meet that well, set the bar high.” As with so many other businesses, COVID made its presence known. Smith said, “I had COVID, and it hit hard. Couldn’t breathe! It didn’t shut us down. In a landfill, you have just one person in a setting, so we were pretty much distancing just by doing our job — everyone riding and working by themselves. I had to go to meetings and public things, so it’s hard to say where I got it, but it hit hard in the admin building. They had to shut that whole building down. A lot of people think handling garbage is the riskiest of all, but it’s actually safer in the sanitation department than out in the rest of the world. You aren’t really touching anything because you’re in the cab of a truck!” He continued, “But we have staff shortages now. Used to be about 28, and now down to 11. We’re trying everything to get
