As James City County’s new administrator settles in, there is one familiar place he can go to get his bearings: the numbers.
Bryan J. Hill, who began work Sept. 8 as county administrator, sees the hundreds of pages of financial information contained in the county’s budget and other financial documents as the key to unlocking his new position. After long days at the office full of meetings to get to know and understand the myriad offices and groups within the county, he goes home with three-ring binders chock full of budget data.
“You have to dive into the numbers to understand the operation,” Hill said. “Those numbers tell you what you can and cannot do.”
Along with the binders, Hill frequently turns to his trusty iPad — “I’m lost if I don’t have it,” he said — as a means of accessing the numbers and other critical information about the county. Hill has also used his affinity for numbers in his private life. He is an accomplished coach, having overseen many years of play in recreation leagues and travel teams for several sports, including basketball and soccer.
“Basketball is a mathematical equation,” Hill said. “It’s all geometry. If [the players] understand the angles and the cuts, they can outpace people who have more athleticism.”
That mindset helped him lead the sixth-grade Amateur Athletic Union basketball team he coached to the top of the standings in its league earlier this year. The team is based in Bluffton, a town in Beaufort County, S.C., where Hill served as deputy county administrator for more than five years prior to accepting the James City County job.
“He is by far the best associate I have ever worked with,” said Gary Kubic, Beaufort County’s administrator. Kubic said he has been an administrator for 40 years, and he has always seen his relationship with his numerous deputy administrators as that of a teacher and student.
“Bryan was my best student,” Kubic said, noting that when the James City County search committee called him to ask about Hill’s performance, it took an hour to extol his virtues.
Kubic said Hill is ready to be an administrator, praising Hill’s desire to succeed, energy level and familiarity with technology as key factors behind his sustained success in South Carolina. When Hill joined Beaufort County, there was a $4 million balance of unallocated funds saved in that county’s general fund for capital projects and emergencies. Now there is $28 million, a figure Kubic said Hill helped achieve with his responsible stewardship of Beaufort County.
Beaufort County, located in the southern-most tip of the state, is in the heart of South Carolina’s lowcountry, a conglomeration of islands and coastal lands anchored by vast marshes and dense forests. The area blends the traditions and culture of the Gullah — descendants of those who were enslaved in the lowcountry — and traditional Southern culture.
James City and Beaufort counties share some similarities. Each has experienced rapid growth in the past 20 years, causing them to almost double in population. Beaufort County also has a military presence, with the Parris Island Marine Corps Recruit Depot located within its boundaries.
Tourism is a lynchpin of the economy in both areas — Beaufort County features Hilton Head Island among its almost 40 miles of beachfront against the Atlantic Ocean.
Hill said the beaches guaranteed 2 million visitors a year to Beaufort County. Those tourists help feed the service industries that tourists rely upon during their visits, leading to a large population of service sector workers, according to the county’s comprehensive plan. The plan also notes the economic downturn has affected tourism, a trend Hill must confront again in James City County.
He said he has started to think about how to promote tourism in the county and the area, bringing up sports tourism as a particular vehicle to attract more people.
“We might be able to cobble together weekends where we have a lot of visitors coming here looking at our historic, competitive and our fun environment,” Hill said, referring to a potential marriage of the area’s historic resources with competitive sports meets and outlets like Busch Gardens.
Part of the work required to bring a vision like that to fruition would be a close relationship with Greater Williamsburg Chamber and Tourism Alliance President and CEO Karen Riordan, with whom he has already met.
Riordan is one many people Hill has met in his first days as county administrator. He described his early experiences as a “whirlwind” of meetings with the various offices in county government and outside groups with regular cause to interact with the county, like Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools, the James City County Citizens Coalition and the Alliance.
He has spent the most time so far with Assistant County Administrator Adam Kinsman — the equivalent of Hill’s previous job in Beaufort County — who will work closely with him as his second in command. He said Kinsman has been a strong and valuable partner who has allowed him to sink his teeth into exploring the large and diverse operation of James City County’s government by helping with the day to day.
“It’s been good to have someone of his pace go after and attack things while I’m sorting things out,” Hill said.
Hill said he and Kinsman have already identified some areas to explore changing, such as the online presentation of the county’s code. The current presentation of the code is a hyperlink to each chapter, meaning anyone who wants to search for each instance of a particular word or theme must click through chapter by chapter or search the county’s website, forcing the searcher to pick through the code and the rest of the information posted to the entire website.
To make it easier for citizens — and anyone else with an interest in the county’s code — he wants to explore ways to consolidate the code’s text into a single searchable database, making the code a more efficient document.
Hill’s early days as administrator have left him with little time to do much but learn about James City County. He visited his sister in Stafford County and went with Supervisor Kevin Onizuk (Jamestown) and their families to Busch Gardens, though much of the rest of his time has been learning the job.
While Hill has been working in the Historic Triangle, his family has been elsewhere. Kenita, his wife, continues working in Northern Virginia, where she specializes in assessing the risk to insure nursing homes and hospitals. His oldest son, BJ, is studying math at North Greenville University, while his other two sons, Devin and Aaron, are working on their last semesters in Beaufort County. The goal is to have the boys in WJCC schools by the start of classes in January.
The distance has made it so he is not able to participate as he usually does in his sons’ athletics. To make up for it, he said his wife uses FaceTime to broadcast their games live on her iPad so he can watch them play despite the hundreds of miles separating them until their South Carolina house sells or Christmas comes — whichever happens first.
Once his family arrives and he has settled into his job, he can begin to build more of a private life here. In Beaufort County, for example, he served on the board of directors for United Way of the Lowcountry, a nonprofit group tasked with seeing to the basic needs of vulnerable citizens. He said he prefers to continue his exploration of James City County before having fun or identifying specific areas where he wants to invest his time.
“Fun is when the kids get up here and I can enjoy having my family around,” Hill said. “Right now it’s all about business. I don’t have time for fun right now.”
Hill was born in London and lived there until he was 6 years old. He then moved with his mother to Montclair, N.J., a suburb of New York City. He grew up there, transitioning from the soccer he played in the United Kingdom to basketball, a sport in which he came to excel. He landed on a college team at Alfred University in Upstate New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree.
After finishing a master’s degree at University of Southern California, Hill moved with his wife to the Washington, D.C. area, where he became a fiscal analyst at the University of Maryland. After a year working with the university’s finances — “the fiscal health of the university” as Hill described it — he earned a promotion to the director of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, where he said he oversaw the expansion of the research budget from about $4 million to about $28 million over five years.
Then came time in UMD’s office of information technology before he landed a job at the University of South Carolina Beaufort in 2004, when he was hired to be the vice chancellor of finance. While there, he oversaw a budget of more than $17 million for the Beaufort County-based USC satellite campus.
A few years later, he was at a bookstore when he was approached by Beaufort County’s administrator, Gary Kubic, about a job in the county as a budget analyst. After about a year of talking, Hill made the transition, joining Beaufort County as a budget analyst in February 2008. By January 2009, he was the deputy county administrator, a position he held until accepting the James City County job.
He said he is ready to tackle this job, noting his long career in finance and municipal operations has given him the skill set he needs to successfully manage the county. Now it’s just a matter of learning the numbers and the people who define James City County.
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