Putnam Commission Approves Maynard, Smith Promotions

Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter moved quickly Monday night to replace two county department leaders.

The County Commission approved the promotion of Brandon Smith to County EMA Director and Cody Maynard as Parks and Recreation Director.

“When I came into office, one thing I made sure of is that we had a succession plan for all our departments,” Porter said. “If anything happens to the department head, there’s an assistant director ready to step up. And we planned it that way. They’ve been trained that way, because I’ve saw too many occurrences where you’ve had something happen unexpectedly, and especially in these fields, in emergency services field, anything can happen that there wouldn’t somebody step up, and it put a hardship on the county.”

Maynard replaces John Ross Albertson, whose final day of work was Monday. Albertson is taking a job in Longview, Texas as that city’s parks and recreation director.

“He’s done an amazing job with Parks and Recreations to bring it to the level that it is compared to where it was when I came into office,” Porter said. “And I hate to lose him, too. I’d love for him to be moving down to assistant director and staying with us, but he has bigger plans. John Ross is looking at this as a stepping stone and looking at moving on up to a very large department at some point in time.”

Brandon Smith replaces Tyler Smith, who decided to step back to assistant director.

“Tyler has reached a point in his career where that getting up every night in the middle of the night to go on calls has become difficult,” Porter said. “He has a family and several kids, and so he’s decided that he would like to step down.”

“I can’t think of a better one than Brandon,” Commissioner Junior Phipps said.

In other business, the commission also approved applying for state money for school resource officers. Sheriff Eddie Farris said the state has already approved the allocation to Putnam County.

Commissioners also approved a series of budget amendments and clean-up items in preparation for the end to the fiscal year.