Johnny Gary Jr. is one of the highest-paid elected officials in Mississippi, earning more than a quarter million dollars a year.
The Leflore County chancery clerk makes almost double the salary of Gov. Tate Reeves and a third more than the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
Yet Gary, during his first few years in office, has failed to pay on time tens of thousands of dollars he is obligated to turn over to the county’s treasury in excess of what by law he is allowed to keep.
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The pattern of delinquency, says his harshest critic on the Board of Supervisors, is further evidence that Gary is not up to handling all the extra jobs for which the board is paying him, including that of county administrator.
“He’s not doing the day-to-day job that I expect the county administrator to do, such as running the county,” said District 1 Supervisor Sam Abraham, who spent 20 years as the county’s chancery clerk and county administrator before changing roles. “We have some problems out here that need to be addressed, and he’s not addressing them.”
Gary declined to comment for this story other than to say the information he provided the Commonwealth on the amounts and dates of
payments he made to the county’s general fund were previously provided to the Board of Supervisors.
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The compensation of Mississippi’s fee-paid officials — primarily chancery and circuit clerks — has periodically been scrutinized because of how much more many of them earn than other public officials.
In 1993, the Legislature decided to cap what the clerks could earn, setting it at $75,600, which at the time was the salary of the governor.
The cap has been periodically increased since then, and it’s currently $94,500. Anything above that is supposed to go to the county’s general fund.
The cap for chancery clerks applies only to what they make from the responsibilities they are required to perform by statute — such as their administrative duties for chancery court and keeping the minutes of the Board of Supervisors — plus what they collect in fees on deeds of trust, court filings and other documents recorded in their offices from attorneys and other outside parties.
From that income, the clerks deduct their costs, primarily the payroll expenses of employees they hire to help them perform these tasks.
The clerks get to keep the difference between their income and their expenses, up to the salary cap.
In 2020, Gary’s first full year as chancery clerk, his net income exceeded the salary cap by $49,286. He paid $35,295 to the county’s general fund on April 13, 2021, two days before the deadline. The balance due of $14,531, however, did not come until more than five months later, on Sept. 22, 2021.
In 2021, his net income exceeded the cap by $108,429, and again he had difficulty turning it over. It took him four installments — all of them past the April 15, 2022, deadline — to satisfy what he owed the county. Two installments, totaling $78,429, were made in the last 10 days of April. The final two installments, each for $15,000, were made on Aug. 25 and Sept. 2, more than four months behind.
Under state law, to “knowingly” fail to pay by the deadline is a misdemeanor, for which conviction could bring up to six months in jail and a fine up to double the amount that was not deposited.
The law, however, is apparently rarely if ever enforced. Logan Reeves, a spokesman for the State Auditor’s Office, said he was not aware of any clerk who has been prosecuted for failing to pay the overage on time.
“There is no teeth to that statute,” Reeves said.
Nor does there appear to be any civil penalty. Unlike property taxes, for which late fees are charged to the delinquent owners, there was no assessment against Gary for the tardy payments.
A Commonwealth search of the records for the past decade showed that neither of the previous two chancery clerks — Christine Lymon and Abraham — appeared to have this problem.
Lymon, who served one term in the office prior to Gary, only exceeded the cap twice and by much smaller amounts — $234 in 2016 and $425 in 2017. Both times, she deposited the excess into the county’s general fund before the deadline.
In Abraham’s final four years of office, the overage was deposited on or before the deadline. In his final two years, the amounts to be turned over were even greater than Gary’s because Abraham was dealing with a lower earnings cap after taking retirement in 2013 while still in office.
He deposited into the county’s general fund $158,054 from his earnings in 2014 and $127,664 in 2015.
“As far as I know, I didn’t ever pay late,” Abraham said.
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Although the 1993 state law instituting a cap on chancery clerks’ earnings was presumably designed to bring their pay down, some of them have continued to be among Mississippi’s highest-paid public officials because of the additional jobs they are allowed to hold, for which there is no salary limitation.
Since at least the mid-1980s, the Leflore County Board of Supervisors has paid the chancery clerk to handle additional responsibilities beyond those specified by state law. The supervisors have periodically contemplated hiring other employees to handle some of these jobs. Each time, though, the issue has come up for a vote, the majority has bowed to the case made by chancery clerks, including Abraham when he was in the office, that it was less expensive to the county for the chancery clerk to do the work, even if it produced an eye-popping salary for that individual.
Gary receives $48,000 annually for record restoration, $41,612 as county administrator and $24,000 as comptroller — all jobs granted him by the Board of Supervisors. In addition, he earned $16,350 last year from the 3% fee he gets for collecting delinquent property taxes for Greenwood and other municipalities in the county. In all, he made $135,513 last year that was not subject to the salary cap, bringing his total wage to $230,013 — roughly $900 less than Gary made the year before.
“I don’t begrudge him of that. Don’t get me wrong,” said Abraham, who was at or near the top of the earnings rankings of Mississippi chancery clerks for many of his years in office. “What I do say is Johnny needs to do a better job as county administrator. He’s not performing his county administrator job to the level that I think a county administrator should do.”
Abraham’s criticism was echoed last month by a stunning letter from the accounting firm the county hires to check its books. The firm claimed that Gary had repeatedly failed to provide the information the auditors needed to complete their work and threatened to issue an exception to his 2021 Annual Financial Report, which could trigger an investigation by the state auditor. Gary said he subsequently provided the requested documents by the firm’s deadline.
Abraham said when he has learned about problems in the chancery clerk’s office, he has alerted other board members partially out of self-protection should there be an audit by the state.
“I don’t want to have to pay any money back on something that I approve,” he said.
“I’m only trying to protect myself and the other board members. At the same time, I want to protect Johnny. I don’t want Mr. Gary to have any problems.”
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Robert Collins, the president of the county Board of Supervisors, says that Gary should be cut some slack.
“It’s been a rough ride for Johnny, but he’s the hardest-working guy that I know of,” said Collins, who has worked with the last three chancery clerks during his four terms in office representing District 5.
Collins said he had reservations about awarding Gary the additional responsibilities of county administrator and comptroller following Gary’s election in 2019, given the rookie officeholder’s limited experience and the wholesale staff turnover he was facing.
“When Johnny came in, I voted against it because I didn’t want him to be bogged down with too much in a learning position. But after the board voted for it, I got on board and tried to help him any kind of way I could,” said Collins.
“Now that he’s in there, we got to just keep giving him the chance to make sure that he’s doing the job to the best of his ability.”
Unlike Abraham, who had previously worked as an auditor for the state, and Christine Lymon, who had spent 28 years working for the chancery clerk before she was elected to the job, Gary’s only relevant experience was 1½ years as a deputy circuit clerk.
Complicating the transition was the departure of nearly all of the staff, including several of its most-seasoned employees, who either retired or took jobs elsewhere.
Collins estimated that 90% of the employees in the Chancery Clerk’s Office did not stay following Gary’s election, and the rest left within the first year.
“He had a complete turnover,” Collins said. “He didn’t have the people that the rest of the county administrators had for all those years. And as chancery clerk, he didn’t have the same people that everyone else had.”
Collins also believes that Abraham’s expectations are unrealistic.
“Sam came from the Audit Department. He knew government from one side to the other one,” said Collins.
“The county is not going to run as efficiently as it did when Sam was there. It just can’t do it.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
