LEADERS IN FOCUS
McDonough Mayor Kam Varner has spent more than a decade in city government, first as a councilwoman and Mayor Pro Tem before becoming mayor.
MCDONOUGH- Kam Varner's family has been in Blacksville for seven or eight generations. Her great-great-grandfather, Pompey Phillips, owned so much land there that a road still carries his name. The neighborhood took care of itself back then. Seafood markets, barbershops, lawn services, two of everything. Advocacy wasn't a cause she picked up. It was just how her family operated.
She didn't set out for politics. "I wanted to be an attorney. The next Johnny Cochran," she said. Then, at 29, members of McDonough's American Legion Post 516 encouraged her to run for City Council.
She won. And suddenly she was sitting in rooms with people who had spent years studying government. She didn't have a degree of her own yet, and she didn't pretend to know everything.
"I became a student," Varner said. She meant it literally. While serving on Council, she went back and earned a bachelor's in organizational leadership from Point University, then a master's in public administration from Strayer, studying the same things she was already living: finance, poverty, why one community thrives while another stalls out. It wasn't about the letters after her name. It was about getting better at the job in front of her.
"I'm forever a student," she said.
For Mayor Kam Varner, serving McDonough means getting out of City Hall and into the community, connecting directly with the people who call it home.
Thirteen years and two terms as Mayor Pro Tem later, she ran for mayor.
"I just absolutely jumped off the porch with faith and ran."
Months into her first year as mayor, she talks about the job the way she talks about most things, carefully, and with an eye toward what's possible, rather than what's wrong. There's a parks master plan underway. A citywide beautification push designed to carry some of downtown McDonough's charm beyond the Square. And housing affordability is the issue closest to her heart, giving teachers, grocery workers and public works crews an actual shot at owning a home.
Even the hard days get the same treatment. The challenges, she said, are "mostly opportunities." She has a way of landing on what's next instead of dwelling on what went wrong.
Ask what she wants people to say about her when it's all over:
"She wasn't self-serving, and she left McDonough better than she found it."