In 2007, Chesterfield County had a bit of an image problem.
Critics were casting the local government as beholden to real estate developers as the subprime mortgage meltdown plunged the economy into a recession. Poverty was worsening in the eastern portions of the county off U.S. Route 1. A year earlier, Ed Barber, the former chairman of the Board of Supervisors, had been convicted of sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter.
The longtime county administrator, Lane Ramsey, had announced his retirement. The Board of Supervisors decided to hire as his replacement a respected deputy administrator, Jay Stegmaier, who’d already spent 28 years working for the county.
Over the next few years, Stegmaier guided Chesterfield through the recession and helped elevate the county as a regional pillar of efficiency.
“He was one of the smartest people that I ever worked with,” Ramsey recalls. It wasn’t just his financial acumen — Stegmaier was key to Chesterfield earning AAA bond ratings from the three major bond-rating agencies in 1997, the first municipality in Virginia to do so — he was also personable and well-liked by just about everyone.
“He was always calm,” Ramsey says. “He was humble. He cared about the front-line employees, he cared about the citizens. He went out of his way to talk to people.”
Stegmaier died on Jan. 20 at age 68 due to complications from cancer, leaving a legacy of responsible governance and helping Chesterfield establish its place in the regional order.
“Jay was everywhere. Everywhere you went, to any regional thing, he was there,” says Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas, who worked with Stegmaier in Chesterfield in the early 1990s.
Chesterfield had a culture of fiscal responsibility before Stegmaier took over, Vithoulkas says, and by the time Stegmaier retired in 2016, that culture had become Chesterfield’s identity.
“It was the culmination of years of effort,” Vithoulkas says. “I think that Lane started it, and Jay finished it.”