Meet A City of Dalton Employee: Gesse Cabrera, Deputy City Clerk

The City of Dalton is special because of the people who work hard every day to make it the best place to live, work, and play in Georgia. The City is proud of the men and women working to serve our residents. This article continues a series of profiles we'll be running from time to time to spotlight the special people who are making a difference in our city. 

Gesse Cabrera is the Deputy City Clerk and if you've ever needed to do any business at City Hall, chances are that you've crossed paths with him. Cabrera grew up in Dalton, moving to the City from Mexico when he was 11 years old. He's a graduate of Dalton State College with a degree in business management, and he's approaching his ten year anniversary as a City of Dalton employee. He works with City Clerk Bernadette Chattam to maintain the city's records and all of the other functions of the office.

Here's a Q&A with Cabrera about his background and his work with the city: 

So Gesse, tell us a little about growing up in Dalton.

I was born and raised in Mexico in the state of Jalisco, in the city of Guadalajara, I was raised there for 11 years. We immigrated to the United States when I was in 7th grade. We came directly from the state of Jalisco to Dalton, actually. We had family here, from my dad’s side of the family. We moved here for multiple reasons – better job opportunities, better health care, my middle sister needed physical therapy and occupational therapy so that’s one of the reasons we moved here. Pretty much I’ve been a resident of Georgia my whole life, 24 years now, and I’ve lived in Dalton the vast majority of my time. I went to Dalton Junior High and then Dalton High School, I graduated in ’04. I went to Dalton State College so yeah, I’ve been here pretty much my whole life.

What was the experience of moving to Dalton from Mexico like, was that a scary experience?

Yeah, it was, I didn’t know much English, so you’re in a new country with new rules and new friends so it was very challenging for the first year or so. Just being in the whole process of being in ESOL, now it’s called ESL (English As Second Language classes), learning English and being in there for a couple of years, then getting out of there and into the regular classes. It was challenging but it was also very rewarding – all of my friends challenged me to just speak English, whether it was at home or at school. In about a year and a half I was able to get out of the ESL classes, they gave me the exam to get out of it, and I passed it thankfully. It was challenging, it was stressful at times. Just to communicate with people, it was very stressful, because people would ask me questions and “yes” and “no” were the only words I really knew. I did have English classes back in Mexico, but it wasn’t anywhere near on the same level. They were just teaching us the very, very basics, not even speaking in full sentences.

So after you graduated and began your professional career you stayed in Dalton. What was it about Dalton that kept you here?

Well from seeing my family’s experience, there were just job opportunities everywhere. I remember it was ‘97, ‘98 and in the early 2000’s there were just job postings and opportunities everywhere. Industry here is huge and for me I wasn’t thinking too far into the future as far as degrees - I always wanted to pursue computers, computer science classes, whether it was the very basic technology classes like repairing computers or software classes – but to me, just the fact that there was so much growth here, and my parents took advantage of that as well. Immediately after coming here, within a week they started working manufacturing jobs at Shaw, Mohawk, and Beaulieu back in the day.

So, I knew that there was potential for growth here. Not just in Georgia, but in the whole United States. Specifically in Dalton, it was booming here with overtime, every manufacturing company was giving you overtime. There were 60 hour weeks, 70 hour weeks, no problem. The jobs were very practical, very easy to do in a sense - so for me I thought I was going to have the opportunity to do these jobs while I continue my education and go to college and so on.

I’ve been working since I was 16 years old. I started at Arby’s when I was 16 and I’ve never stopped working since then. I moved on to McDonald’s and from there I went to Shaw Extrusion Company on Hamilton Street, Plant WM. I left Shaw after a few years after I started college in the pre-engineering program at Dalton State College. It was rough, and after two years of doing it I realized I needed a career change. I continued working, though, I moved to Calhoun with my family and started working at Mohawk. But, I realized I needed a change in majors, so I moved to business management and I got my degree in business management from Dalton State.

To be honest, the reason I’ve got this job is because I was looking for an internship in my senior year at Dalton State College and there was an internship with the city. I didn’t really think that much about the government, much like any resident of a city or county, they don’t really get involved with the local government. But I was looking for a paid internship and that’s what the City of Dalton was offering through Dalton State College so there I was in the city clerk’s office as an intern. I did almost a year of interning, and from there I got a job with Dalton Public Schools and eventually the position opened here with the City of Dalton and I was able to move back to the city. So, in 2011, I was here as an intern and I was back in the Clerk’s Office as a full-time employee in 2012 and I’ve been here about ten years. It will be ten years this August.

When you explain to people what you do as the Deputy City Clerk, how do you explain your job?

So first and foremost, it’s records management. We do permitting, we do almost anything that’s administrative for the city, but our main purpose is records management for the City of Dalton. We have our minutes of city meetings scanned and stored, we have various contracts for the different city departments whether it’s fire, police, public works, parks and recreation and so on – we make sure we catalog everything so that’s accessible not just for the citizens but for the departments that might need something. Aside from that, we really are a licensing and permitting department. We do occupational taxes which is Georgia’s form of business license, we do alcohol licenses, we do special event permits, we do annexations, we’re in charge of creating the deeds for West Hill Cemetery. We do solicitor permits, we do horse cart carriage permits even though we don’t have any of those out there right now.  We also do open records for our offices and we also assist other departments if they have trouble finding anything that’s not in their files.

Bernadette Chattam, the City Clerk, has said that the main role of the office is really to be the city’s historian.

Yes, we have all of the minutes dating back to the 1880’s for every meeting that was held and every action that was taken, we have those in our vault. We continue to have physical copies of those to this day. Nowadays, pretty much everything is digitized. Some of the contracts themselves aren’t, that’s something that we look forward to doing now that we have an extra pair of hands to work with us. We’re in charge of keeping the minutes for three city boards and committees, we have the Mayor and Council, the Pension Board, and the Public Safety Commission. We keep notes and minutes for those meetings.

So what’s the coolest part of the job for you?

I’d say teaching the citizens more about our government and how it works. Usually when we work with someone who is new to the city, they’ve just bought a house here and they come to City Hall and ask what they need to do – they may think that there’s just one central office that does everything but there are multiple departments that do many things for us. Whether it’s Public Works, if they want to get their trash and rubbish collection set up, we tell them who to contact. The police department, there’s a non-emergency number, you’re more than welcome to contact them. The fire department will give you permits for any burning you may need to do. For property taxes, that’s a big one, we inform them that we have an intergovernmental agreement with Whitfield County so they pay their taxes with the county but the city’s portion comes to us.  It’s just educating them on the way the whole system works, and then they pass that on to other residents. I love dealing with the people. That’s probably the thing I take the most pride in is just letting the people know what it is that we do and what we’re about as a city.

Is there something that you’ve worked on during your time in the City Clerk’s Office that you’re particularly proud of?

Yeah, it’s something that we’re continuing to work on here which is to just make things more accessible. I’m looking forward to making the experience for our different citizens to be more accessible. Before, our website was mostly English and we’ve managed to get some of the forms translated to Spanish. As you know, half of our citizens here are Hispanic. On top of that we want to make sure moving forward to find a way to be able to apply online for occupational taxes and other permits and licenses. We just want to make it more accessible for our citizens, so moving forward we want to be able to implement a system where we can receive applications via email because right now people have to come in person. They have to fill out a form or they have to mail it in and most people these days don’t want to do that. We do have an online payment system but we don’t have an online application submittal system, and that’s something that we’re hopefully going to get done this year.