Jason Briley experienced a couple of ups and downs early in his professional career, but the end result has been nothing but positive.
Following some ventures in the information systems field, a couple of which were less than successful, Briley changed direction, obtained his insurance license, and has been an ALFAC agent since January of 2013.
“I haven’t looked back since,” he commented last week. “Wish I’d done it 30 years earlier. Love it. And, nobody’s gonna fire me.”
Briley recently celebrated a birthday. “I just turned 65 and got my Medicare card,” he announced. When told he looks younger, his comeback was, “Not a day over 64 right?”
Briley, son of the late well-known District Attorney Joe Briley, is married to the former Debra Farmer, and they met at a New Year’s Eve Party in 1976.
“I was 16, and she was 15,” he recalled. “She was there with someone else on a double date with my cousin. I was there with somebody else. Sometime after that, early in ’77, I called my cousin and said, ‘Hey, how about introducing me to that sweet little thing?’ He did, and the rest is history. She finally found a winner. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
The two dated several years, marrying in October of 1984. They have three children, Jason, James, and Jessica, 40, 39, and 36, respectively. They each have two children.
Briley said he only briefly considered following in his father’s footsteps, but some of the district attorney’s prosecutions stick out in his mind, one in particular.
“When I was probably around 13 years old, there was a very notorious murder trial,” he recalled. “Some guys kidnapped two elderly ladies out of Macon, brought them out here to Jones County out toward Round Oak. They beat them to death with a 2x4. I knew they were having this big trial, and it was quite something, too, because it was Joe Briley versus Denmark Groover, two classic, old-school individuals, both of them.”
With his father’s permission, the teenager attended the trial.
“I rode my bike up there, 13 years old, walked in the courtroom and sat there and watched that. And that’s when I knew my dad should have been an actor because, man, did he put on a show.”
The two men received the death penalty, and Briley believes neither was successful on appeals.
Following high school graduation in 1978, Briley enrolled in what is now Georgia College and State University, but he didn’t graduate until 1985.
“I worked my way through and laid out for a couple of quarters working and then went back and still worked,” he explained. “I kind of worked my way through school at Georgia College.”
Briley’s sister, Jessica, was working in radio at the time and helped him start what would be a short career.
“She got me connected with the DJs in Macon, and they would let me come in when I was 16 years old. So I did that for a little while, learned how to DJ.”
The college student then worked at commercial radio stations in Milledgeville, and he was the program director at the radio station at Georgia College.
“I was that for quite a while, but I didn’t stick with that either. I went on to something else. The computers got me interested. I guess it was just electronics that had me interested. And so, I did that for some time, wound up actually working in that field with geographic information systems after I got out of school.”
Briley ultimately established his own business, Southern Geographic, in 1995. He worked with the City of Atlanta and a couple of private businesses and ultimately transferred Southern Geographic to his brother, Joe Jr., in 2011.
He kept one company, then he and the City of Atlanta, parted ways. “I always hated it because they always said they loved me as they were sending me out the door,” Briley said with just a hint of a smile on his face.
He decided to change his course of action after that. “I’m going to start doing something where nobody can fire me,” he told himself.
“So, I got an insurance license. I had never even thought about it. Then, at the end of 2012, something caught my eye.
“I went and visited the folks at AFLAC, and I signed a contract with AFLAC in January of 2013.”
The entrepreneur has done well.
“I’ve grown that. I’ve had some associations with other businesses,” Briley reported.” And now I do more than just AFLAC. But, I’m independent, and it’s great. The name of the business is Southern Benefits. Debbie retired from the Jones County Board of Education, and now she’s an AFLAC agent.”
Briley does all the life, health, and disability for Bob Farnsworth’s agency.
“It works out great. I don’t have room up there for an office, so I got me a little home office back there with a Farnsworth phone in it. Man, I was working from home before working from home was cool.”
While it would entail more than working from home, Briley was considering a new job. He wanted to run for Mayor of Gray. Mayor Emily Roberts had indicated in 1997 she was going to seek the Mayor Pro-Tem seat on City Council.
“I spoke with her about it,” Briley said. “I wasn’t going to run against her.”
The potential candidate told his father about his plans.
“He said, ‘Son, I don’t know why you’d want to run for that office. You don’t want to do anything like that. You need to go talk to Jimmy (long-time mayor Jimmy Roberts).’
“I went and talked to Jimmy. I told him I was going to run for mayor. He said, ‘why are you going to do something like that?’
“I was like, ‘oh, maybe I ought to have second thoughts about this thing. That’s what I keep hearing. Nah, I’m going to do it.’ You know, I was young, 35 years old. I thought I knew a lot.”
Briley defeated Mike Newsome, took office in January of 1998, and immediately faced numerous problems, including infrastructure, especially the wastewater treatment plant.
“The city was just under the gun,” Briley declared. “I thought, ‘man, I walked into a hornet’s nest.’ We wound up with consent orders, lawsuits, and just all kinds of stuff. The sewer was in terrible shape. I’m like, ‘golly, I thought I knew.’ I didn’t know anything.”
The former mayor says he believes his background in mapping both infrastructure and planning and zoning and knowledge of regulations and governmental systems helped prepare him for his new role.
“I felt like I had something to offer. I thought I had enough of a background,” he reasoned.
“I think we got some things done,” Briley commented. “I think we did okay.”
Briley was unopposed for re-election in 2001, but in 2005 faced two challengers, not related but with the same last name, Joe Wood and Lehman Wood. Briley could not help relaying one of his favorite remarks.
When he was forced into a runoff with Joe Wood, newspaper reporter Debbie Lurie-Smith was checking the vote figures election night.
“She said, ‘Mayor, what do you think about the results?’ And, I replied, ‘We’re not out of the Woods yet.’” It took Briley a moment last week to stop laughing at his play on words.
He did prevail in the runoff, sending him to his third term, which eventually altered his outlook.
Briley was very busy those years, working for the City of Atlanta at one point and as a regional sales manager for a private company, TerraGo Technologies. He wasn’t comfortable with the time away from Gray and his job as mayor.
“ In the previous two terms, I was right there in the Roberts (office) building, in town, all the time,” he said. “In that third term, I was out of town. I was all over the place.
“And then I decided, ‘You know what, it’s not fair. It’s not right.’ It wasn’t right because I wasn’t here, and I wasn’t able to be available as much.”
Briley followed his conscience and opted against a fourth term. He didn’t want it to be about him. “Public service should be just that,” he declared, “and not a career, not done for self-gratification.”
Briley recalls some advice his father gave him soon after he was first elected mayor. He remembers conversations concerning his new job in which he used ‘I’, as in ‘I am’, ‘I have,’, ‘I said.’ Joe Briley cautioned him.
“He said, ‘Stop right there. Son, the personal pronoun has no business in the vocabulary of a public servant.’ And I thought about that, and I took it to heart and I said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’ I tried to live that as much as I could and try to remember it.”
Now that he is out of politics and enjoying his ‘new’ career of 13 years as an independent agent, Briley, a member of the local Masonic Sincerity Lodge, exudes contentment, working primarily from home, as does Debbie. There appears to be no pressure.
“We’re not on Social Security or anything like that yet, and so we’re waiting on that until the time is right,” he added, “I mean, life is good. Three children happily married, beautiful grandchildren. Everybody’s gainfully employed. Everybody’s healthy. What else do you want? Nothing.”
