Candidates talk issues at GOP club
Other candidates and members of the executive committee also attended.
Kim Frazier
In the mayor’s race, Kim Frazier, County Commissioner for At Large Seat 11, started as a community activist in the Hardin Valley community before she was elected Commissioner.
“I decided to run for mayor for one reason, and that’s you, the hard-working people of Knox County, who have reached out to me, expressed their confidence in me …” she said. “I get in there; I work hard; I find solutions; I build relationships … people I have been representing have asked more of me.”
Frazier, who has chosen “to deepen her commitment” to the county, serves on 14 committees for the Commission and is a member of six community and business groups.
“Farragut is really special to me,” she said. “My father-in-law, before he passed away, was the principal at Farragut Intermediate School, from the time the school opened until his untimely death.”
Frazier’s mission has been responsible growth “because of my everyday efforts to bring attention to the impact of growth and development and additional infrastructure in my own community,” she said.
“As a Commissioner, I turned the work that I started as a citizen advocate into policy, legislation and planning that focuses on what matters most to you, the taxpayer,” she said.
Regarding tax increases, Frazier said she will go to the citizens and ask them what services they want.
David Amburn
In the sheriff’s race, Amburn currently is chief of detectives with the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, for which he served the last 34 years.
“I was born and raised in Knox County, and I graduated from Farragut High School,” he said. “I kind of migrated to the other side of town now … Halls and Powell area.
“Personally and professionally, I’m invested in this community,” Amburn said.
In the sheriff’s office, he said he has had opportunities to have a diverse background, from corrections to patrol, special investigations, detective, major crimes, property crimes and fleet management.
“I have had extensive experience helping to plan and implement the multi-million dollar budgets we use within the sheriff’s office in the many different divisions,” Amburn said. “We had about a $114
million budget this last year, and I’m sure it will probably increase.
“We also have a detention facility the sheriff’s office is responsible for,” he added. “We have another 500 employees there.”
However, “the main thing you have to do as sheriff is, first of all, keep the citizens of Knox County safe,” Amburn said. That involves training officers, serving and supporting them and lead them.
“And you have to have a vision on how to move the sheriff’s office forward,” he said. “… Knox County is at a crossroads. We are changing. We are exploding in our population.”
JJ Jones
Jones, who served as sheriff from 2007 to 2018, promised to bring a precinct back to Farragut.
“That would be the first thing I would do is to make sure Farragut has that precinct in Farragut, not in Cedar Bluff but in Farragut,” he said. “I was the first one to open a precinct in Farragut when I was the sheriff.
“We have opportunities that we can put a precinct back in Farragut,” said Jones,
who grew up in Knox County and in the sheriff’s office in 1980.
“Back then, there were about 196 employees,” he said. “Now, there are 1,000 … things have changed a lot.”
In the 1990s, he recalled there were more officers then than now.
“Just think about how population has exploded in Knox County,” Jones said. “That’s one of the main things I look at. We need to get a full complement of officers in the sheriff’s office. We’re down about 100 officers.”
However, “we’ve got about 40 in the pipeline that we’re hiring, and we still need about 45 more,” he said. “We’re having to pull from different divisions to make sure our patrol division does the job we need them to make sure our citizens are safe.
“It’s not anybody’s fault,” he added. “At one time, we went through COVID … at one time we were 200 officers down, so we certainly have progressed and gotten better.”
Still, “its hard to try to retain employees,” Jones said.
