Monroe County has a lot of excellent employees, but very few of them have the unique combination of experience and knowledge that county road superintendent Ira “Junior” Watts Jr. possesses.
Watts, who is in his fourth year leading the road department, is by far the department’s longest tenured employee, having worked for Monroe County since 1989. In that time, Watts has seen the road department from all angles while enduring seemingly a lifetime’s worth of natural disasters. As he now enters the twilight of his distinguished career, he reflected on the memories he’s made while revealing his hopes for the road department’s future.
Watts grew up in the western North Carolina mountains near the small town of Marshall, N.C., about a 30-minute drive from Asheville, N.C. Watts’ father, Ira Watts Sr., was a mechanic while his mother Grace was a stay-at-home mother to their six children of which Junior was the second-oldest. Watts, who helped his father build engines at a young age, said he grew up wanting to be an airplane pilot. However, upon graduating high school at Buncombe County High, he took a different career path, working for about a year in an apple packing shed.
From there, Watts moved a few hundred miles south to Monroe County, where his father was born and raised, going to work at Jack Pitman’s full-service Gulf station in Forsyth for about two years. While he enjoyed working for Pitman, Watts said he learned the Monroe County Road Department, then led by superintendent Brack Goolsby, was hiring so he met with the head man. Goolsby told him he needed a right-of-way tractor driver and asked Watts to be there the next morning. As it turned out, Watts showed up that next day and has kept showing up at the road most days for the next 31 years.
Watts operated a right-of-way tractor for two years before moving onto the pothole patching crew. This was long before the county bought a patching truck. At that time, Watts recalled patching potholes by hand with coal patch and then packing it down with a shovel. Watts said new hires today don’t know how hard it was to work for the road department before modern technological advances in equipment.
Watts said with a laugh: “When I first started with Monroe County, the only difference between working for Monroe County and being on the chain gang is you got to go home at quitting time. It was rough.”
It was five years into Watts’ tenure with the county when Monroe County suffered its most notable natural disaster of the 20th century, the now infamous Flood of 1994.
Watts said, “It started raining, and it seemed like it wasn’t ever gonna quit.”
In the span of a week, Watts survived a pair of instances of being swept into dangerous flood waters. The first incident occurred when he accompanied Tommy Lee Williamson down to Pate Road to put out barricades to prevent drivers from traveling off into flood waters. The two left the barricades and were headed to another site when a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy notified them that the barricades they had just left were under water. By the time Watts and Williamson got back, there was only about six inches of the barricade visible above the water, so Watts waded into the flood waters to retrieve them and move them to higher ground. The second incident happened a few days later on Collier Road, where a drain pipe had washed downstream. Again, Watts waded into the flood waters, this time with a heavy chain designed to grab the pipe. However, Watts’ feet got swept out from under him, and he was carried about 100 yards downstream by flood waters before he was able to grab hold of a limb.
“That was a terrifying moment,” Watts said.
But the seemingly never-ending rain was just the start of Watts’ travails. Once the flood waters finally receded, countless roads were washed out and all 19 wooden bridges in Monroe County were destroyed, a “nightmare” situation, Watts described.
“There on Mayfield Road was the longest wooden bridge we had in Monroe County,” Watts said. “And when the water receded, there was nothing left except the iron beams. And after that we got a government grant and the state actually built the existing concrete bridge that’s down there now.”
After his stint on the pothole patching crew, Watts got his Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) and began driving a dump truck. That’s when perhaps the most humorous mishap of Watts’ career occurred.
Watts recalled, “This was back in the early 90s. I was actually driving a dump truck on English Road that day, and the parking brakes wouldn’t stay set on it. But I got there that morning with a load of crush-and-run and set the parking brakes, and I got out to talk to the motor grader man at the time and the parking brakes popped off on the truck. And the truck took off and left me. It went about 100 yards before it came to rest upside of a large cedar tree. Mr. Goolsby knew it had bad parking brakes, but it was some of the junk we had to work with. The truck was very old, wore out. They patched it back up, but it was pretty much the end of it. It never drove right after that.”
The county’s next road superintendent, Sid Banks, who succeeded Goolsby upon his retirement, let Watts train under veteran employee Lennis Clark on how to use a motor grader. Watts operated a motor grader for several years before moving into the county shop, where he re-lived his days at the Gulf station as a mechanic changing oil and tires.
Along the way, Watts carefully studied how Banks led the department, particularly in the way he interacted with county citizens.
“I watched what the superintendent at the time did,” Watts said. “And I thought if I ever got the opportunity, I’d like to take a shot at the job.”
Shortly before Banks’ successor Cliff Howard resigned in 2016 due to medical issues, Watts was promoted to the position of “lead man”, which made him the second highest ranking member of the road department. When Howard stepped down in early-2016, Watts stepped up as interim road superintendent, a role he filled exceptionally for eight months. Without even an interview, Monroe County Commissioners made Watts a unanimous choice to take over as permanent road superintendent in January 2017.
Monroe County Commission Chairman Greg Tapley said at the time of Watts’ promotion: “I think there’s some enthusiasm on this one. We’ve gone through some of these appointments and discussed them and heard great things. . . Junior, we appreciate your work.”
Since Monroe County Manager Jim Hedges was hired in 2018, Watts said there has been an enhanced focus on ensuring the road department has top-notch equipment. Watts said the department now has seven pieces of large equipment, including a grapple truck that easily clears items like trees and dead deer out of the roadway.
“I would say we’ve got the best equipment now in the past 12 months that we’ve had in my 31 years of employment,” Watts said. “Thirty-one years ago when I started, everything we had was an accident waiting to happen. We had no air conditioner, and a lot of the things we did the first couple of years I worked here was by hand.”
Interestingly, Watts said the number of road department employees has actually decreased since he’s worked for the county. He said there were 26 employees back in 1989 but only 22 today. He said the smaller number is a result of the county not doing its own road paving anymore.
Like his predecessors, Watts divides up his crew into specific roles, such as patching, truck drivers, equipment operators, etc., but he said he’s focused on making sure his employees can cross-train in as many aspects of the department as possible.
“A lot of my guys are multi-purpose guys,” Watts said proudly. “I’ve got several guys who can do anything that needs to be done. If I’ve got a truck driver out, I’ve got another guy that can step up and drive the truck for him. Same thing with the equipment operators.”
Watts said he’s also pleased with how his department has responded to a number of natural disasters that have befallen the county since he took over as superintendent. Among these were Hurricane Irma in 2017 and a tornado that hit Smith Road and Collier Road back in April. Watts said he has a plan of attack for any type of disaster. If the county gets hit in one centralized area, as is typically the case in a tornado, he deploys his entire team to the area affected. However, if the event is widespread throughout the county, as is often the case during an ice storm, Watts divides the county into four quadrants and deploys a backhoe crew and a saw crew to each quadrant. Watts said significant ice storms are his most dreaded disaster because they can cause crippling tree damage on virtually every road in the county.
Watts estimated that in his 31 years with the county, he’s worked nearly two-dozen tornadoes, about 8 to 10 ice storms and close to a dozen hurricanes. When Hurricane Irma came on a nearly direct path through Monroe County in September 2017, Watts remembered that his crews didn’t go home for about three days.
“I can’t tell you how many times the whole entire road department worked all night long,” Watts said. “Everybody was asleep in bed, and we’re out rockin’ and rollin’. When you have a storm, it’s all hands on deck.”
Watts said when he was younger, he used to get an adrenaline rush from being out in the middle of dangerous storms. But some of the experiences he’s endured have changed his mindset. In April 2011, Watts and another employee, Kenneth Watts, were driving on Hwy. 42 North when a tornado caused a tree to fall across the hood of their truck.
“That was one of the scariest moments I’ve ever had in my life,” Watts said. “It was like 1:30 in the morning, blinding rain, and a tornado was still on the ground and I didn’t know about it. We were on the way with chainsaws to start cutting a path until a backhoe got there. Another county employee brought a truck and picked us up. A tow truck had to get my truck because it totaled it out.”
Watts said another frequent storm hazard is down power lines as occurred during the April tornado.
“When it’s pitch black dark and trees lie this, you don’t know whether it’s got a live power wire,” Watts said. “But during those events, I do have a strict safety meeting with my guys before we deploy. That’s one thing I do. We like to pull up there with our headlights on bright and get out and do an initial check and all that. But if you see fire, smoke, sparks, humming, you don’t mess with it until the power company gets there. That was the situation over there on Collier Road when that one touched down a few months ago. It actually set a field on fire and a power line was still live.”
Watts’ most significant on-the-job injury actually didn’t occur during a natural disaster. He was hanging up a hose on a pothole patcher truck on Smith Road one time when the patcher truck’s driver accidentally lightened up too much on the brake pedal and it rolled over Watts’ foot, breaking his toe. Watts’ other major injury happened when he was cutting a limb, as it snapped back and hit him in the head, requiring 22 stitches.
Away from his superintendent job, Watts is a devoted family man, having been married to wife Tammy for 21 years. Tammy Watts is Monroe County’s Deputy Tax Commissioner, and the Watts’ have a 16-year-old son, Jacy. Some of Watts’ hobbies include: serving as a member of Forsyth’s Strict Observance Masonic Lodge No. 18, attending Tru Vision Pentecostal Church and restoring guns. However, he said the main hobby he plans to pursue more frequently when he retires in a few years is fishing.
But Watts said he’s got more to accomplish as road superintendent before he thinks about retirement. Watts has set a goal of having every dirt road in the county paved before he hangs it up. He said there’s 70 miles of road still unpaved, and he said the passage of this November’s penny Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (TSPLOST) dedicated to road improvements is a must for his objective to be reached.
“If they (voters) only knew what it would do for this county, everybody would vote ‘Yes’ on it,” Watts said of the TSPLOST. “I am a big supporter of it. Our infrastructure is in such bad shape, and it takes money to fix that. Paving is very expensive.”
In the meantime, Watts said his phone line remains open to Monroe County citizens, estimating that he takes at least 50 calls during a daily shift.
“That’s one thing I do enjoy is if I have a citizen complaint, I enjoy personally going to meet those people,” Watts said. “I have met a lot of very nice county citizens and become friends with some of them.”
