Tuesday marked six years since Nicole Love Hendrickson first started working in Gwinnett County government, as head of the county’s community outreach program.
This year, Hendrickson has a new title: chairwoman of the Gwinnett County Commission.
At her first meeting of the year, Hendrickson, two other newly elected board members and two commissioners elected in 2018 approved the county’s $1.91 billion budget in one of their first major votes.
The spending plan was prepared last year, but Hendrickson and Commissioner Kirkland Carden said county staff helped the new commissioners understand the document before they voted on it.
The board was also able to change portions of it, adding money for homeless warming stations and a performance audit that will help them identify potential cost-saving measures.
There are other, more subtle ways the new board’s influence can be seen. One is in Hendrickson’s title.
Though she is not the first woman to hold the job, Hendrickson is the first to call herself chairwoman. Her female predecessors in the role, Lillian Webb and Charlotte Nash, used the title chairman. Nash said she did so because the county’s enabling legislation used that title.
And while the county’s business meetings usually begin with a prayer, they instead started Tuesday with a moment of silence. County spokesman Joe Sorenson said that would be the case going forward “so that everyone attending may pray or reflect in the way they see fit.”
An invocation was added before the first meeting of the day, where a county chaplain offered a prayer in a smaller meeting room the board uses for informal discussions. Sorenson said the invocations would continue.
At a session later that afternoon, Commissioner Jasper Watkins passed out “challenge coins” he created for his fellow commissioners, saying it is tradition when a new commander takes over.
Hendrickson is the first Black chair of the county commission and the first Democrat at the helm in more than 30 years. The board she leads is the first in Gwinnett’s history to have no white members. All board members are Democrats, something that hasn’t been the case since the 1980s.
One aspect of the county’s chain of command will remain the same, though.
Commissioners voted to keep Marlene Fosque as their vice chair. While the position usually rotates, Fosque will hold the title for the second year in a row after former Commissioner Tommy Hunter’s term was skipped last year.
Fosque is one of the board members elected in 2018.
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