J.D. Clark is up to a Texas-sized challenge

Key Takeaways

Last month at the Annual Conference, NACo President J.D. Clark played his guitar and sang a song he had written in front of 3,000 people—the largest audience he had ever performed for. But it wasn’t the most intimidating.

In 2017, as chair of the Rural Action Caucus, he welcomed the caucus’ meeting to Wise County, Texas, where he serves as county judge. And he was called upon to toss a lasso over a practice dummy at the Wise County Fairgrounds. His audience there? The NACo executive committee.

And while Wise County was surely rural compared to neighboring Tarrant County, home of then-president Roy Charles Brooks, the county was firmly on a growth curve and Clark was a leader focused on where his community was headed. And yet, he was called upon to prove his bona fides to celebrate its past on the Texas frontier.

“I can’t embarrass myself in front of all of my out-of-state NACo friends,” he recalled thinking. “But there were a whole lot of rural guys there who could have done it.” 

He stepped up, slung his arm out and roped it on the first try.

“I won’t be trying that again in front of anybody,” he said of the upcoming NACo Fall Board of Directors Meeting and County Storytellers Symposium, where he will play host as NACo’s new president. “I was just blessed and lucky to have roped it that one time.”

At 39, he’s the youngest NACo leader in 24 years, but his rise has been anything but beginner’s luck. Before starting his 19-year career in public service, he was covering local government for his local newspaper while still in high school under the tutelage of editor Keith Bridwell.

“He was sending me to commissioner’s court, city council, the school board,” he said. “It was a great experience and a way to learn, not just understanding it myself, but being able to explain it to other people.”

Clark started writing opinion pieces about his hometown of Chico, which drew the attention of city council members. They liked his fresh perspective and recruited him to run for an open seat while studying at the University of North Texas. After serving for a few years while teaching high school history, he was elected mayor, which put him in the middle of discussions about impending growth in the county. 

“I knew that growth was coming for Wise County, and I knew we had to be ready for it,” Clark said. “I wanted to be in a better position to shape what it would look like. I looked at growth patterns out of Dallas-Fort Worth and adjacent counties and we were basically like the next and last frontier.”

He ran for county judge in 2013, taking office in 2014, once again colleagues with people he covered as a reporter as a high school and college student. He was on the other side of the story — with executive responsibilities for an entire county before the age of 30.

But those responsibilities, and their limited powers, have driven Clark to be creative in managing growth. The county has no zoning or land-use authority, so shaping Wise County’s future has come through indirect means, like working with the groundwater district or setting road standards for new developments through the public works department. Clark has built relationships with the developers who will be driving residential expansion and pursued infrastructure funding from the state.

“We help [developers] understand some of the ramifications, that ‘we can’t require you to do this, but this is important to us as a community,’” Clark said. 

Though there’s no county component to the closing process when a Wise County newcomer buys a house or property, Clark is pushing the county to do more proactive communication about what to expect living there.

“I try to weave in a lot of Wise County’s history and background — not just for the long-timers or lifers there —but it’s a benefit to the new people coming in. They’re not looking at it and saying, ‘Oh, gosh, this looks like every other place along the highway, let’s live here.’ They’re seeing this community culture, it’s a small-town vibe and the downtown squares and main streets that we have, and they like that and they want to be part of that,” Clark said. “I think if somebody’s choosing to come live there and be part of that, you’ve got to bring them into the loop on what the county’s history is and make them appreciate that this was a pretty rough, scrappy frontier place not that long ago. What we do with growth, with service demand, increased population, all of that, has to be done in conjunction with, ‘And let’s talk about where we’ve come from.’

“I think that’s good for people to be reminded of, whether they’ve always lived there or you’re brand new.”

He was brand new to NACo in 2015, when he first attended a Legislative Conference. Joining the Rural Action Caucus offered Clark a sampler of NACo programming that helped him find his way to the Telecommunications and Technology Steering Committee, which he later chaired, along with NACo’s Broadband Task Force in 2020.

“NACo has the opportunity to connect us with people who are experts that I couldn’t get to myself,” he said. “That’s a value for every county official who is trying to be better equipped to serve people at home.”

In 2023, he was a relatively late entrant to the race for NACo second vice president, but overcame trepidation about running, with some counsel from a colleague with whom he would work closely, and the encouragement of his wife, Leah, who serves as the executive director of the Bridgeport Economic Development Corporation in Wise County.

“I never really thought that I would run for president for a long time because I have three little girls at home, but talking to (immediate past president) James Gore helped me understand how I could make it work,” he said. Gore had been the first parent of young children in a decade to serve in NACo leadership, which carries often-extensive travel demands. “It’s a season, it’s a service. I thought I had for my county makeup, for my demographics, for my experience, I thought I brought something that would be a good asset on the executive committee.”

Clark brings the same curiosity to the presidency that he did to The Chico Texan 20 years ago.

“We’re all local government nerds, and counties are such a fascinating form of government — it’s different from state to state,” he said. “It’s so interesting learning what different governing boards look like, but in this job as president, the biggest thing to continue to learn about is when it comes to counties administering social services. In Texas, we just don’t really do much of that, so I haven’t had to do too much as a county official.”

He also wants to build on the Texas enthusiasm that showed up at the 2023 Annual Conference in Travis County, Texas, when he ran for NACo office. 

“We need Texas voices coming strongly from the county level to the feds, because when it comes to legislation, a lot of things that we wish hadn’t happened or that we fear, are going to have a negative impact on counties generally because somebody doesn’t understand how it works in the counties,” he said.  “And that goes for all counties. We need to be part of that conversation, telling the story about how our communities and our constituents will be affected.

“A lot of that is incumbent on members engaging, sharing stories, sharing information, certainly when talking to our representatives, but also giving NACo staff the examples they can call on when they’re working on our behalf.”