Acid reflux gnawed at David Fields’ gut. Sleep came in fits. The waking hours were worse, as he battled depression with medications.
Inevitably, the antidepressants failed to temper the toll taken by a job he once loved and now feared would kill him: Cherokee County tax commissioner.
“My doctor told me, ‘If you don’t quit, you’re going to have a stroke or heart attack,' ” Fields said Monday, explaining why, after 28 years, he resigned from his post with two years left on his term.
Fields, 62, became a poignant reminder of the housing bust’s impact on thousands of lives across metro Atlanta, where almost 100,000 properties were foreclosed on in 2010. Property owners are not the only ones hurt; so are people, such as Fields, at the end of a ruinous process set in motion by recession.
“I was foreclosing on the homes of people I have known my entire life,” Fields said Monday, two weeks after he walked away from his job but still carrying its burden. “I tried to do all I could to help them. But there’s only so much you can do. Your job is to collect taxes.”
In the good times Fields said he seldom dealt with bad news. “There were almost no foreclosures, and the tax digest was in great shape," he said. "We would have collected 97 percent of taxes by the end of the year.”
Then, about a year ago, the gravity of the downturn gripped him and wouldn’t let go. A man who described himself as “normally happy and upbeat” was suddenly nauseated all the time. He didn’t have any energy. Daily events he once took in stride turned into crisis after crisis.
“I would talk to somebody or deal with something, a foreclosure or a lien, and I would just have to step out of the office to regain my composure,” he said.
Fields said he didn't feel he could do the job he was elected to do. “I felt like I was letting everybody down," he said, "the people who were losing their homes and the county I was supposed to represent."
Doctors, specialists, did all kinds of tests on Fields.
“They checked the lining of my stomach, and it was so irritated, they did biopsies," he said. "They concluded it was a combination of stress, nerves and depression. My job was getting to me.”
Too many “hardworking people” he’d known his entire life, out of work and out of savings, were asking for more time to pay their property taxes, he said. “There was nothing I could do.”
Fields said he talked to other tax commissioners across the state about how to deal with emotional pain and the futility of the job. But last year he was so sick he missed their annual convention and supportive camaraderie. “That might have helped,” he said, “but I’m not sure how much.”
Cobb County Tax Commissioner Gail Downing said Monday that the stress “definitely gets to me sometimes” in the job where you’re putting people out of homes and “dealing with angry and upset taxpayers [who] many times [are] angry about things outside of my control.”
But that “comes with the territory,” she said. To relieve the tension, she takes walks, and her grandchildren give her great pleasure. “I’ve just learned to let go of a lot of it,” she said. "I do what little I can and try to let God handle the rest.”
Fields’ replacement in the job, Sonya Little, said Monday that she thinks she can handle the stress, even as she’s looking at as many as 70 properties being sold during the county's next foreclosure auction March 1 on the steps of the county courthouse in Canton.
“I think I’ll be able to deal with pressure,” she said. “But that’s easy to say when you don’t have the ‘buck stops here job,' ” she said. “This is only my second week. Ask me a year from now.”
Fields said he’s still battling nausea, but there are signs it may go away soon and he and his wife can take the long vacation he has promised her for years. “I’ve been putting that off and putting that off," he said, "maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Or it may just be he didn’t have the hide it took to bounce along the bottom of the economy. “I’m pretty tenderhearted,” he said. “I guess I just wasn’t crusty enough.”
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