Bristol’s only contested local race in the Nov. 4 election is a rematch between the current commissioner of the revenue, Cloe-Eva Barker, and challenger Steven Gobble Jr.
Barker, 62, a Democrat, is seeking her third four-year term as commissioner, although she has worked in the office for nearly 40 years, since she graduated from Emory & Henry University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
She touts her many years of experience and familiarity with city residents as the main reasons voters should keep her in the job.
Gobble, 48 and a Republican, has had a diverse career, starting out in several factory jobs before moving into real estate in Tennessee and working in a pest elimination business. After an unsuccessful run for the office in 2021, he worked for two years for the Washington County commissioner of the revenue and learned about all aspects of the job, he said.
Gobble, who also ran unsuccessfully for a city school board seat in 2022, graduated from Abingdon High School with an advanced studies diploma.
He said it’s time for the commissioner of the revenue’s office to have new leadership and a fresh approach.
Four years ago, Barker received 50.5% of the vote, Gobble picked up 28%, and a third candidate, Neal Osborne, had 21.3% of ballots cast.
The city’s commissioner of the revenue is a constitutional officer whose main responsibility is to assess an array of taxes, including real property, personal property and business taxes. The office also provides tax relief for older residents, those with disabilities and some veterans, and issues and renews business licenses.
The current annual salary for the position is $90,640.
If elected, Gobble said he would take steps to communicate more with city residents, possibly through a Facebook page, where residents could learn about tax relief and other services offered.
He would also move to offer more detailed information about properties throughout the city on the website, which now offers only basic GIS information, he said.
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To see who’s on the ballot in Bristol, see the Bristol page in our Voter Guide. To find out who’s running in other localities and where they stand, start on the main page of our Voter Guide. Early voting begins Sept. 19.
If reelected, Barker said she would move forward with training opportunities for her four employees, particularly the two most recent hires, who have been there less than two years.
Like most local governments, the city recently went through a reassessment of all properties, and values rose significantly, with residential values up by about 66% and an overall increase of 52%, according to Barker.
She said the increase was comparable to the hikes experienced in other localities in the Tri-Cities and in Virginia.
The Bristol City Council lowered the real property tax rate, but many homeowners still saw an increase in property taxes.
The reassessment is done every four years by an outside firm, which works well and is what’s done by most cities and counties in the state, according to Barker.
Gobble, however, said he received training in setting up a local team to conduct the city’s reassessments and he’d like to see if that would be better for Bristol.
“I have certification that was given by the Commissioners Revenue Association about local assessments and taxation for real estate and one of the things I’d like to do is actually create a local assessment that works out of the local office instead of every four years trying to figure out who we’re going to hire from across the state or out of state,” he said.
Barker said she doesn’t think a local team would be feasible for the Bristol office. Some larger cities have their own teams, but “assessors must go through a lot of training with the department of taxation. They must be certified, they have to meet a lot of requirements to even be able to offer their services to the individual localities,” she said.
Early voting begins Sept. 19 and runs through Nov. 1.
