MOULTRIE, Ga. – The City of Moultrie recently announced Jessica Perdew as its new director of finance.
Following the retirement of current Director of Finance Garry McDaniel, Perdew took up the position Dec. 6. McDaniel will continue to work part-time alongside Perdew while the transition takes place, according to Moultrie City Manager Pete Dillard. He introduced Perdew to the Moultrie City Council during the work session of their Dec. 7 meeting.
Perdew is originally from Michigan, she said in an interview Monday. After graduating high school at the age of 17, she had plans to go into the military but her parents insisted she get an education first.
“I grew up in Michigan. Went to the University of Michigan. Then I never went back to Michigan,” Perdew joked.
Perdew graduated from Michigan with a Bachelors of Science studying physics in 1988. That same year she enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, saying it had always been a part of her plan.
“When I graduated high school, I was only 17 so I needed my parents to sign for me to go into the military. But, they wouldn’t sign. Not because they were opposed to the military; they wanted me to get an education. So I had to wait,” Perdew said. “Going into the military was something I always wanted to do.”
She went through boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina.
“Parris Island is a beautiful place in April,” she said.
After finishing boot camp she was assigned to the Second Marine Division at the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., as an intelligence specialist. She was soon transferred to the intel training center or “the school house” in Virginia Beach, Va., Perdew said.
By 1992, she had taken an overseas deployment to Okinawa, Japan. Her duties included coordinating and summarizing pertinent information which included things such as weather, messages, geography, weapon systems, troop movements and even briefings for Marines who were about to engage in “liberty briefs.”
“It’s letting the Marines know what they can and can’t do when they go out on liberty. ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ Marines will find trouble if given the opportunity, believe it or not,” she said.
She describes this type of behavior as the “mother in her” and it will continue to be shown with positions she will fill later in life.
In 1993 she officially left the Marine Corps and moved back to the United States. She then married her husband, Lt. Col. Jason Perdew, who is currently the JROTC instructor at Colquitt County High School.
“I started doing what Marine wives do. I supported my husband… I learned pretty quickly after college that money makes the world go around… I found it very eye-opening to learn that if you know anything about finance, you can do almost any job,” Jessica said.
She soon began classes to complete a degree in accounting at the University of Maryland taking “one or two classes here and there.” She got much more practical experience in 1996 when she and her family went back to Okinawa. There, she worked as a Department of Defense civilian contractor in accounts receivable.
“I was the return check lady so nobody was happy when I called. It’s much like Moultrie, so they knew if Mrs. Perdew was calling you, it was not good news… Just being able to sit down with young sailors and marines and walking them through how to avoid that in the future was a great experience. Maybe it’s just the mom in me,” Perdew said.
Throughout all this, she had already had a growing family. Her first son, Will, was born in 1986 and her first daughter, Ashley, was born in 1989 and her second daughter, Abigail was born in 1995. After leaving Okinawa in 1999, she and her family had settled back at Camp Lejeune, N.C., when her second son, Ethan was born in 2002.
“We always moved with brand new babies,” Perdew joked.
Her family would continue to move across the world for years to come. They lived in Seoul, Korea, for three years; then moved back to the States to work at the Pentagon from 2005 to 2008; then across the country to Camp Pendleton, Calif., from 2008 to 2011. During that time her son, Andrew was born. He currently is a student at C.A. Gray Junior High School.
Throughout all this, Jessica worked a variety of positions. One of her most proud accomplishments was when she became an advocate for military benefits, she said. From 2006 to 2007 she advocated for the expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.
The act entitles “eligible service members up to 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave during any 12-month period for qualifying exigencies that arise when the employee’s spouse, son, daughter or parent is on covered active duty,” according to the Department of Labor’s description.
Perdew’s work sought to expand the eligibility for military members and their families.
“Luckily, the military was the flavor-of-the-month in Congress. We were able to expand up on the existing guidelines to include more military family members. This was a fairly big accomplishment as the law hadn’t been changed at all since it was passed in 1993,” she explained.
The family then moved to the Kingdom of Bahrain in 2011 until 2013 when they moved back to the US to work at the Pentagon from 2013 to 2018. During this stretch back in the States, Perdew graduated from the University of Maryland in 2015 with her degree in accounting. In 2018, the family made their final trip overseas when Jason was working as an JROTC instructor in Iwakuni, Japan, in 2018.
Earlier this year, Jessica, Jason and Andrew moved to Moultrie to stay.
“It’s a great town. The people here have been wonderful. We have been all over and we wanted a place to plant our roots. We’re so happy to be here and the community has accepted us, which has been wonderful,” she said.
Going forward Perdew will be taking care of the city’s financial functions.
“Basically anything that goes on with the city that has to do with the city is touched by finance. It’s cyclical. We do the budget and then once we do the budget, we start to execute the budget. Once we execute the budget, we work closely with the other department heads and (the Moultrie City Council) to find areas where we might have some cost savings and can afford some other projects,” Perdew said.
She said that she is “thrilled” to be working alongside McDaniel.
“Those are big shoes,” she said. “Anything that happened five years ago, that’s Garry. He is Moultrie’s financial past… He’s an invaluable resource and I’m thrilled to be working with him and all the other City of Moultrie employees.”
