James September-October 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 9
THE YEAR 2002 was an exciting time for University of Georgia
football. Mark Richt had become the
coach the year before and the team
was headed to its first SEC Championship in 20 years and a Sugar
Bowl win over the then-vaunted
Florida State Seminoles led by Bobby
Bowden. For a young free safety
from Jackson, Georgia, the year
was the ultimate capper to a college
career at UGA. Burt Jones was a former walk-on (recruited by Coach Jim
Donnan) who had been awarded a
scholarship earlier that year and was
named team captain.
Following that Sugar Bowl win
and graduation, Jones joined the
Jackson-based family business Jones
Petroleum. He is part of a sixth family generation to call the area home.
The up-and-coming businessman
soon founded JP Capital and Insurance, an insurance arm of Jones Petroleum. Quickly carrying on a family
tradition of public service— father
Bill served in the state House from
1976-1984— Jones joined the board
of directors for the Butts County
Water and Sewage Authority in 2009.
Three year later, Jones ran for the
state Senate and won his first race.
After serving a decade in the
Senate he convincingly won the 2022
lieutenant governorship election.
Jones’ big break might have
come earlier, though, when he was
the first elected official in Georgia
to endorse future president Donald
Trump in 2015. “I was for him before
I ever met him. In 2016 when you
had 11 or 12 Republican candidates
that were running for the office, I
just thought everybody knew who
Donald Trump was before he ran
for president. But I just thought he
was something different,” Jones
recalls. “Someone that we needed as
a country, a businessman— number
one a successful businessman— and
a person who attacks things with a
commonsense type of approach.”
“That was the reason why I was
drawn to him early on. Then once I
got to meet him later in the process,
he’s a very likable guy,” said Jones.
“When you meet him one-on-one,
he’s funny, he is engaging. He talks
to you like you’re just a regular guy
and he’s not what the media would
like to portray him at all. He’s very
likable; he’s kind of a guy’s guy.”
That endorsement led to a collaboration that led to Jones being asked
by the Trump administration to join
the Foreign and Domestic Trade
Council, to be endorsed by Trump
in the lieutenant governor race— a
big factor in a Republican primary— and to be asked to speak at the
August Trump rally in Atlanta. That
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